There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

It may be that America has become too big and complicated for most people to deal with being part of. People are longing for a smaller, stupider reality.

Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end.

America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That's one of the things we're probably known for around the world, I would imagine.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.