James Stewart in The New York Times:
It’s been 14 years since Goldman Sachs was vilified as a “vampire squid” by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. “Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy,” he concluded then. Goldman has since experienced some hard times, tarred by scandal (the looting of a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund) and forced to bail out of consumer banking. Big companies like Walt Disney are under attack not so much from the socialist left, but by conservatives for being too “woke.” Yet organized greed lives on, a seemingly intractable aspect of human nature, as three new business books make clear.
The age-old swing of the pendulum between greed, excess and regulation is the subject of TAMING THE OCTOPUS: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation (Norton, 290 pp., $29.99), by Kyle Edward Williams, a history of efforts to temper capitalist excess through social responsibility, whether self-directed by corporations or imposed by regulators. Inevitably, greed and scandal breed regulation, which in turn provokes proponents of the free market to decry government overreach. Consider the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from more speculative investment banking during the Great Depression only to be relaxed by the Clinton administration more than six decades later. The cycle then begins anew.
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