What is to be done? Review article of Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (2024) by Gerald Epstein and The Bailout State: Why Governments Rescue Banks, Not People (2025) by Martijn Konings

Abstract These two recent contributions offer complementary perspectives on the financial consequences of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), Covid and continuing financial instability. Epstein identifies a ‘capture’ of US government by a ‘bankers’ club’, presenting an impassioned account of its dysfunctional influence and deleterious consequences. Konings is equally critical of finance’s dominance, but he delves deeper to reveal the emergence and consolidation of structural links between finance and the state. Based on these different theoretical foundations, their accounts suggest and imply different strategies of what could be done to control the continued threat of instability, arrest the power of finance and consequential growth of inequality.