Philip A. Wallach, “To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis” (Brookings, 2015)

Philip A. Wallach is the author of To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). Wallach is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

There has been a lot written about the financial crisis of the late 2000s, but little with the attention to important concepts from political science. Wallach investigates the various federal strategies to address the meltdown of the financial sector from the perspective of legitimacy, seeking to understand what we can learn about this idea from the unprecedented expansion of federal power. From efforts to save the failing investment banks, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, to the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), federal officials applied a largely ad-hoc approach that Wallach deems “adhocracy” often substituting expedience for legal authority. While this worked in the short-term, Wallach probes where this leaves the country and speculates about what will come in the future.

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