The MIT professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund caused a splash with “
The Quiet Coup,” an article in The Atlantic arguing an irrational faith in Wall Street caused the financial crisis, prompting government to push business elites to regulate themselves. “In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington,” Johnson wrote. He explained that the government can't truly correct its mistake until it nationalizes insolvent banks and breaks them up.