In her new book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, Nomi Prins remembers how the 9/11 attacks affected her. She was, at the time, working for Goldman Sachs (which has been sending key former employees directly into top government posts ever since, most recently, of course, Steven Mnuchin as Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary). Before that, she had been working for the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which crashed and burned so dramatically, helping trigger the great financial crisis of 2007-2008. Here’s what she writes:

“We each have our stories from those days, where we were, what went through our minds, how it changed us as people, as a nation. For me, those tense moments walking up Broadway away from Wall Street, with the acrid, debris-filled smoke of the Twin Towers in the air, was a last straw. I left Goldman Sachs. Partly because life was too short. Partly out of disgust at how citizens everywhere had become collateral damage, and later hostages, to the banking system. Since then, I’ve dedicated my work to exposing the intersections of money and power and deciphering the impact of the relationships between governments and central and private bankers on the citizens of the world.”

Because 9/11 did something similar to me, and this website, TomDispatch, resulted from my own urge to decipher a puzzling post-9/11 world, I couldn’t be more sympathetic. Now, almost 17 years later, as the U.S. military pursues its unending wars across the planet, the central bankers of the same planet pursue… well, let Nomi Prins explain it to you.

• Donald Trump and the Next Crash
  Making the Fed an Instrument for Disaster
  Nomi Prins • April 26, 2018 • 2,400 Words