The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson take his experience of international crises from the IMF and applies it to the U.S. This article is first-rate.

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings
attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers
suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything.

The solution, from an economic standpoint is easy:

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize
troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

The politics, however, is not.