The decades-long boom in financial services has created tremendous wealth for a handful of people. The once-stodgy banking sector became a Xanadu for the quantitatively gifted, attracting talent that might have once been drawn to industry or academia. But has this transformation contributed to the growth of the real economy? In A Call for Judgment, economist Amar Bhidé argues that it has not. Rather, it has undermined the foundations of free-market capitalism by encouraging a dangerous centralization of financial decision making.

Unlike Simon Johnson and Joseph Stiglitz, economists who’ve also