Christopher Caldwell has written an exceptionally smart review of 13 Bankers, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak, for the Weekly Standard.

No book on the meltdown will make you angrier than 13 Bankers. On the off-chance that it doesn’t make you as angry as you’d like to be, though, Johnson and Kwak also have an excellent blog, Baseline Scenario, that addresses some of these questions in a more heated way. Go there and you will find an interesting take on the present negotiations over financial regulatory reform. Democratic Senate Finance chairman Chris Dodd, in Johnson’s view, is not negotiating with Republicans in order to peel off one or two senators and get the toughest bill possible; he is aiming for the weakest possible bill that will be palatable to the public, and is negotiating in order to pin the blame for its weakness on Republicans.

Caldwell goes on to suggest that the chief antagonists of the SAFE Banking Act, which Johnson and Kwak continue to champion, are Senate Democrats who fear that passing the bill will cause a backlash from fundraisers. I’m very curious as to whether Caldwell believes that the SAFE Act is substantively the right way to go.