The financial crisis has proven to be a cornucopia for authors and documentary film makers. We've seen a whole lot of thick books, that's for sure. The dominant genre for these books is the lightly critical journalist's take, the fly-on-the-wall approach that's driven by incredible insider access, not unlike Bob Woodward's Washington approach.

But a genre buster has cropped up. Matt Taibbi's new book, Griftopia, is written not from the insider perspective but from a highly critical populist standpoint, exactly what you would expect from the Rolling Stone writer who coined the phrase "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into everything that smells like money," referring to Goldman Sachs.

We'll have to see whether this perspective resonates in the public mind. In the run-up to Dodd-Frank, it seemed like this view was winning out. The big Wall Street banks "are the dominant political powers in the country now," Taibbi told Reuters. "When you get so much political influence that you can't not make money, it's just like a license to steal and that is what the book is about," he said. Obviously, the industry would take issue with this.

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