As David Korten showed in the first edition of this hard-hitting book, the steps taken to address the financial meltdown – including pouring trillions of dollars into bailouts for the Wall Street institutions that created the mess – did nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system. Korten identified the deeper sources of the failure in Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating money out of nothing, without producing anything of real value in return. Its major players engaged in speculative trading, bought into asset bubbles, stripped corporate assets, created debt pyramids, and engaged in predatory lending in the mortgage and credit card markets.

In this revised second edition, Korten evaluates how far we have come in the year since the first edition's release and traces both the progress made as well as the ongoing setbacks. Korten also explores the transition to Main street and the momentum towards real wealth and how such a movement is manifesting itself across the nation. In a new chapter, Korten examines how the Obama administration has yet to address the root causes of the system failures to avoid ongoing economic, social, and environmental crises.