Should More Bankers Be in Prison?

Four years after the financial meltdown, the worldwide banking system is still a mess. In 2012, JPMorgan lost as much as $9 billion in a botched trade, while Barclay's faced criminal charges for joining with other banks to manipulate the world's most influential benchmark interest rate.

For The Atlantic's January/February 2013 cover story, coauthors Jesse Eisinger and Frank Partnoy dove into the chaos — or, as The Atlantic's Derek Thompson puts it, they went "spelunking" through Wells Fargo's financial statements. Here, Eisinger explains why he and Partnoy focused on Wells Fargo and what they learned along the way about the deceptiveness of America's banks.