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A worker reaches to replace a setting of flowers inside the board room of the New York Stock Exchange on March 8, 2010 in New York City.

A Bank of America director questioned the CEO’s $76 million pay package in a year when the bank laid off 12,600 workers. She was dropped from the board a few months later. The General Motors board gave its CEO a 64 percent raise in 2007, the same year the company took $39 billion in losses. In his book Money for Nothing, author John Gillespie chronicles these and other corporate excesses. But he places the blame on the shoulders of elite but dysfunctional boards that fail to reign in corporate leadership. He argues that this is the true source of the recession and, that if we don’t reform corporate governance, another economic catastrophe is inevitable.

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