Financial History

In this ambitious and groundbreaking history of the dollar, financial journalist and economic scholar Brendan Greeley makes a new argument about the origins of our money—and the people and nations who have surrendered to it. America’s money is global money—nearly every nation in the world...

When Charles P. Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises was first published in 1978, the world was entering a new period of global economic turbulence. Established economists based their analyses on the assumption that investors act rationally, and these economists often communicated their ideas with dry, technical language. Kindleberger rebelled against convention. Using a more literary and descriptive style, he came up with a new view.

Do the Fed’s efforts to stabilize the economy worsen inequality? The Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank, was built for a monetary system composed primarily of investor-owned, government-chartered banks. But over the years, the erosion of banking law and the rise of alternative forms of...

With Cutler Dawson at the helm for the last 14 years, Navy Federal Credit Union, the world's largest credit union, has quadrupled the size of the organization and made it an industry leader in customer service. It is now one of the most fiercely trusted and smoothly run financial institutions in the world ranked by Fortune magazine as a Best Place to Work for eight years. This book reveals an honest and straightforward look at Dawson's leadership philosophy and guiding principles.

Few things affect the day-to-day lives of everyone more than the economy. Economics is a subject everyone should know at least a little about. How your country’s economy is doing directly affects you, even though you may not be able to see it. Understanding the basic terms and definitions, so when the financial news comes on you won’t have to skip it because you don’t understand it. In this practical glossary, you'll learn about economics, including some of its foundational topics and concepts.

In his acclaimed new book Investment Atlas II: Using History as a Financial Tool, Winans shows listeners how to become profitable users of investment history rather than future victims of it. Just as travelers use a road atlas to learn about their destination and prevent the embarrassing and costly act of getting lost, Winans encourages investors to learn from history in order to successfully tackle the age-old challenges inherent in profitable investing.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman's Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman's Bank collapsed. Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman's Bank and its depositors

By providing historical context and a thorough yet easily accessible explanation of US financial markets, authors Norbert Michel and Jennifer Schulp provide a much-needed counterpoint to current debates and criticisms. "Financing Opportunity" not only busts many popular myths about financial markets but also proposes ways to improve how our financial markets function. With financial markets and American opportunity so closely tied, financial policy is vital to supporting growth, productivity, and prosperity.

In this astute new work, Jakob Feinig shows how the relation between money users and money-issuing governments changed from British colonial North America to today's United States, discussing how popular movements reshaped money-creating institutions, and how their opponents attempted to silence them.

The Democratic Party left rural America behind. This urgent rallying cry shows how Democrats can win back and empower overlooked communities that have been pushing politics to the right—and why long-term progressive political power depends on it. Through 2 successful elections in rural red...

In this revelatory narrative covering the years 1967 to 2017, Steven Brill gives us a stunningly cogent picture of the broken system at the heart of our society. He shows us how, over the last half century, America’s core values—meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, and even...

Whether driven by mass psychology, fear, or greed of investors, the forces of supply and demand, or a combination, technical analysis has flourished for thousands of years on the outskirts of the financial establishment. In The Evolution of Technical Analysis: Financial Prediction from Babylonian Tablets to Bloomberg Terminals, MIT's Andrew W. Lo details how the charting of past stock prices for the purpose of identifying trends, patterns, strength, and cycles within market data has allowed traders to make informed investment decisions based in logic, rather than on luck.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A business leader and esteemed economic thinker outlines simple solutions to America’s five most pressing public policy issues, from healthcare to education to inequality. America today confronts a host of urgent problems, many of them seemingly intractable, but...

The bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers was the pivotal event of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. Ever since the bankruptcy, there has been heated debate about why the Federal Reserve did not rescue Lehman in the same way it rescued other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG. The Fed's leaders from that time, especially former Chairman Ben Bernanke, have strongly asserted that they lacked the legal authority to save Lehman because it did not have adequate collateral for the loan it needed to survive.

During the upheavals of 2007-9, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of a Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man of letters, inventor of the Treasury bill, and author of Lombard Street, the still-canonical guide to stopping a run on the banks, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that - decades later - inspired the radical responses to the world's worst financial crises.

This book tells the untold story of how JPMorgan became a universal bank in the 1980s-1990s and the events leading to it being acquired by Chase in 2000. It depicts the challenges Morgan's leaders, Lew Preston and Dennis Weatherstone, confronted when the firm's business model was disrupted by the developing country debt crisis, up to its current management with Jamie Dimon.

Misunderstanding Financial Crises offers a back-to-basics overview of financial crises and shows that they are not rare, idiosyncratic events caused by a perfect storm of unconnected factors. Instead, Gorton shows how financial crises are, indeed, inherent to our financial system.

A timely, counterintuitive defense of Wall Street and the big banks as the invisible—albeit flawed—engines that power our ideas, and should be made to work better for all of us Maybe you think the banks should be broken up and the bankers should be held accountable for the financial crisis...

2009: The Year You Can’t Afford to Make Any Mistakes with Your Money. The credit crunch, the stock market freefall, the staggering toll of home foreclosures and job losses: The economic crisis that struck in 2008 has left no one untouched and everybody reeling. Seemingly overnight, the...

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken...