Yale Series in Economic and Financial History
One of the reasons many people believe financial markets are lawless and irrational—and rigged—is that they follow two sets of rules. The official rules, set by law or by the heads of the exchanges, exist alongside the unofficial rules, or floor rules—which are the ones that actually govern. Break the official rules and you may be fined or jailed; break the floor rules and you’ll suffer worse: you will be ostracized. Regulations vary across markets, but the floor rules are remarkably consistent.
This book, offering compelling stories of market disturbances in which insider rules played a key role, shows readers, without excessive moralizing, how markets really govern themselves. It is a study of the norms, customs, values, and operating modes of the insiders at the center of the financial markets that trade money, stocks, bonds, futures, and other financial derivatives. The core insiders who rule trading markets are a relatively small group who exert disproportionate influence on financial systems. Mark W. Geiger examines the historical roots of the culture of financial markets, describes the role insiders play in today’s high finance, and suggests where this peculiar, ingrown culture is heading in an era of constant technological change.
Hundreds of years before a sixteenth†‘century crisis in European agriculture led to the origins of capital, investment, and finance, the silver mining industry exhibited many of the features of modern capitalism. Silver mines were large†‘scale businesses that demanded large investments and steady cash flow, achieved by spreading that risk through fungible shares and creating legal structures to protect entrepreneurs from financial disaster. Jeannette Graulau argues that mining preceded agriculture as the first true capitalist enterprise of the modern world.
“Using a vast array of archival evidence, Summerhill convincingly shows that political commitment to a secure public debt was neither necessary nor sufficient to insure financial development in nineteenth-century Brazil. A must-read for economic and financial historians and for anyone interested in the politics of financial development.” —Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, California Institute of Technology
Vice is endemic to Western capitalism, according to this fascinating, wildly entertaining, often startling history of modern finance. Ian Klaus’s Forging Capitalism demonstrates how international financial affairs in the nineteenth century were conducted not only by gentlemen as a noble pursuit but also by connivers, thieves, swindlers, and frauds who believed that no risk was too great and no scheme too outrageous if the monetary reward was substantial enough. Taken together, the grand deceptions of the ambitious schemers and the determined efforts to guard against them have been instrumental in creating the financial establishments of today. In a story teeming with playboys and scoundrels and rich in colorful and amazing events, Klaus chronicles the evolution of trust through three distinct epochs: the age of values, the age of networks and reputations, and, ultimately, in a world of increased technology and wealth, the age of skepticism and verification. In today’s world, where the questionable dealings of large international financial institutions are continually in the spotlight, this extraordinary history has great relevance, offering essential lessons in both the importance and the limitations of trust.
This bold re-examination of the history of U.S. economic growth is built around a novel claim, that productive capacity grew dramatically across the Depression years (1929-1941) and that this advance provided the foundation for the economic and military success of the United States during the Second World War as well as for the golden age (1948-1973) that followed.
Alexander J. Field takes a fresh look at growth data and concludes that, behind a backdrop of double-digit unemployment, the 1930s actually experienced very high rates of technological and organizational innovation, fueled by the maturing of a privately funded research and development system and the government-funded build-out of the country's surface road infrastructure. This significant new volume in the Yale Series in Economic and Financial History invites new discussion of the causes and consequences of productivity growth over the last century and a half and on our current prospects.
It has become commonplace to think that globalization has produced a race to the bottom in terms of labor standards and quality of life: the cheaper the labor and the lower the benefits afforded workers, the more competitively a country can participate on the global stage. But in this book the distinguished economic historian Michael Huberman demonstrates that globalization has in fact been very good for workers’ quality of life, and that improved labor conditions have promoted globalization.
Two of the greatest financial fiascos of all time took place at the same time and were instigated by two acquaintances: the Mississippi Bubble, on which John Law at first made a vast fortune and gained sway over French finances; and the South Sea Bubble, launched by Law and Thomas Pitt, Jr., Lord Londonderry, his main partner in England. This book tells the story of these two financial schemes from the letters and accounts of two leading personalities. Larry Neal, a distinguished economic historian, highlights the rationality of each person and also finds that the primitive exchanges of the day, though informal and completely unregulated, actually performed reasonably well.
This highly original work explores a previously unknown financial conspiracy at the start of the American Civil War. The book explains the reasons for the puzzling intensity of Missouri’s guerrilla conflict, and for the state’s anomalous experience in Reconstruction. In the broader history of the war, the book reveals for the first time the nature of military mobilization in the antebellum United States.
As China emerges as a global powerhouse, this timely book examines its economic past and the shaping of its financial institutions. The first comparative study of foreign banking in prewar China, the book surveys the impact of British overseas bank notes on China's economy before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Focusing on the two leading British banks in the region, it assesses the favorable and unfavorable effects of the British presence in China, with particular emphasis on Shanghai, and traces instructive links between the changing political climate and banknote circulation volumes.
Drawing on recently declassified archival materials, Niv Horesh revises previous assumptions about China's prewar economy, including the extent of foreign banknote circulation and the economic significance of the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925.
