When Washington Shut Down Wall Street

Download or read book When Washington Shut Down Wall Street written by William L. Silber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book When Washington Shut Down Wall Street written by William L. Silber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-21 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Washington Shut Down Wall Street unfolds like a mystery story. It traces Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo's triumph over a monetary crisis at the outbreak of World War I that threatened the United States with financial disaster. The biggest gold outflow in a generation imperiled America's ability to repay its debts abroad. Fear that the United States would abandon the gold standard sent the dollar plummeting on world markets. Without a central bank in the summer of 1914, the United States resembled a headless financial giant. William McAdoo stepped in with courageous action, we read in Silber's gripping account. He shut the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months to prevent Europeans from selling their American securities and demanding gold in return. He smothered the country with emergency currency to prevent a replay of the bank runs that swept America in 1907. And he launched the United States as a world monetary power by honoring America's commitment to the gold standard. His actions provide a blueprint for crisis control that merits attention today. McAdoo's recipe emphasizes an exit strategy that allows policymakers to throttle a crisis while minimizing collateral damage. When Washington Shut Down Wall Street recreates the drama of America's battle for financial credibility. McAdoo's accomplishments place him alongside Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan as great American financial leaders. McAdoo, in fact, nursed the Federal Reserve into existence as the 1914 crisis waned and served as the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Download or read book Wall Street Wars written by Richard Farley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration set out to radically remake America’s financial system—but Wall Street was determined to stop them. In 1933, the American economy was in shambles, battered by the 1929 stock market crash and limping from the effects of the Great Depression. But the incoming administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected on a wave of anxiety and hope, stormed Washington on a promise to save the American economy—and remake the entire American financial system. It was the opening salvo in a long war between Wall Street and Washington. Author Richard Farley takes a unique and detailed look at the pitched battles that followed—the fist fights, the circus-like stunts, the conmen and crooks, and the unlikely heroes—and shaped American capitalism. With a disparate cast of characters including Joseph P. Kennedy, J.P. Morgan, Huey Long, Babe Ruth, and Henry Ford (who refused to bail out his son’s bank, thus precipitating the meltdown of the entire banking system), Farley vividly traces the history of modern American finance and the establishment of a financial system still bitterly debated on Capitol Hill.

Download or read book Capital Offense written by Michael Hirsh and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-08-20 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why every president from Reagan through Obama has put Wall Street before Main Street Over the last few decades, Washington’s firmly held belief that if you make investors happy, a booming economy will follow has caused an economic crisis in Asia, hardship in Latin America, and now a severe recession in America and Europe. How did the best and brightest of our time allow this to happen? Why have these disasters done nothing to change the free-market mantra of the Washington faithful? The answer has nothing to do with lobbyists and everything to do with ideology. In Capital Offense, veteran Newsweek reporter Michael Hirsh gives us a colorful narrative history of the era he calls the Age of Capital, telling the story through the eyes of its key players, from Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman through Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. • Based on the solid research and skilled reporting of Newsweek Senior Editor Michael Hirsh • Takes you inside high-level, closed-door conversations of top White House advisers and administration officials such as Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Paul O’Neill, and others • Illuminates key figures and lively interpersonal clashes, including the conflict between Larry Summers and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz • Offers crucial insights on why President Obama took so long to work on the economy—and why he may not be going far enough • Catalogs the missteps of three decades of fiscal, regulatory, and financial recklessness, including the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act, the S&L debacle, Enron, and the subprime mortgage meltdown As we struggle to emerge from the financial crisis, one thing seems certain: Wall Street’s continued dominance of the global economy. Propelled into the lead by a generation of Washington policy-makers, Wall Street will continue to stay ahead of them.

Download or read book After the Fall written by Nicole Gelinas and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robust financial markets support capitalism, they don't imperil it. But in 2008, Washington policymakers were compelled to replace private risk-takers in the financial system with government capital so that money and credit flows wouldn't stop, precipitating a depression. Washington's actions weren't the start of government distortions in the financial industry, Nicole Gelinas writes, but the natural result of 25 years' worth of such distortions. In the early eighties, modern finance began to escape reasonable regulations, including the most important regulation of all, that of the marketplace. The government gradually adopted a "too big to fail" policy for the largest or most complex financial companies, saving lenders to failing firms from losses. As a result, these companies became impervious to the vital market discipline that the threat of loss provides. Adding to the problem, Wall Street created financial instruments that escaped other reasonable limits, including gentle constraints on speculative borrowing and requirements for the disclosure of important facts. The financial industry eventually posed an untenable risk to the economy -- a risk that culminated in the trillions of dollars' worth of government bailouts and guarantees that Washington scrambled starting in late 2008. Even as banks and markets seem to heal, lenders to financial companies continue to understand that the government would protect them in the future if necessary. This implicit guarantee harms economic growth, because it forces good companies to compete against bad. History and recent events make clear what Washington must do. First, policymakers must reintroduce market discipline to the financial world. They can do so by re-creating a credible, consistent way in which big financial companies can fail, with lenders taking their warranted losses. Second, policymakers can reapply prudent financial regulations so that markets, and the economy, can better withstand inevitable excesses of optimism and pessimism. Sensible regulations have worked well in the past and can work well again. As Gelinas explains in this richly detailed book, adequate regulation of financial firms and markets is a prerequisite for free-market capitalism -- not a barrier to it.

Download or read book The Seven Sins of Wall Street written by Bob Ivry and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know that the financial crisis of 2008 came dangerously close to pushing the United States and the world into a depression rivaling that of the 1930s. But what is astonishing -- and should make us not just afraid but very afraid -- are the shenanigans of the biggest banks since the crisis. Bob Ivry passionately, eloquently, and convincingly details the operatic ineptitude of America's best-compensated executives and the ways the government kowtows to what it mistakenly imagines is their competence and success. Ivry shows that the only thing that has changed since the meltdown is how too-big-to-fail banks and their fellow travelers in Washington have nudged us ever closer to an even bigger economic calamity. Informed by deep reporting from New York, Washington, and the heartland, The Seven Sins of Wall Street, like no other book, shows how we're all affected by the financial industry's inhumanity. The transgressions of "Wall Street titans" and "masters of the universe" are paid for by real people. In fierce, plain English, Ivry indicts a financial industry that continues to work for the few at the expense of the rest of us. Problems that financiers deemed too complicated to be understood by ordinary folks are shown by Ivry to be financial legerdemain -- a smokescreen of complexity and jargon that hide the bankers' nefarious activities. The Seven Sins of Wall Street is irreverent and timely, an infuriating black comedy. The Great Depression of the 1930s moved the American political system to real reform that kept the finance industry in check. With millions so deeply affected since the crisis of 2008, you'll finish this book asking yourself how it is that so many of the nation's leading financial institutions remain such exasperating problem children.

Download or read book Bailout written by Neil Barofsky and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes a new foreword to the paperback edition.