Product Description: The practice of charging interest on loans has been controversial since it was first mentioned in early recorded history. Lending is a powerful economic tool, vital to the development of society but it can also lead to disaster if left unregulated...read more

Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s, the use of credit cards, which had begun as a convenience, began to grow into an addiction. Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America explains how a nation of savers became a nation of consumers and how Wall Street used consumers' addiction to spending to create the "toxic securities" that threaten to bring about the collapse of the global economy. Geisst looks at the policy implications of the credit crisis and describes how the United States can get its fiscal house in order: Debt must be brought back onto the issuer's balance sheet. Investors must have the assurance of recourse to the debt issuer's own funds, rather than the empty promise of a valueless document. Regulators must be educated to know at least as much about financial engineering as the structured finance instruments' architects do. This book connects the dots from consumer spending to credit cards to home-equity loans and back to credit cards.

Product Description: A critical look at over 80 years of conflict, collusion, and corruption between financiers and politicians Undue Influence paints a vivid portrait of the dealings between "the few", in this case members of Congress, the banking community, and the Fed, and sheds light on how radical new deregulatory measures could be introduced by unelected officials and then foisted upon Congress in the name of progress...read more

Product Description: DEALS OF THE CENTURY Throughout history, mergers and acquisitions have been the major game played on Wall Street. These deals have had far-reaching effects, on the worlds of finance and industry - more than most commentators or financiers are publicly willing to admit...read more

Product Description: In the seven years since the publication of the first edition of Wall Street, America's financial industry has undergone a series of wrenching events that have dramatically changed the nation's economic landscape. The bull market of the 1990's came to a close, ushering in the end of the dot com boom, a record number of mergers occurred, and accounting scandals in companies like Enron and WorldCom shook the financial industry to its core...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Wall Street is an unending source of legend―and nightmares. It is a universal symbol of both the highest aspirations of economic prosperity and the basest impulses of greed and deception. Charles R. Geisst's Wall Street is at once a chronicle of the street itself―from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant―and an engaging economic history of the United States, a tale of profits and losses, enterprising spirits, and key figures that transformed America into the most powerful economy in the world...read more

Product Description: An intriguing history of the futures market and speculation From Jay Gould's attempt to corner the gold market in the 1860s to the Hunt brothers' scandalous efforts to control the silver market in the 1980s, Wheels of Fortune traces the rich, colorful history of the futures market on its quest for respectability and profit...read more

Product Description: Selected as one of the Top 10 Business Books by "Booklist""The Last Partnerships "is an enormously enjoyable read."--United Press International"The Last Partnerships narrates the rise and fall of the great financial houses--from the "Yankee Bankers" at the turn of the 19th century, up to Goldman Sachs's historic IPO in 1999-- tracing their origins, their successes and failures over the years, and the reasons for their ultimate demise...read more

Product Description: They laid the foundations of American finance and defined the American brand of capitalism. They bankrolled wars, were the impetus behind the building of the first transcontinental railroad system, and fueled a fledgling nation’s grandiose dreams of empire...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: There is probably no other "street" in the world that is as influential as Wall Street. From robber barons to money trusts; the Depression to the great 1950s bull market; increased government regulation and war to the ongoing 1990s boom; from insider trading and fraud to antitrust suits; from J...read more

Product Description: In this incisive and comprehensive history, business historian Charles Geisst traces the rise of monopolies from the railroad era to today's computer software empires. The history of monopolies has been dominated by strong and charismatic personalities...read more

Product Description: The Bretton Woods system ensured a quarter of a century of relative stability on the world's financial markets. The quarter of a century which has followed has brought financial chaos and excessive financial volatility. Exchange Rate Chaos: 25 Years of Financial and Consumer Democracy describes and compares US and British financial history during this period...read more

Product Description: Book by Geisst, Charles (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is the first history on the subject of foreign investment in the United States since 1920. It shows how the United States changed from a debtor nation to a supplier of capital to the rest of the world, and then details the structural shifts to this creditor position after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1972...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This groundbreaking new work presents the first financial history of the United States in the 20th century from the commercial and investment banking perspective. The author traces the development of both industries from the 1920s through the conditions of the present marketplace and looks at the simultaneous development of the federal regulatory agencies that grew up around the financial markets...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: An introductory survey of financial institutions in Britain and the United States. Discusses the structure and functions of commercial banks, building associations, investment banks, life insurance companies and pension funds, and American federal agencies...read more

Product Description: In 'Financial Futures Markets' the authors explain in as clear a way as possible this very complex market. They detail the nature of financial futures trading, highlighting the key channels which link the conventional cash markets and the new financial futures markets...read more