Speculators caused a stock market crash in 1792, forcing the federal government to bail out New York bankers— and the nation
And how it grew, and grew, and grew…
How we became a nation of instant, constant borrowers
As long as there have been bankers and brokers, there have been people asking what would happen if they had to earn an honest living
At its roots lie fundamental tensions that have bedeviled American banking since the nation began
S & L scandals, junk bonds, defaults—the pattern is familiar to anyone who knows about U.S. banking between 1830 and 1855.
Two hundred years ago the United States was a weakling republic prostrate beneath a ruinous national debt. Then Alexander Hamilton worked the miracle of fiscal imagination that made America a healthy young economic giant. How did he do it?
It cannot be measured in dollars alone. It involved a kind of personal power no man of affairs will ever have again.
Banking as we’ve known it for centuries is dead, and we don’t really know the consequences of what is taking its place. A historical overview.
Solid-gold coins were legal tender for most of the nation's history. In their brilliant surfaces we can see our past fortunes.
A Scottish émigré became the most powerful man in the French government, and sold hundreds of thousands of shares in land holdings in the Mississippi Valley
How J. P. Morgan, like a “one-man Federal Reserve,” calmed the bankers and helped ease the Panic of 1907