Finance in America - by Kevin R Brine (Paperback)

About the Book

The history of what we call finance today does not begin in ancient Mesopotamia, or in Imperial China, or in the counting houses of Renaissance Europe. This timely and magisterial book shows that finance as we know it--the combination of institutions, regulations, and models, as well as the infrastructure that manages money, credit, claims, banking, assets, and liabilities--emerged gradually starting in the late nineteenth century and coalesced only after World War II. Kevin Brine, a financial industry veteran, and Mary Poovey, a historian, lay bare the history of finance in the United States over this critical period. They show how modern finance made itself known in episodes such as the 1907 Bankers' Panic on Wall Street, passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, and the marginalist tax policies adopted by the federal government in the 1920s. Over its long history, the distinctive feature of modern economics has been its reliance on mathematical modeling; Brine and Poovey show how this reliance came about, and how economists themselves understand it. "Finance in America: An Unfinished Story" provides the long view that we need to advance our national conversation about the place of finance. The story is unfinished because the 2009 financial crisis opened a perilous new chapter in this history, with reverberations that are still felt throughout the world. How we arrived at this most recent crisis is impossible to understand without the kind of history that Brine and Poovey provide here.

Book Synopsis

The economic crisis of 2008 led to an unprecedented focus on the world of high finance-and revealed it to be far more arcane and influential than most people could ever have imagined. Any hope of avoiding future crises, it's clear, rest on understanding finance itself.
To understand finance, however, we have to learn its history, and this book fills that need. Kevin R. Brine, an industry veteran, and Mary Poovey, an acclaimed historian, show that finance as we know it today emerged gradually in the late nineteenth century and only coalesced after World War II, becoming ever more complicated-and ever more central to the American economy. The authors explain the models, regulations, and institutions at the heart of modern finance and uncover the complex and sometimes surprising origins of its critical features, such as corporate accounting standards, the Federal Reserve System, risk management practices, and American Keynesian and New Classic monetary economics. This book sees finance through its highs and lows, from pre-Depression to post-Recession, exploring the myriad ways in which the practices of finance and the realities of the economy influenced one another through the years.
A masterwork of collaboration, Finance in America lays bare the theories and practices that constitute finance, opening up the discussion of its role and risks to a broad range of scholars and citizens.

Review Quotes

"A truly magisterial history of the American financial system. Finance in America will be the textbook for a generation or more, for those wishing to understand what has become one of America's most prominent economic sectors."
-- "American Affairs"

"An altogether remarkable scholarly achievement. In Finance in America: An Unfinished Story, Kevin Brine and Mary Poovey embed the development of economic and financial theory in the United States in its historical and institutional context. Further, they illuminate the interdependent relationship of the 'real' and the 'financial' sides of the economy. This is of profound importance and represents a welcome commitment to the intellectual bridge-building so needed between the domains of economic and financial theorizing. Essential reading for anyone with a stake in the ongoing story of American finance."-- "William H. Janeway, author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy"

"Few issues are more important than whether and how economies and their financial systems are rendered visible. All readers with a serious interest in that issue will benefit from Brine and Poovey's remarkably comprehensive history."-- "Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh"

"The authors of this book are respectively a non-academic Wall Street practitioner and a non-economist academic, but the text is nonetheless of considerable interest to economists and in particular to historians of economics . . . the overall effect is to make clear how economics and finance, presented in modern textbooks as a matter of the logical workings of a closed mathematical model, in fact arose not only in bits and pieces but more importantly in concrete practice."-- "History of Political Economy"

About the Author

Kevin R. Brine is an author, artist, and private investor. A Wall Street veteran, Brine spent over two decades as a board member and senior executive of a prominent investment management and research company and subsequently served on the board of a New York Stock Exchange insurance company. Mary Poovey has recently retired from her position as Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University. She is the author of numerous books, including A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society and Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain.