Mary Poovey

Kevin R. Brine

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.

An Unfinished Story

Finance in America

Henrike Lähnemann

Elena Ciletti

The Book of Judith tells the story of a fictitious Jewish woman beheading the general of the most powerful imaginable army to free her people. The parabolic story was set as an example of how God will help the righteous. Judith's heroic action not only became a validating charter myth of Judaism itself but has also been appropriated by many Christian and secular groupings, and has been an inspiration for numerous literary texts and works of art. It continues to exercise its power over artists, authors and academics and is becoming a major field of research in its own right. The Sword of Judith is the first multidisciplinary collection of essays to discuss representations of Judith throughout the centuries. It transforms our understanding across a wide range of disciplines. The collection includes new archival source studies, the translation of unpublished manuscripts, the translation of texts unavailable in English, and Judith images and music.

Judith Studies Across the Disciplines

The Sword of Judith

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.

Kevin R. Brine

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