"The definitive account of the crash of 1987, a cautionary tale of how the U.S. financial system nearly collapsed ... Monday, October 19, 1987, was by far the worst day in Wall Street history. The market fell 22.6 percent--almost twice as bad as the worst day of 1929--equal to a loss of nearly 5,000 points today. But Black Monday was more than just a one-day market crash; it was seven years in the making and threatened the entire U.S. financial system....

"From the host of NPR's Planet Money, the deeply-investigated story of how one visionary, ruthless investor changed American finance forever. Before Bill Gross was known among investors as the Bond King, he was a gambler. In 1966, a fresh college grad, he went to Vegas armed with his net worth ($200) and a knack for counting cards. $10,000 and countless casino bans later, he was hooked: so he enrolled in business school. The Bond King is the story...

From the first days of the United States, a battle raged over money. On one side were the democrats, who wanted cheap money and feared the concentration of financial interests in the hands of a few. On the other were the capitalists who sought the soundness of a national bank-and the profits that came with it. In telling this exciting story, H. W. Brands focuses on five "Money Men": Alexander Hamilton, who championed a national bank; Nicholas Biddle,...

You know what happened during the financial crisis--now it is time to understand why the financial system came so close to falling over the edge of the abyss and why it could happen again. Journalist Suzanne McGee examines the forces that transformed Wall Street from its traditional role as a capital-generating and economy-boosting engine into a behemoth operating with only its own short-term interests in mind and with reckless disregard for the broader...

Reveals how the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker engineered changes in America's economy.

Private, unregulated lending to high-risk borrowers is the answer, or at least it was in the United States for much of the period from the Civil War to the onset of the early decades of the twentieth century. Newspapers called the practice "loan sharking" because lenders employed the same ruthlessness as the great predators in the ocean. Slowly state and federal governments adopted laws and regulations curtailing the practice, but organized crime...

"The fundamental motive for financial innovation is not to make the system work better, but to avoid regulation and oversight. This is not a bug of the financial system, but a built-in feature. The president of the US is not a tax avoider because he is an especially fraudulent financier; he's a tax avoider because he is a wealthy man in a system premised on such deceit. Finance is an industry of sabotage. This book is a brilliant, intellectual detective...