I’m happy to announce imminent publication of my book Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation. It’s from University of Texas Press, in the “Discovering America” series edited by Mark Crispin Miller (pub. date: October 15, 2012).Hysteriography
Launch Party/Discussion/Signing for My Book “Founding Finance”: October 24 in Brooklyn USA
William Hogeland
The subjects of the book will not all be news to readers of this blog. Founding Finance ranges like a bull in a china shop through those critical years 1765-1795, turning up dire conflicts among 18th-century Americans over finance and economics. These are the conflicts that, while shockingly little-known, I think played directly into – no, they were — the decisive arc of the American founding, the stuff that really made us who we are.
Little-known founding episodes that may sound eerily resonant:
- predatory lending in a real-estate bubble about to pop
- feverish speculation by upscale investors in dubious debt instruments
- foreclosure crises sending ordinary families into poverty and dependence
- popular uprisings against government complicity in wealth concentration
- militarized crackdowns on democratic approaches to finance
- and, of course, much, much more
This is not, in other words, another book about founding conflicts between Americans and England. We won that war.
This is about the founding war between some Americans and other Americans, a war over money, debt, and government’s role in public and private finance. A war we refuse to believe formed us, a war we’ve never stopped fighting.
3 comments:
"a war we’ve never stopped fighting."
Perhaps just not here in the US for the last 200 years, but rather within western civilization for thousands of years... rsp,
The rhyme of American history.
"HOOVER LISTS PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS, URGING CONGRESS TO SPEED $150,000,000; $8,000,000 NEW GOAL OF JOB FUND HERE; PRESIDENT FEARS DELAYS Says in Message That He Can Make Jobs Now by Directing Spending."
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20A1FF83A5C157A93C7A91789D95F448385F9
Maybe Hoover II (Obama) can have congress to give him some money to spend as he sees fit, oh wait he did that and the banksters are thankful until there not because:
"I am a job creator: A manifesto for the entitled"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/i-am-a-job-creator-a-manifesto-for-the-entitled/2012/09/28/756f2e90-07ee-11e2-858a-5311df86ab04_story.html
Not to mention that government issued paper currency hade hyperinflated by the end of the war and was worthless, the government credit was about as good as Mugabe's. That's why they created the first central bank, tying in the richest banks and creditors with govt and banks mutually guaranteeing each other's credit, banks getting a cut of govt tax revenue in the form of interest on govt debt, and a cut of seigniorage profit.
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