Pundits will argue that the 2008 financial crisis was the first
crash in American history driven by consumer debt. But in this
spirited, highly engaging account, Scott Reynolds Nelson
demonstrates that consumer debt has underpinned almost every major
financial panic in the nation's history. From William Duer's
attempts to profit off the country's post-Revolutionary War debt to
an 1815 plan to sell English coats to Americans on credit, to the
debt-fueled railroad expansion that precipitated the 1857 crash: in
each case, the chain of banks, brokers, moneylenders, and insurance
companies that separated borrowers and lenders made it impossible
to distinguish good loans from bad. Bound up in this history are
stories of national banks funded by smugglers, fistfights in
Congress over the gold standard, America's early dependence on
British bankers, and how presidential campaigns were forged in
controversies over private debt. An irreverent, wholly accessible,
eye-opening book.
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