Before they achieved renown as patrons of the arts and de facto rulers of Florence, the Medici family earned their fortune in banking. But even at the height of the Renaissance, charging interest of any kind meant running afoul of the Catholic Church's ban on usury. Tim Parks reveals how the legendary Medicis-Cosimo and Lorenzo "the Magnificent" in particular-used the diplomatic, military, and even metaphysical tools at hand, along with a healthy dose of intrigue and wit, to further their fortunes as well as their family's standing.

The bestselling author of the acclaimed House of Cards and The Last Tycoons turns his spotlight on to Goldman Sachs and the controversy behind its success.
From the outside, Goldman Sachs is a perfect company. The Goldman PR machine loudly declares it to be smarter, more ethical, and more profitable than all of its competitors. Behind closed doors, however, the firm constantly straddles the line between conflict of interest and legitimate deal making, wields significant influence over all levels of government, and upholds a culture of power struggles and toxic paranoia. And its clever bet against the mortgage market in 2007—unknown to its clients—may have made the financial ruin of the Great Recession worse. Money and Power reveals the internal schemes that have guided the bank from its founding through its remarkable windfall during the 2008 financial crisis. Through extensive research and interviews with the inside players, including current CEO Lloyd Blankfein, William Cohan constructs a nuanced, timely portrait of Goldman Sachs, the company that was too big—and too ruthless—to fail.

The House of Morgan was the personification of economic power and the symbol of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other entrepreneurs were wealthier -industrialists like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Duke -but none was relied upon more by business and government or better known in the world of high finance. Vincent Carosso, using for the first time the large collections that constitute the Morgans' own business records, as well as other private papers and public archives, has constructed an in-depth account of the evolution, operations, and internal management of the Morgan banks at London, New York, Philadelphia, and Paris, from the time Junius Spencer Morgan left his Boston business to become a London banker to the death of his son and successor, John Pierpont Morgan. The new data throw light on the Morgans' business strategies, policies, and practices in financing such vast American enterprises as railroads, steel, farm equipment, communications, and the electrical industry. They also reveal the Morgan firms' dealings in the political arena in their role as financiers of the United States governmentMorgan banks funded the Civil War debt, met the Army payroll in 1877, stopped disastrous outflows of U.S. gold in 1894 and 1895, and acted as the country's central bank in the panic of 1907-and as bankers for Mexico, Argentina, and many other governments. This intricate and comprehensive history of the mechanisms of international finance, the waning of private banking houses and the evolution of commercial and investment banking, the risks and profits of high finance will interest historians of business, economics, the United States, and the modern world.

City Bankers, 1890–1914 is a major contribution to a controversial area of economic history and to the debate about the nature of British society in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Translated here into English for the first time, it provides a detailed analysis of the banking community of London between 1890 and 1914 when the City of London was the undisputed financial centre of the world. Attention is paid to the social origins, education, careers , business interests and fortunes of its members, to the networks of relationships of its most important dynasties, as well as to the political influence of the world of banking. The analysis is based on a sample of 460 bankers at the heart of international finance and the author has used a wide range of banking archives and private papers. Business historians and economists will welcome this comprehensive study of a most important group of capitalists at the junction of the business world and aristocratic society in the Edwardian age.

Michael Hudson's in-depth and highly controversial study of U.S. financial diplomacy explores the faults built into the core of the World Bank and the IMF at their inception which -- he argues -- were intended to preserve the US's financial hegemony. Difficult to detect at the time, these problems have since become explicit as the failure of the international economic system has become apparent; the IMF and World Bank were set up to give aid to developing countries, but instead many of the world's poorest countries have been plunged into insurmountable debt crises.
Hudson's critique of the destructive course of the international economic system provides important insights into the real motivations at the heart of these institutions - and the increasing tide of opposition that they face around the world.
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Note that this book only covers up through 1973.