Money, Power, and the People asserts that common Americans fed up with the repeated financial panics and economic downturns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fixed the American banking system with New Deal banking reforms like federal-deposit insurance. In the decades of banking stability that followed World War II, however, the people forgot how to conduct “banking politics,” creating a vacuum that allowed bankers to exert “private power in the pursuit of profit without regard to the public welfare” (12). Another wave of crises and runaway-wealth inequality resulted. Occupy Wall Street and other grassroots movements, however, portend an end of the anomalous postwar detente between Americans and their financiers.

Shaw, a historian by training, is silent about his methodology, which, so far as can be ascertained, is that of traditional narrative history. The story begins with the Panic of 1907 (Chapter 1) before moving to the Emergency Currency Act...

You do not currently have access to this content.