The world of finance is again undergoing crisis and transformation. This book provides a new perspective on finance through the prism of popular and formal culture and examines fascination and repulsion toward money, the role of governments and individuals in financial crises and how the Crisis of 2008, like others since 1720, repeat the same patterns of enthusiasm, greed, culpability, revulsion, reform and recovery. The book explores the political and socio-economic factors which determine fallibility and resilience in financial cultures, periods of crisis, transition and recovery based on cyclical rather than linear progression. Examining the roots of financial capitalism, in Europe and the United States and its corollary development in Asia, Russia and emerging markets proves that cultural and psychosocial reactions to financial success, endeavor and calamity transcend specific periods or events. The book allows the reader to discover parallel and intersecting reactions, controversies and resolutions in the cultural history of financial markets and institutions.

The world of finance is again undergoing crisis and transformation. This book provides a new perspective on finance through the prism of popular and formal culture and examines fascination and repulsion toward money, the role of governments and individuals in financial crises and how the Crisis of 2008, like others since 1720, repeat the same patterns of enthusiasm, greed, culpability, revulsion, reform and recovery. The book explores the political and socio-economic factors which determine fallibility and resilience in financial cultures, periods of crisis, transition and recovery based on cyclical rather than linear progression. Examining the roots of financial capitalism, in Europe and the United States and its corollary development in Asia, Russia and emerging markets proves that cultural and psychosocial reactions to financial success, endeavor and calamity transcend specific periods or events. The book allows the reader to discover parallel and intersecting reactions, controversies and resolutions in the cultural history of financial markets and institutions.

Once there was a golden age of American thrift, when citizens lived sensibly within their means and worked hard to stay out of debt. The growing availability of credit in this century, however, has brought those days to an end--undermining traditional moral virtues such as prudence, diligence, and the delay of gratification while encouraging reckless consumerism. Or so we commonly believe. In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Lendol Calder shows that this conception of the past is in fact a myth. Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources--including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum--to show that debt has always been with us. He vigorously challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values. Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of disciplined rationality and hard work. Throughout, Calder keeps in clear view the human face of credit relations. He re-creates the Dickensian world of nineteenth-century pawnbrokers, takes us into the dingy backstairs offices of loan sharks, into small-town shops and New York department stores, and explains who resorted to which types of credit and why. He also traces the evolving moral status of consumer credit, showing how it changed from a widespread but morally dubious practice into an almost universal and generally accepted practice by World War II. Combining clear, rigorous arguments with a colorful, narrative style, Financing the American Dream will attract a wide range of academic and general readers and change how we understand one of the most important and overlooked aspects of American social and economic life.

In a time before large banking systems, and with paper money just in its infancy, money during the Renaissance meant coinage (mainly gold and silver) and local credit systems. These monetary forms had a significant influence on the ways in which money was understood throughout the period, and shaped discussions on such topics as the meaning of monetary value, the economic, political, religious, and aesthetic uses of coinage, the moral implications of usury and credit systems, and the importance of reputation, both at the state and individual levels. Crucial to the transformation of ideas about money in the period was the growing awareness that the individuals, up to and including the monarch, were powerless to overcome the market forces that determined value and directed the movement of goods and money. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Renaissance presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.

Bracketed by global financial crises and economic downturns, the modern age has been defined by debates about, and transformations of, money. The period witnessed the consolidation of national currencies and monetary policies as well as the diversification of payment technologies and the proliferation of financial instruments. Throughout, even as it appeared abstracted by finance and depoliticized by expert ideologies, money was revealed again and again to be a powerful medium of cultural imagination and practical inventiveness as well as the site of public and political struggles. Modern money - both as a form of liquidity and as a claim on wealth - remains deeply unsettled, caught between private and public interests and subject to epic struggles over the infrastructures of value creation and circulation and their distributional consequences. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.

The book discusses how culture simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the economy. Over the past few years, as the world has staggered from one financial crisis to another, the neat separation of economics and culture has been consistently challenged. To understand the current state of affairs, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the conjuncture that rules the production of value in economic systems, how money shapes social relations and affects discursive practices. By discussing the vocabulary, by understanding the rhetoric and interpreting the narratives, be it of crisis, austerity, growth, welfare, neo-liberalism or socialism, new modes of imaging the economic system may be made possible. The book is structured in four chapters dealing with theory and conjuncture (“Philosophies of Money”), with the visual arts and investment (“The Arts and Finance”), with literary representation and narrativity (“Literature and Money Matters”) and with the cognitive impact of fiduciary representation (“Cognitive Moneyscapes”). This collection analyses the process whereby a material icon invested with the symbolical power to rule social exchange becomes an explanatory narrative determining the way societies produce meaning.

Winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize Financial Missionaries to the World establishes the broad scope and significance of "dollar diplomacy"—the use of international lending and advising—to early-twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. Combining diplomatic, economic, and cultural history, the distinguished historian Emily S. Rosenberg shows how private bank loans were extended to leverage the acceptance of American financial advisers by foreign governments. In an analysis striking in its relevance to contemporary debates over international loans, she reveals how a practice initially justified as a progressive means to extend “civilization” by promoting economic stability and progress became embroiled in controversy. Vocal critics at home and abroad charged that American loans and financial oversight constituted a new imperialism that fostered exploitation of less powerful nations. By the mid-1920s, Rosenberg explains, even early supporters of dollar diplomacy worried that by facilitating excessive borrowing, the practice might induce the very instability and default that it supposedly worked against. "[A] major and superb contribution to the history of U.S. foreign relations. . . . [Emily S. Rosenberg] has opened up a whole new research field in international history."—Anders Stephanson, Journal of American History "[A] landmark in the historiography of American foreign relations."—Melvyn P. Leffler, author of A Preponderence of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War "Fascinating."—Christopher Clark, Times Literary Supplement