Collectively, mankind has never had it so good despite periodic economic crises of which the current sub-prime crisis is merely the latest example. Much of this success is attributable to the increasing efficiency of the world's financial institutions as finance has proved to be one of the most important causal factors in economic performance. In a series of insightful essays, financial and economic historians examine how financial innovations from the seventeenth century to the present have continually challenged established institutional arrangements, forcing change and adaptation by governments, financial intermediaries, and financial markets. Where these have been successful, wealth creation and growth have followed. When they failed, growth slowed and sometimes economic decline has followed. These essays illustrate the difficulties of co-ordinating financial innovations in order to sustain their benefits for the wider economy, a theme that will be of interest to policy makers as well as economic historians.

""As soon as Independence had been won from Great Britain, the decks were clear for a second fight. That fight, as is usually found after a successful revolution, was the fight to decide whether independence was to be true independence or whether, after the change of names, the financial system was to re-establish over the new government that same control which it had exercised over the old."" This is the story of the first 40 years of that war. A shorth history of paper money and banking in the U.S. An inquiry into the principles of the American banking system Letter to Andrew Jackson An inquiry into the expediency of dispensing with bank agency and bank paper in fiscal concerns of the U.S. Journal of Banking Banking as it ought to be Banks of the United States William M. Gouge and the formation of orthodox American monetary policy