There are few indictments of the American banking system as searing as Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, written by Louis D. Brandeis in 1913. Long considered one of the major muckraking exposés of the Progressive period, it still speaks powerfully to our own times. The book led to the establishment of stringent regulations on the banking system, rules that undergirded decades of prosperity and stability for both banks and the American economy after World War II. Weakening those rules led to the great banking meltdown of 2008, when once again the greed and recklessness that Brandeis had warned about triggered a major depression and cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs and homes.
About the author
Louis Dembitz Brandeis is known to most people as one of the giants of American constitutional law. Among Progressives he led the attack against monopolies and what he termed the “curse of bigness, ” charging that the large banks, headed by J. P. Morgan, had created a money trust. In 1912 a congressional committee held extensive hearings that uncovered how those banks used their financial power to dominate American industry. Brandeis took these revelations and interpreted them into popular language in this book.
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