Lords of Finance
Great quote:
"It was great theater [...] a reenactment of an old morality play that had divided the republic since its founding--between those, like Hamilton, who believed that great wealth was the reward for taking risks and those, like Jefferson, who believed that prosperity should be the reward for hard work and thrift." (Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed. pg. 317. Penguin 2009)My first debate is of course, that Jefferson even if he believed that didn't quite follow it--he spent like a dot-com with VC funding in 1999. And I would add a third: the people who still believe that wealth is deserved when inherited (which I find decidedly anti-American).
Labels: reading
posted by Kyrce @ 9:50 AM
2 Comments:
But was it a good book? Is this recommended reading?
It's recommended so far, but I haven't finished the book yet. It was slow going for a while there; I felt it got bogged down in describing the huge cast of characters.
I thought that quote was an astute observation of the inherent contradictions in Americans' view of money.
Most of it was written before the most recent crisis, which makes a lot of the observations even more creepily appropriate.
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