Customer Reviews

Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America Rich

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This book provides very good explanations of how the early American economy was financed. Would be a good gift for a college student majoring in Economics.

However, I did not think the interesting concept at the core of this book was helped by the extended digressions into the private lives of the men chosen by the authors to illustrate their public policy points and financial explanations.

Stephen Girard is titled "The Saint" for both helping his fellow citizens during an epidemic and funding a school for white male orphans. At one point, Girard's complicity in slavery (in that he owned a coffee plantation) is mentioned as his "one asterisk to our dubbing him for sainthood." Two pages later, Girard is described as having bribed customs officers, evaded taxes, violated usury laws, and manipulated shipping records to gain better insurance rates. Some Saint.

The authors are better with the history of financial transactions and banking, than political history. For example, they call John C. Calhoun "illustrious" with " a distinguished career", while I think this Southern senator helped propel our country into the bloodshed of the Civil War through his long career of defending slavery as an institution and state's rights as his political God.

Economists and citizens need to read this book! It's chapter on the financial crisis of 1837 saved me millions of $ in 2007 and 2008. Read this book and you'll have a much better appreciation of financial systems, in both their strengths and weaknesses.

Adding to the economic history, the book weaves in the personal histories of the founders. Quirky and eccentric, they, like Hamilton, somehow washed up on the shores of what was to be the United States--and they and their ideas prospered. These distinct and eccentric founders built a new system. How did they do it? The book lends great insight into the distinct country that was the United States. People everywhere must have dreams, but in the U.S. a financial system developed to fund those dreams.

Let's hope we still have remnants of the liberty in that early U.S. and people somewhere like those early founders.