Customer Reviews

The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War over the American Dollar (Enterprise)

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I was expecting to read a brief history of the US monetary system and, in particular, the contribution thereof by each of Brand's five "money men". Instead I got a series of disjoint, narrow biographies on five guys who helped shape American banking.

To be sure, the book has its moments, for example, there is an interesting discussion about the way in which funds for the civil war were raised through war bonds -- but it is apparently left as an exercise to the reader to consider how this approached changed the US economy in any broader sense (other than that it helped the North win the war). There is no over-arching description of how each man contributed to the current system or how their work impacted the monetary system over time. Part of the problem - a few specific exceptions aside - is that Brand does not paint any broad strokes that would give the reader an idea about what the economic, monetary and political climate were like during the lives of each of the men. I was left wanting for more thorough discussion concerning the monetary and economic issues of the era.

Perhaps there is a book that describes the continuous evolution of American banking, money and capital markets, but this one isn't it.

I am a big fan of Bill Brands' work. He's one academic historian who can make complex subjects understandable to Average Joes like me. Unlike the previous reviewer, I don't have much background on the Money Question, which, as Brands explains, so deeply divided the nation for the first dozen or so decades of its existence. So this book was a learning experience for me.

In "The Money Men," Brands elucidates five pivotal stories in America's economic development:

*Hamilton's efforts to establish a national bank and his program to finance the developing country's growth through national debt
*The Jackson-Biddle "War" in which Pres. Jackson prevailed in killing off the Second Bank of the United States
*Jay Cooke's role in financing the Civil War
*The failed attempt of railroad barons Jay Gould and James Fisk to corner the gold market
*J.P. Morgan's role as the nation's de facto central banker.

Of these, I was particularly drawn to the story about Cooke's innovations in selling Union war bonds to the general public. Major bankers, especially New York bankers, had shown only tepid appetite for such bonds amid Union battlefield setbacks. Indeed, except for Lincoln, Cooke may have been the man most responsible for keeping the Union army in the field.

I was also surprised to learn -- as apparently were his contemporaries --of the relatively modest size of Morgan's estate: $68 million. By comparison, Andrew Carnegie amassed a $225 million fortune.

Brands wraps up with the resolution to the Money Question -- the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. The Fed system was a compromise that combined elements of Hamiltonian capitalism and Jeffersonian democracy. With a couple of glaring exceptions (late 20s/early 30s and 1970s) the Fed system has served the nation's economy well across nine decades now.

The Money Men by H.W. Brands is a good, albeit quite brief, review of our nation's historical struggle between the forces of capitalism and democracy. Clearly the two, while a recipe for economic success, opportunity and global power, have collided both philosophically and politically over some two hundred thirty years.

Brands, a highly regarded historian at the University of Texas, and the author of such definitive books and "Andrew Jackson" and "The Age of Gold" seems to have radically tailored his prose for this entry into The Enterprise Series. As it is my first read of these books I cannot be sure if the editors at Norton are seeking to spoon feed a reader audience where little existing knowledge of the specific topics is assumed. It seems as if that is the goal and it is a shame as Brands has so much more to offer. His writing is crisp in The Money Men and the history of a developing economic, financial and monetary system is well done, but from a cursory and overview perspective. Those looking for more should do just that, keep looking.

This was a terribly disappointing book. I was hoping for an accessible, easy-to-understand history of American finance, explained through the lens of mini-biographies of Hamilton, Biddle, Gould, Cooke and Morgan.

Instead, I got a choppy book that read a little like a rushed college paper. While reading it, I could almost see a MS Word document and paragraphs being highlighted, cut, and pasted in my head. Somehow, it just didn't read smoothly or cohesively.

I believe that much of this is due to the fact that, oddly, the writing itself wasn't bad. There are snappy, interesting parts of the book, and some of the biographical information and historical tidbits are very interesting in and of themselves. Unfortunately, the writing can't quite overcome its stilted, choppy nature.

I've never read any of H.W. Brands' other works, and I have to say that I think he is probably a very good writer. He apparently is a Pulitzer Prize winner, for one thing, but for another-again--the writing itself isn't bad; you really feel as though Brands wasn't given room to write naturally, and the book suffers for it.

One thing that may have gone a long way for a reader such as myself is if there were more explication; I am a totally Humanities-oriented person and have very little understanding or knowledge of finance. For just that reason, I thought this would be a great book for me to read to gain a better understanding of our financial history. Instead, I was constantly putting the book down to Google things (for example, specie and how that system worked, or what buying bonds "at par" meant) or look up financial phrases on Dictionary.com. A brief glossary and/or footnotes section would have gone a long way to make this a more pleasurable read.

I thought this was a good, short overview of the evolving state of banking in the US. It has perked my interests to read other more detailed books. Perhaps HW Brand's title 'American Colossus' will do. Also interested in 'House of Morgan' by Chernow...

What would it be like if there were no central bank? What would it be like if the U.S. Treasury did not print money and had to redeem its notes in gold (or silver)? How is it that government can print money and control interest rates? Did the framers of the Constitution intend this? That is what this book is about. And it is a very timely telling the story from perspective of key people in our history starting with Alexander Hamilton and moving forward from there.

What this book shows is that the Tea Party and other conservative arguments espoused today are not new. We have had experience with a gold standard (albeit fractional), a bimetal standard (gold and silver), not printing money to finance wars and more recently, printing a lot of money to finance wars, no central bank and now a central bank. All have their problems and, through history's lens, we can see what the people at the time thought about the various approaches. Much of this will resonate today and may suggests solutions to our financial problems.

I highly recommend this book along with This Time Is Different (Reinhart and Rogoff) This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly and Lords of Finance (Ahamed) Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, The Mystery of Banking (Rothbard) The Mystery of Banking and The Theory of Money and Credit (Mises) The Theory of Money and Credit for those interested in the history of our money and banking system. I would read them in reverse order rather than in the order listed if you are really interested in exploring the subject. Mises is a little tough going but it is all downhill from there. If you get bogged down, go right to The Mystery of Banking.

One caveat, while the author of this book, which I highly recommend, and of the first two books listed above are great at illuminating the practical problems and forces that led to significant economic upheavals in money and banking in the U.S. and the arguments raised by all the involved parities, these authors don't necessarily draw the correct conclusions as to how the situation could have been handled better or prevented.

These authors, but not Mises and Rothbard, follow the conventional wisdom which is that printing money and loosening credit is the best way to deal with a banking and economic crisis. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But the real question is how can these problems be avoided or at least if unavoidable, how can we minimize their severity?

It seems to me that any economic system, such as ours, that requires that vast majority of society to work and add to the economic pie before sharing in it (by working to acquire and spending money) while allowing a special group, banks, to create money out of thin air (if you don't understand how this works, be sure to read the Mystery of Banking or any book explaining the fractional reserve banking which is practiced throughout the world) is suboptimal because if favors some citizens over others. This may be good for a monarchy or dictatorship but not for a democracy. Government favoritism undermines the public spirit and social cohesion.

In addition to being inherently unfair and, as far as I can see, unnecessary, the creation of money out of thin air injects false demand signals into the market because this money looks the same as the money earned by people who worked for it. The unspoken assumption about money is that those who have it earned it by adding to the economic pie. Money created out of thin air creates apparent demand as if the money were earned by productive workers when that is not the case. Those who receive money created out of thin air have not added to the economic pie before taking a piece of it. If everyone could do that, there would be no pie.

Permitting banks to lend money that they create out of thin air, rather than money earned and deposited with them, can cause a much larger measure of misallocation of resources than would otherwise be the case because because it creates false demand signals (via bidding up prices with thin air money) that fuels bubbles. This misallocation of resources manifest itself in larger swings in the business cycle (bigger booms and busts such as in the stock bubble, in 2000, and real estate bubble, during the past decade).

This is just as true when the government spends money it creates out of thin air as when banks do it. When government spends money it does not have and has not borrowed or taxed, it creates apparent rather than real demand which would represented by dollars that were earned by taxpayers and then acquired by government through taxes or borrowing. It creates inflation - more money chasing the same amount of goods.

This issue of creating money out of thin air to support expenditures was well know to our forefathers. It discussed in this book, The Money Men. At the outset of the Civil War, the financially strapped Union had to raise money to support the Civil War. They recognized that they had to either raise taxed, print money and/or sell bonds. The Money Men shows you what they did and who and how it was done. It is quite an interesting story all by itself.

Read The Money Men and enjoy!

A very informative and interesting book on the history of money thought which is still prevalent today. Easy to read. Good for novices to get some understanding.

I have long been a fan of HW Brands - In fact he is the author of two of my favorite works on US History ("The First American" and "The Age of Gold") However, what has consistently made Brands a favorite of lovers of American history is missing in "The Money Men" - that is his amazing attention to personal details. Typically, Brands is able to bring his subjects alive like no other. Unfortunately, "The Money Men" is a very brief glimpse at five loosely associated men... each is given between 30-50 pages.


The result of Brands work is an overview of the formation of the banking industry in the United States. I would approach "The Money Men" as a way to decide if you would like to tackle one of the more complete books on the subject... such as Chernow's masterful books on JP Morgan, Rockefeller, and Alexander Hamilton (And I highly recommend each of them).

A final note.... at the time of publishing this review the price of "The Money Men" is less than three dollars. This is an outstanding price - and definitely worthy of a place in your library at this price!

It is VERY difficult to make an interesting book on the history of central banking and money in the US, especially without a pet agenda ("Bring back the gold standard!" or "Outlaw Central Banks!"). The Money Men contains American history, Economic history and Banking history, linked together in the stories of Alexander Hamilton, JP Morgan, and the powerful bankers between them.

Does is succeed in being a page-turner? Not really - it's best read in several sittings. Does it avoid partisanship? Depends on the wording... While largely unbalanced, "Capitalism vs. Deomcracy" paints a biased view of the participants. "Capital driven democracy versus Economic populist democracy" could be less biased words. But all that said, the book certainly beats other alternatives of US central banking histories....

I found this book to be a bit of a challenge, since it takes the reader through the history of U.S. money from before the nation's establishment as a country independent from the crown of England, and the accompanying tax structure, all the way through the Federal Reserve days of Alan Greenspan. Yet what I learned about the men profiled in this book gave me a glimpse of their "inner workings" and how their business - and personal - biases have had an affect on the entire development of the U.S. An excellent read.