Nomi Prin's new book demonstrates that a historical examination of the U.S banking industry's influence and control of U.S. politics and economic development is neither dry nor dull. It is riveting! In masterful style she starts early in the 20th century to show how powerful bankers have managed the country and political leaders for a very long time. While history tends to show that presidents have been the prime figures shaping history, this book argues that banking figures who ran the forerunners of today's powerful banks were equally powerful.
Even more fascinating, Prins shows how U.S. bankers extended U.S. power and domination into Europe, Latin America, and other third world countries. World War II enabled the U.S. to be the top of the industrial world. But most of us don't think about the equally critical financial world. This book examines that area closely: the successful effort to establish the supremacy of the U.S. dollar, the formation of the IMF and the World Bank, and the U.S.'s success in pushing aside Great Britain, the world's former superpower.
Prins carefully analyzes the relationship of the IMF and the World Bank with powerful U.S. banks. For example, she shows that the IMF provides short-term financing to help stabilize currencies in developing countries. This provides enough stability to enable U.S. bank to provide more expensive, and much more profitable, debt to those countries. The World Bank, on the other hand, is transformed into a "securities vending machine for private banks." Bankers can then decide which bonds to sell which gives them incredible control over where the World Bank provides lending.
This book also provides an illuminating examination of the banking industry's long-term effort to get rid of Glass-Steagall regulations that were put in place during the Great Depression. The goal of these regulations had been to prevent the highly speculative and reckless lending and security issuance behavior that characterized the period before the 1929 crash. Prins examines how banks during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s gradually chipped away at the various banking regulations. It culminates in the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that once again allows investment firms to combine with commercial banks. That put in place the conditions that allowed the banking industry to recklessly head toward the financial meltdown of 2007-8.
"All the Presidents' Bankers" takes its place among other superb books that examine the real drivers of U.S. economic power like Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine". Prins, like all great non-fiction writers, proves that discovering how economic and political systems really run is far more fascinating that the nearest best-selling spy thriller.
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