Market Rules

Bankers, Presidents, and the Origins of the Great Recession (American Business, Politics, and Society)

By: Mark H. Rose

Narrated by: David Beveridge

Although most Americans attribute shifting practices in the financial industry to the invisible hand of the market, Mark H. Rose reveals the degree to which presidents, legislators, regulators, and even bankers themselves have long taken an active interest in regulating the industry.

Rose explains the history of the financial industry as a story of individuals - some well-known, like presidents Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton; treasury secretaries Donald Regan and Timothy Geithner; and JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon - and some less so, though equally influential, such as Kennedy's comptroller of the currency James J. Saxon, Citicorp CEO Walter Wriston, and Bank of America CEOs Hugh McColl and Kenneth Lewis.

Rose traces the evolution of supermarket banks from the early days of the Kennedy administration, through the financial crisis of 2008, and up to the Trump administration's attempts to modify bank rules. Deeply researched and accessibly written, Market Rules demystifies the major trends in the banking industry and brings financial policy to life.

The book is published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

Praise for the book:

"A lively and lucid account of banking and financial history over the past half century…a great achievement." (Walter Friedman, director of Business History Initiative at Harvard Business School)

"Engaging study...offers a unique voice." (Susie Pak, associate professor of history at St. John's University)

©2019 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2020 Redwood Audiobooks

Fine-grained, yields great insights

This book does a fantastic job of flying low, digging into the personalities, stories and legal-business structures from the 1950s to the 2008 crash. This fine grain and skillful telling altogether confer huge insight. It is more clear, listenable, and informative than most banking books (and I've heard most of them here). It has a lot to say about how firms, politicians, entrepreneurs, and regulators mixed and produced the landscape we see today. The stories are each captivating (as much as this topic can be).

Among overlapping audiobooks here, the story of USA banking, end-to-end, from 30,000 feet, with a big framework for understanding, is told well in Fragile By Design. From a slightly lower altitude, so to speak, and a wider time-frame, is All the Presidents' Bankers (though I prefer the account here by a lot). The earlier history of Citi (one of the banks spotlighted here) from, say, 5,000 feet is told reasonably in Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts, and Bailouts at Citi. For me, if choosing between them, the pair of Fragile by Design and this one have the most value.