A Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek Book of the Year Why our banking system is broken—and what we must do to fix it New bank failures have been a rude awakening for everyone who believed that the banking industry was reformed after the Global Financial Crisis—and that we’d never again have to choose between massive bailouts and financial havoc. The Bankers’ New Clothes uncovers just how little things have changed—and why banks are still so dangerous. Writing in clear language that anyone can understand, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig debunk the false and misleading claims of bankers, regulators, politicians, academics, and others who oppose effective reform, and they explain how the banking system can be made safer and healthier. Thoroughly updated for a world where bank failures have made a dramatic return, this acclaimed and important book now features a new preface and four new chapters that expose the shortcomings of current policies and reveal how the dominance of banking even presents dangers to the rule of law and democracy itself.

This pioneering exploration of Georgian men and women's experiences as readers explores their use of commonplace books for recording favourite passages and reflecting upon what they had read, revealing forgotten aspects of their complicated relationship with the printed word. It shows how indebted English readers often remained to techniques for handling, absorbing and thinking about texts that were rooted in classical antiquity, in Renaissance humanism and in a substantially oral culture. It also reveals how a series of related assumptions about the nature and purpose of reading influenced the roles that literature played in English society in the ages of Addison, Johnson and Byron; how the habits and procedures required by commonplacing affected readers' tastes and so helped shape literary fashions; and how the experience of reading and responding to texts increasingly encouraged literate men and women to imagine themselves as members of a polite, responsible and critically aware public.

From the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression, Wall Street embarked on a stunning, unprecedented, and often bloody period of international expansion in the Caribbean. A host of financial entities sought to control banking, trade, and finance in the region. In the process, they not only trampled local sovereignty, grappled with domestic banking regulation, and backed US imperialism—but they also set the model for bad behavior by banks, visible still today. In Bankers and Empire, Peter James Hudson tells the provocative story of this period, taking a close look at both the institutions and individuals who defined this era of American capitalism in the West Indies. Whether in Wall Street minstrel shows or in dubious practices across the Caribbean, the behavior of the banks was deeply conditioned by bankers’ racial views and prejudices. Drawing deeply on a broad range of sources, Hudson reveals that the banks’ experimental practices and projects in the Caribbean often led to embarrassing failure, and, eventually, literal erasure from the archives.