Collateral Damaged (eBook)

Charles Geisst is the author of seventeen books, includingUndue Influence: How the Wall Street Elite Put the FinancialSystem at Risk (John Wiley, 2004), Deals of the Century:Wall Street, Mergers, & the Making of Modern America (JohnWiley, 2003), Wheels of Fortune: The History of Speculation fromScandal to Respectability (John Wiley, 2002), The LastPartnerships: Inside the Great Wall Street Money Dynasties(McGraw Hill, 2001), Monopolies in America: Empire Builders andTheir Enemies from Jay Gould to Bill Gates (Oxford UniversityPress, 2000), 100 Years of Wall Street (an illustratedhistory, McGraw-Hill, 1999), and Wall Street: A History(Oxford University Press, 1997). He also is the editor andprincipal contributor to the Encyclopedia of American BusinessHistory, published by Facts On File in December 2005. He alsowrites a column on financial affairs for GlobalEntrepreneur, the Chinese business magazine. The Last Partnerships was named one of Booklist's TopTen Business Books for 2001 and has been translated into Chinese ashave Wheels of Fortune and Monopolies in America.Wall Street: A History was on the New YorkTimes Business Bestseller List for three months and was aselection of the History Book Club and the Book of the Month ClubInternational. It was also on the Toronto Globe & MailBusiness Bestseller List and has been translated into German,Japanese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Russian. 100 Years ofWall Street was on the Wall Street Journal BusinessBestseller List, Asian Wall Street Journal BusinessBestseller List, and the Business Week Business BestsellerList as well as on the bestseller list in India. It has also beentranslated into Russian, Korean, and Chinese. A previous text,Investment Banking in the Financial System, was translatedinto Chinese and was a standard business school text in Beijing.His books have been translated 16 times. Geisst was born in New Jersey in 1946. He attended the Universityof Richmond (BA, 1968), the New School for Social Research (MA,1970) and the London School of Economics & Political Science(PhD, 1972) and did post-doctoral study as a Visiting Scholar atthe Yale Law School in law and history, and at Balliol College,Oxford University in finance. He has been a frequent guest on radioand television talk shows, including Frontline, ABC Evening News,ABC Nightline, CBS Evening News, WCBS TV, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg TVand radio, Nippon Television, NPR, A & E, Radio New Zealand,BBC, Australian Broadcasting, TechTV, A & E, The HistoryChannel, and the CBC. He has spoken about his work at the New YorkPublic Library, the New York Historical Association, and the 92Street Y among others. From 1972-75 he taught political science in an open admissionsenvironment at the City University of New York before taking a jobon Wall Street. Subsequently, he worked as a capital marketsanalyst and investment banker at several investment banks in theCity of London. Since 1985, he has taught finance at ManhattanCollege, and he was named the college's first Louis F. CapalboChair in Business in 1993. In 2009, he was named to the AmbassadorCharles A. Gargano Chair in Global Economics. Consultingassignments in financial markets have been with Cazenove & Co.,S.G. Warburg & Co., the Hudson Institute, and J.P. Morgan &Co. Listed in Who's Who, he has published professional andtrade articles in magazines and journals such as the Wall StreetJournal, International Herald Tribune, Neue Zurcher Zeitung,Newsday, and Euromoney. He lives with his wife inOradell, New Jersey.

Introduction.

1 The Great American Credit Machine.

2 Creating a Consumer Credit Society in the 1920s.

3 A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

4 The Rise of Credit Cards.

5 The Mortgage Explosion.

6 The Politics of Credit.

7 Policy Implications.

8 Prescription and Outlook.

Bibliography.

Index.