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ALL THE PRESIDENTS' BANKERS

Nomi Prins

The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power

All The Presidents’ Bankers is a groundbreaking narrative of how an elite group of private individuals and their financial institutions have transformed the American economy and government, influenced foreign and domestic policy, and shaped American history.

For over a century, from the Teddy Roosevelt to the Obama administrations, America’s supremacy has emanated from a set of mutually beneficial, clandestine relationships between presidents and a select circle of bankers. The United States owes its super-power status—and global, crisis-inducing economic policies—to the prerogatives of the nation’s financiers and their symbiotic collaborations with the Oval Office. Through original presidential archival research, Nomi Prins offers an explosive account of the untold inter-dependence between The White House and Wall Street. All The Presidents’ Bankers sheds new light on major historic events—such as why, after the Panic of 1907, America’s dominant bankers convened at Jekyll Island to fashion the Federal Reserve System; how, during World War I, the ambition of J.P. Morgan merged with that of President Wilson to propel America’s standing in the post-war world; how Chase and First National City Bank chairmen worked secretly with FDR to save capitalism in the wake of the Great Depression, and the extent to which the World Bank and IMF were influenced by American financiers beside Truman after World War II. Through the Cold War and into Vietnam, Prins reveals how bankers and presidents jointly promoted American’s economic expansion doctrine, while maintaining a spirit of public service domestically. But by the 1970s, these alliances irrevocably shifted towards a more mercenary nature that placed the bankers’ agenda foremost. With Wall Street’s rush to secure Middle East oil profits, the sense of allegiance to the needs of the domestic population receded as the profit motive trumped the commitment to a greater good. Since the 1980s, personal and intimate banker-president relationships gave way to arms-length ones, as campaign donations and lobbyists flourished. By the late 1990s through today, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and growth of the derivatives market solidified the bankers’ power base, and created a level of instability over which presidents now have no control. Prins portrays an alternative history of American power revealing how the same titans of finance retained their authority for decades, outlasting and influencing presidential administrations regardless of political party affiliation. Exhaustively researched, culled from unseen correspondences , All the Presidents’ Bankers delves into the shocking consequences of a system in which there is no barrier between public office and private power, prompting the compelling question: Who really rules America? Nomi Prins is an acclaimed financial journalist, a former Goldman Sachs Managing Director, and impassioned critic of the financial industry. She is the author of several books about Wall Street, including Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, which was an Economist Book of the Year for 2004.

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Book Published 2014-03-01 by Nation Books

Comments

Nomi Prins has written a big book you just wish was bigger: page after page of killer stories of bank robbers who've owned the banks—and owned the White House. Prins is a born story-teller. She turns the history of the moneyed class into a breathless, page-turning romance—the tawdry affairs of bankers and the presidents who love them. It's brilliant inside stuff on unforgettable, and unforgivable, scoundrels.

All the Presidents' Bankers is gracefully written, carefully researched, and accessible. It is a must read for anyone concerned with politics and economics — in other words, just about everybody.

A revealing look at the often symbiotic, sometimes-adversarial relationship between the White House and Wall Street... [A] sweeping history of bank presidents and their relationships with the nation’s chief executives"

Nomi Prins has done it again – this time with a must read, a gripping, historical story on the first corporate staters – the handful of powerful bankers and their decisive influence over the White House and the Treasury Department from the inside and from the outside to the detriment of the people. All the Presidents’ Bankers speaks to the raw truth today of what Louis D. Brandeis said a hundred years ago: ‘We must break the Money Trust or the Money Trust will break us.

Nomi Prins follows the money. She used to work on Wall Street. And now she has written a seminal history of America’s bankers and their symbiotic relationship with all the presidents from Teddy Roosevelt through Barack Obama. It is an astonishing tale. All the Presidents’ Bankers relies on the presidential archives to reveal how power works in this American democracy. Prins writes in the tradition of C. Wright Mills, Richard Rovere and William Greider. Her book is a stunning contribution to the history of the American Establishment.

«Obama geht mit den Bankern Golf spielen» Die Ex-Bankerin Nomi Prins kritisiert die enge Verbundenheit des Weissen Hauses mit den US-Finanzinstituten. Read more...

n this riveting, definitive history, Nomi Prins reveals how US policy has been largely dominated by a circle of the same banking and political dynasties. For more than a century, Presidents often acquiesced or participated as bankers subverted democracy, neglected the public interest, and stole power from the American people.

The relationship between Washington and Wall Street isn't really a revolving door. Its a merry-go-round. And, as Prins shows, the merriest of all are the bankers and financiers that get rich off the relationship, using their public offices and access to build private wealth and power. Disturbing and important.

Nomi Prins takes us on a brisk, panoramic, and eye-opening tour of more than a century’s interplay between America’s government and its major banks – exposing the remarkable dominance of six major banks, and for most of the period, the same families, over U.S. financial policy.

Money has been the common denominator in American politics for the last 115 years, as Nomi Prins admirably points out. All the Presidents' Bankers is an excellent survey of how money influences power and comes dangerously close to threatening democracy.

Prins divides her justifiably long text into digestible one- to three-page segments and seamlessly incorporates dozens of prominent banker profiles. Her work is highly recommended both to general readers and to students of financial history.