All the Presidents' Bankers

February 10, 2014
The intricate connections between finance and politics add up to less than their parts in this unfocused history of Oval Office interactions with the banking industry. Drawing on exhaustive archival research, journalist and former Wall Street executive Prins (Other People’s Money) presents a sprawling, haphazard, eye-glazing account of interactions between presidents and leading bankers from the Panic of 1907 to the Crash of 2008. Bankers pop up everywhere in her narrative, lobbying presidents, holding cabinet positions, leading foreign-affairs missions and staking out policy positions. Prins styles all this as a sinister “hidden alliance” underpinning a nebulously undefined global “power,” “control,” and “hegemony,” but her revelations are neither original nor surprising: she mainly demonstrates that bankers are part of the Establishment, with special interests—less regulation, more bailouts and foreign business—that they hope to see advanced through government action—or inaction. Unfortunately, her (often well-merited) populist ire never builds its critique of bankers’ opportunism into a coherent account of policy-making, wallowing instead in cynical conspiracy-speak—“there are no accidents in global influence”—and contentless Theories of Everything. (“Bankers had a propensity to capitalize on wars, but they were equally adept at profiting from peace.”) The nexus of money and government deserves a more systematic and thoughtful treatment than Prins’s. Agent: Andrew Stuart.

March 15, 2014

Wall Street executive-turned-journalist Prins (Other People's Money) offers a history of the incestuous relationship between powerful bankers and the highest levels of American government. She traces her story from the Panic of 1907 through two World Wars, the Great Depression, 1930s bank regulation, the Cold War, innumerable market meltdowns, bank deregulation, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and President Obama's second term. She paints a picture of influential big bank executives and presidents forming a symbiotic relationship, where the federal government would permit the financial institutions to take on highly profitable risks with the government standing ready to bail them out when markets soured. The bankers in turn would offer campaign funds, boost economic conditions, and extend U.S. interests abroad. Prins says the bankers worked over the years to align government policy with their interests and that in recent decades that alignment became complete as members of the Wall Street fraternity moved in and out of pivotal government posts. Her final word is that America must sever the alliance between the White House and Wall Street or have it break us. VERDICT 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.--Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

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