Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future

“Financial events that seem unprecedented on the surface are, in fact, driven by the same underlying economic currents and human behaviors,” according to this ambitious debut chronicle. Investment consultant Higgins offers a sweeping overview of the American economy from the Founding Era through the present. Beginning with Alexander Hamilton’s establishment of the First Bank of the U.S. to steady a tumultuous economy wracked by Revolutionary War debt, Higgins discusses such developments as the nationalization of state-chartered banks after the Civil War, the buildup of industrial manufacturing capabilities toward the end of the 19th century, the contribution of credit-based stocks to the Great Depression, the popularity of mutual funds after WWII, and the late-20th-century rise of Silicon Valley. He draws illuminating parallels between eras, as when he contends that bullish economists who believed that real estate prices wouldn’t fall nationally in the early aughts because they’d never fallen before would have known better had they studied crashes in the 1820s and 1840s driven by weak crop yields and “the collapse of cotton prices,” respectively. The involved discussions of “fractional reserve banking principles” and the structure of close-ended and open-ended funds are a bit arcane, but Higgins has a talent for synthesizing macro-economic trends into a cogent narrative. Readers who stick it out will be glad they did. (Feb.)