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A Nation Of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History Of America's Financial Disasters
Scott Reynolds Nelson
Knopf
September 2012
On Sale: September 4, 2012
352 pages
ISBN: 0307272699
EAN: 9780307272690
Kindle: B007MDDCV2
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Political
The story of America is a story of dreamers and defaulters.
It is also a story of dramatic financial panics that
defined the nation, created its political parties, and
forced tens of thousands to escape their creditors to new
towns in Texas, Florida, and California. As far back as
1792, these panics boiled down to one simple question: Would
Americans pay their debts—or were we just a nation of deadbeats? From the merchant William Duer’s attempts to speculate on
post–Revolutionary War debt, to an ill-conceived 1815 plan
to sell English coats to Americans on credit, to the
debt-fueled railroad expansion that precipitated the Panic
of 1857, Scott Reynolds Nelson offers a crash course in
America’s worst financial disasters—and a concise
explanation of the first principles that caused them all.
Nelson shows how consumer debt, both at the highest levels
of finance and in the everyday lives of citizens, has time
and again left us unable to make good. The problem always
starts with the chain of banks, brokers, moneylenders, and
insurance companies that separate borrowers and lenders. At
a certain point lenders cannot tell good loans from bad—and
when chits are called in, lenders frantically try to unload
the debts, hide from their own creditors, go into
bankruptcy, and lobby state and federal institutions for relief. With a historian’s keen observations and a storyteller’s
nose for character and incident, Nelson captures the entire
sweep of America’s financial history in all its utter
irrationality: national banks funded by smugglers;
fistfights in Congress over the gold standard; and
presidential campaigns forged in stinging controversies on
the subject of private debt. A Nation of Deadbeats is a
fresh, irreverent look at Americans’ addiction to debt and
how it has made us what we are today.
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