New Books in Finance

Political Scientist Brendan Doherty has a new book that dives into the ways that presidents have raised money for themselves, their parties, and other elected officials over the past six decades. Doherty is an expert on campaign fundraising, especially by presidents, and Fundraiser in Chief: Presidents and the Politics of Campaign Cash (UP of Kansas, 2023) continues the research he has been doing in this area within political science. The overarching thesis of Doherty’s work in Fundraiser in Chief is examining the intersection between campaigning and governing, especially when it comes to the president him(her)self. Doherty’s chief claim in the book is that presidential fundraising, which is usually studied and explored in direct connection with presidential campaigns, should be more fully integrated into the other dynamics and components of how a president governs and uses his/her time. In an effort to examine the time spent fundraising, not just at public events, but also in private venues and closed events, Doherty compiled an extensive data set that includes information for every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. (Doherty has continued to add to the data set to include President Joe Biden, but the research analyzed in the book concludes with the 2020 election cycle and Donald Trump’s presidency.)This is a fascinating examination of fundraising, particularly as the laws and regulations have continued to change and shift over the decades. As Doherty notes, every time there is a shift, presidents pursue different options in order to fundraise for themselves, for their parties, and for other elected officials. And since fundraising is a constant undertaking, not just ramped up during election cycles, it needs to be considered alongside other dimensions of presidential governance, like speechmaking/rhetoric, congressional relations, foreign and domestic travel, and the other ways that presidents spend their scarcest resource, their time. The fundraising world that President Jimmy Carter entered, following the establishment of new laws, regulations, and restrictions on campaign fundraising after Watergate, is much different than the world in which former President Trump and President Biden are now operating as the 2024 election cycle moves forward. Presidents must make strategic choices around fundraising, and this also shapes the ways that individuals govern from the Oval Office, the way they work with members of their parties, and the way that they work with other elected officials. Fundraiser in Chief: Presidents and the Politics of Campaign Cash is an important contribution to the scholarship on the American presidency, especially in our understanding of how governing and fundraising and campaigning all integrate into each other.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

What do the histories of currency and monetary policy tell us about societies at large, political structures, and cultures? Ekaterina Pravilova and Rebecca Spang tackle these questions, respectively, in two important books that examine the history of the Russian ruble from the time of Catherine the Great through the Soviet period, and the history of money during the time of time of the French Revolution. Their conversation delves not only into the past, but into the economic theories and assumptions that underlay the present. Pravilova is the author of The Ruble: A Political History (Oxford UP, 2023). Spang is the author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard UP, 2017).Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Firms and entrepreneurs were key drivers of the globalisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This thesis investigates commodity networks, foreign banking and business networks, as three manifestations of the first global economy, in Egypt. The country was integrated into the world economy by exporting cotton, importing foreign capital, and hosting a large foreign community.The thesis shows that the Egyptian cotton network was sophisticated as market participants were spatially dispersed. The network was instrumentally coordinated by foreign banks that provided the crucial functions of intermediating the flows of cotton, finance, and information. Departing from the literature that portrays foreign banks in developing countries as manifestations of imperialism and exploitation of host countries, the thesis demonstrates that the history of these banks in Egypt does not conform to this rhetoric. The case of the Ionian Bank reveals that foreign banks in Egypt were businesses that sought profits and faced many risks and challenges. Some risks were uncontrollable and negatively affected banks’ performance, which was shaped by trade-off between opportunity and risk appetite. The analysis of the interlocking directorates of the Egyptian corporate and elite networks demonstrates that these networks, predominantly controlled by local foreigners, served as a basis for coordinating and maintaining collective interests. The structure of the elite network presumably fostered entrepreneurial activities that were funded by foreign capital. The analysis documents the gradual rise of indigenous entrepreneurs at the expense of local foreigners.The study demonstrates how Egypt’s integration into the first modern globalisation was facilitated by foreign firms and entrepreneurs. It points out the need to revise the historiography of foreign capital and foreigners in Egypt during this period. In addition, the thesis contributes to the limited business history scholarship on the Middle East and furthers our understanding of the complex nature of globalisation."Cotton, Finance and Business Networks in a Globalised World: The Case of Egypt During the First half of the Twentieth Century" (2019) was the winner fo the Coleman Prize in 2020. It is available open access here. Akram Benjamin is a postdoctoral researcher at the ERC-funded project "Global Correspondent Banking, 1870-2000" at the University of Oxford. After starting his profesional life as a banker in his native country, Benjamin then took on academia in the UK. He has benefited from a Joint Japan World Bank Scholarship Program and besides a PhD holds a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) certification.Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year, globe-spanning quest to understand the wizards behind the world’s new financial machinery. Faux’s investigation would lead him to a schlubby, frizzy-haired twenty-nine-year-old named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short) and a host of other crypto scammers, utopians, and overnight billionaires. Faux follows the trail to a luxury resort in the Bahamas, where SBF boldly declares that he will use his crypto fortune to save the world. Faux talks his way onto the yacht of a former child actor turned crypto impresario and gains access to “ApeFest,” an elite party headlined by Snoop Dogg, by purchasing a $20,000 image of a cartoon monkey. In El Salvador, Faux learns what happens when a country wagers its treasury on Bitcoin, and in the Philippines, he stumbles upon a Pokémon knockoff mobile game touted by boosters as a cure for poverty. And in an astonishing development, a spam text leads Faux to Cambodia, where he uncovers a crypto-powered human-trafficking ring. When the bubble suddenly bursts in 2022, Faux brings readers inside SBF’s penthouse as the fallen crypto king faces his imminent arrest. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Zeke Faux the accolade “our great poet of crime” (Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine), Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (Crown, 2023) is the essential chronicle, by turns harrowing and uproarious, of a $3 trillion financial delusion.Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Luke Froeb joins the podcast to talk about his career in economics, what it's like to be the chief economist at the FTC and DOJ antitrust division, how these agencies make decisions about merger cases, the history of the Chicago School consumer welfare standard and the types of analytical tools and modeling that underlies the approach, along with the rise of the New Brandeisians and their failures thus far.Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Recent scholarship in organisation studies has begun to address how organisations perceive and use their history. However, how organisations preserve and access their history, and how this affects how they are able to use their history is less researched. This thesis investigates how Barclays Group Archives (BGA) contribute to Barclays PLC delivering its strategic objectives. It asks, how does BGA, as a specific unit of the organisation, facilitate the delivery of Barclays PLC's strategic objectives? The researcher was embedded in the archives, enabling the gathering of observational data on how BGA operate as well as a unique level of access to archival organisational records. These were used to target and gain access to Barclays PLC employees to conduct interviews to ascertain how they used BGA's resources and what benefits they felt BGA brought. Using interviews, observation, and other qualitative research methods, Ian Jones introduces archival science theory to the study of how organisations can benefit from using their history, introducing the archival science ideas of authenticity, reliability, usability, and integrity to inform the research on organisational memory and use of the past strategies. The thesis focuses on the period between 2012 and 2015, a time when Barclays PLC made extensive use of their past in an attempt to manage and recover from the various scandals. It argues that BGA, and the archivists in particular, are integral to Barclays PLC's use of the past strategies, enabling Barclays PLC to bolster their claims to be returning to a historically 'authentic' corporate culture that would inform the organisation's strategies and behaviour going forward. Additionally, the archivists themselves act as the link between the information in the archives that forms part of Barclays PLC's organisational memory, enabling users to utilise this information and transforming the static memory held into the archives into dynamic memory that is then utilised by employees. The thesis highlights the importance of how organisations access the historical information that they use to inform their historical narratives, and the importance of the individuals that act as the link between those who are using the past in some way, and the repositories of historical information. The research findings presented in this thesis will be of interest to organisation studies scholars interested in how managers use history as well as to researchers who study corporate archives.Winner of the Coleman Prize in 2022, this research tells of the potential uses of the past as a source of competitive advantage as well as document the relationship between the Corporate Archives and Head Office in a mayor, long-lived British bank.This thesis is available open access here. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

"Within our mandate, the [European Central Bank] is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough". With those three words delivered in London on 26 July 2012, Mario Draghi - the ECB's president from 2011-2019 - stopped a contagious collapse of Europe's common currency after just one decade.Jana Randow and Alessandro Speciale write in Mario Draghi: The True Story of the Man Who Saved the Euro (Rizzoli, 2019): “So simple a phrase, delivered at the right time in front of the right audience, it will hang on as a warning to investors when Draghi is long gone that central bankers in Europe are ready to defend their currency against speculative attacks brought on by people not quite aware of their resolve".Draghi, who went on to see Italy through the Covid pandemic as its prime minister from 2021-2022, has acquired mythical status. Who is he? What are the skills that allowed him to succeed where others may have failed? How did he manage the ECB's governing council in comparison to his French predecessor and successor?Books from inside the ECB by Massimo Rostagno and Pedro Gustavo Teixeira have covered the policy-making history of the Draghi years but, so far, only Randow and Speciale have written a fly-on-the-wall account to match Bob Woodward's and David Wessel's books on the Federal Reserve. Jana Randow is Bloomberg’s senior European economics correspondent based in Frankfurt and Alessandro Speciale now heads Bloomberg's Zurich bureau after doing the same in Rome and working with Jana as ECB correspondent from 2013 until mid-2019.*Jana's book recommendations are Rebel Radio: The Story of El Salvador's Radio Venceremos by José Ignacio López Vigil (Curbstone Press, 1995 - translated by Mark Fried) and Fabian, Die Geschichte eines Moralisten by Erich Kästner - first published in 1931 and translated by Cyrus Brooks as Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist (NYRB Classics, 2013).*Alessandro's book recommendations are The Magician by Colm Tóibín (Viking, 2021) and Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf (John Murray, 2022).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Rob Arnott, founder and chairman of Research Affiliates, discusses topics such as the recent rise of inflation, macroeconomics, capital market returns, value versus growth stocks, factor timing, index investing, the Federal Reserve's handling of inflation, the relationship between hurricanes, aging demographics, and market timing, the inverted yield curve and its impact, the influence of neoclassical and Keynesian thinking on investing, energy stocks and their value status, and technology's ability to address climate change.

Mark Calabria (Former FHFA Director and Cato Senior Advisor) joins the podcast to discuss his tenure as director of the FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency), his legacy of creating a capital rule for the GSEs which remains in place, financial regulation in wake of the global financial crisis, as well as fiscal and monetary policy amid the recent surge in inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Rachel O'Dwyer, author of 'Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform', discusses the rise of tokens as replacements for traditional forms of money. She explores the control and discrimination that can emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions. The podcast delves into the concept of programmable tokens and their impact on people's agency and values. O'Dwyer also discusses the ongoing battle between the state and platforms for control over money and payments. Overall, the podcast offers intriguing insights into the evolving world of digital currencies.