Christy Chapin

This project traces the rise of finance capitalism in the United States since World War II. During the postwar era, the economy began transitioning away from industrial-based production towards service-based production that increasingly revolved around profitmaking through a variety of financial instruments and investment products. The project demonstrates that the way federal policies mixed with the private pursuit of profit helped bring about finance capitalism by altering how business leaders conceptualized risk and viewed money. Although this book examines highly technical financial and economic subjects, it uses the historian’s tool of storytelling to make a complex topic understandable and incorporates a humanities-based approach to examine the changing culture of the banking and financial industries.