The Speculation Economy

The Speculation Economy
Author: Lawrence E. Mitchell
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2008-11-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1458722732

The first book to reveal the deep historical roots of the modern corporate obsession with stock price - a major cause of recent scandals like those at Enron and WorldComDetails how the rise of the modern corporation created the modern stock market - and why this led to an economy dominated by stock speculationAmerican companies once focused exclusively on providing the best products and services. But today, most corporations are obsessed with maximizing their stock prices, resulting in short-term thinking and the kind of cook-the-books corruption seen in the Enron and WorldCom scandals. How did this happen?In this groundbreaking book, Lawrence E. Mitchell traces the origins of the problem to the first decade of the 20th century, when industrialists and bankers began merging existing companies into huge ''combines''- today's giant corporations - so they could profit by manufacturing and selling stock in these new entities. He describes and analyzes the legal changes that made this possible, the federal regulatory efforts that missed the significance of this transforming development, and the changes in American society and culture that led more and more Americans to enter the market, turning from relatively safe bonds to riskier common stock in the hopes of becoming rich. Financiers and the corporations they controlled encouraged this trend, but as stock ownership expanded and businesses were increasingly forced to cater to stockholders' ''get rich quick'' expectations, a subtle but revolutionary shift in the nature of the American economy occurred: finance no longer served industry; instead, industry began to serve finance.The Speculation Economy analyzes the history behind the opening of this economic Pandora's box, the root cause of so many modern acts of corporate malfeasance.

Devil Take the Hindmost

Devil Take the Hindmost
Author: Edward Chancellor
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2000-06-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0452281806

A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day. Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed—and not changed—over the last five hundred years? In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to “stockjobbing” in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the “assurance of female chastity”; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton. From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.

The Speculation Economy

The Speculation Economy
Author: Lawrence E. Mitchell
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007-10-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1576754006

American companies once focused exclusively on providing the best products and services. But today, most corporations are obsessed with maximizing their stock prices, resulting in short-term thinking and the kind of cook-the-books corruption seen in the Enron and WorldCom scandals. How did this happen? In this groundbreaking book, Lawrence E. Mitchell traces the origins of the problem to the first decade of the 20th century, when industrialists and bankers began merging existing companies into huge “combines”—today’s giant corporations—so they could profit by manufacturing and selling stock in these new entities. He describes and analyzes the legal changes that made this possible, the federal regulatory efforts that missed the significance of this transforming development, and the changes in American society and culture that led more and more Americans to enter the market, turning from relatively safe bonds to riskier common stock in the hopes of becoming rich. Financiers and the corporations they controlled encouraged this trend, but as stock ownership expanded and businesses were increasingly forced to cater to stockholders’ “get rich quick” expectations, a subtle but revolutionary shift in the nature of the American economy occurred: finance no longer served industry; instead, industry began to serve finance. The Speculation Economy analyzes the history behind the opening of this economic Pandora’s box, the root cause of so many modern acts of corporate malfeasance.

Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy

Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy
Author: William H. Janeway
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2012-10-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107031257

A unique insight into the interaction between the state, financiers and entrepreneurs in the modern innovation economy.

Speculation, Trading, and Bubbles

Speculation, Trading, and Bubbles
Author: José A. Scheinkman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2014-07-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0231537638

As long as there have been financial markets, there have been bubbles—those moments in which asset prices inflate far beyond their intrinsic value, often with ruinous results. Yet economists are slow to agree on the underlying forces behind these events. In this book José A. Scheinkman offers new insight into the mystery of bubbles. Noting some general characteristics of bubbles—such as the rise in trading volume and the coincidence between increases in supply and bubble implosions—Scheinkman offers a model, based on differences in beliefs among investors, that explains these observations. Other top economists also offer their own thoughts on the issue: Sanford J. Grossman and Patrick Bolton expand on Scheinkman's discussion by looking at factors that contribute to bubbles—such as excessive leverage, overconfidence, mania, and panic in speculative markets—and Kenneth J. Arrow and Joseph E. Stiglitz contextualize Scheinkman's findings.

Migrant Futures

Migrant Futures
Author: Aimee Bahng
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2018-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373017

In Migrant Futures Aimee Bahng traces the cultural production of futurity by juxtaposing the practices of speculative finance against those of speculative fiction. While financial speculation creates a future based on predicting and mitigating risk for wealthy elites, the wide range of speculative novels, comics, films, and narratives Bahng examines imagines alternative futures that envision the multiple possibilities that exist beyond capital’s reach. Whether presenting new spatial futures of the US-Mexico borderlands or inventing forms of kinship in Singapore in order to survive in an economy designed for the few, the varied texts Bahng analyzes illuminate how the futurity of speculative finance is experienced by those who find themselves mired in it. At the same time these displaced, undocumented, unbanked, and disavowed characters imagine alternative visions of the future that offer ways to bring forth new political economies, social structures, and subjectivities that exceed the framework of capitalism.

Spectacular Speculation

Spectacular Speculation
Author: Urs Stäheli
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-02-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804788251

Spectacular Speculation is a history and sociological analysis of the semantics of speculation from 1870 to 1930, when speculation began to assume enormous importance in popular culture. Informed by the work of Luhmann, Foucault, Simmel and Deleuze, it looks at how speculation was translated into popular knowledge and charts the discursive struggles of making speculation a legitimate economic practice. Noting that the vocabulary available to discuss the concept was not properly economic, the book reveals the underside of putting it into words. Speculation's success depended upon non-economic language and morally questionable thrills: a proximity to the wasteful practice of gambling or other "degenerate" behaviors, the experience of financial markets as seductive, or out of control. American discourses of speculation take center stage, and the book covers an unusual range of material, including stock exchange guidebooks, ticker tape, moral treatises, plays, advertisements, and newspapers.

Transatlantic Speculations

Transatlantic Speculations
Author: Hannah Catherine Davies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0231546211

The year 1873 was one of financial crisis. A boom in railway construction had spurred a bull market—but when the boom turned to bust, transatlantic panic quickly became a worldwide economic downturn. In Transatlantic Speculations, Hannah Catherine Davies offers a new lens on the panics of 1873 and nineteenth-century globalization by exploring the ways in which contemporaries experienced a tumultuous period that profoundly challenged notions of economic and moral order. Considering the financial crises of 1873 from the vantage points of Berlin, New York, and Vienna, Davies maps what she calls the dual “transatlantic speculations” of the 1870s: the financial speculation that led to these panics as well as the interpretative speculations that sprouted in their wake. Drawing on a wide variety of sources—including investment manuals, credit reports, business correspondence, newspapers, and legal treatises—she analyzes how investors were prompted to put their money into faraway enterprises, how journalists and bankers created and spread financial information and disinformation, how her subjects made and experienced financial flows, and how responses ranged from policy reform to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when these flows suddenly were interrupted. Davies goes beyond national frames of analysis to explore international economic entanglement, using the panics’ interconnectedness to shed light on contemporary notions of the world economy. Blending cultural, intellectual, and legal history, Transatlantic Speculations gives vital transnational and comparative perspective on a crucial moment for financial markets, globalization, and capitalism.

The Speculation Economy

The Speculation Economy
Author: Ezra Wasserman Mitchell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 10
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

The Speculation Economy identifies the moment in American history when finance triumphed over industry. It shows how the birth of the giant modern corporation spurred the rise of the stock market and how, by the dawn of the 1920s, the stock market left behind its business origins to become the very reason for the creation of business itself. The consequent widespread distribution of intrinsically speculative common stock embedded speculation into the capital structures of most large American corporations.The stock market become the driving force of the American economy in the first decade of the 20th century as a result of the birth of the giant modern corporation. The Speculation Economy tells the story of the legal, financial, economic and social transformations that allowed financiers to collect companies and combine them together into huge new corporations for the main purpose of manufacturing stock and dumping it on the market. Businessmen started to make more money from legal and financial manipulation than from practical business improvements like innovations in technology, management, distribution, and marketing.The Speculation Economy explains how and why, at the turn of the 20th century, the stock created by the giant modern corporation became dispersed throughout the market. It shows the shift in attitudes of ordinary Americans from cautious bond buyers into eager stock speculators. At the same time, it shows how a federal government wedded to an outdated economic model and struggling to expand its own power failed to regulate finance and thus missed the chance to control corporations. While politicians argued, finance came to dominate industry, and as stock ownership spread widely throughout society, the stock market came to dominate finance. The Speculation Economy examines this history in detail from the perspectives of the economic history of the growth of the market, the social history of early stockholding, the intellectual history of financial analysis of the era, the federal regulatory attempts to control the giant combinations, and the roots of modern securities regulation that emerged from the antitrust debate of the first decade of the 20th century.The downloadable paper includes the Table of Comments and Prologue of The Speculation Economy.

Speculative Communities

Speculative Communities
Author: Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-01-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226816028

"In Speculative Communities, Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that financial speculation has moved beyond markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions--such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union--they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a different kind of future. Even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify alternative visions of the present and future-these are the "speculative communities" that now shape our personal and political realities. For Komporozos-Athanasiou, "to speculate" means increasingly "to connect," to endorse uncertainty preemptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Finance has thus become the model for society writ large. These financial systems have taken a notable turn in our current era, however. Contemporary capitalism sees the risk-taking, entrepreneurial person being refashioned as a politically disoriented, speculative subject, who embraces the future's radical uncertainty rather than averting it. As Komporozos-Athanasiou shows, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps function as finance's speculative infrastructures, leading to a new type of imagination across economy and society"--