Until the early nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future.
Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutionsāinsurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities marketsāwhile posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk's rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one's own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name "financial services industry." Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system.
Amid the nineteenth-century's waning faith in God's providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortune is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.
- 425 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
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Information
Publisher
Harvard University PressYear
2012Print ISBN
9780674736351
9780674047488
eBook ISBN
9780674067202
Table of contents
- Contents
- Prologue: Voyage
- 1. The Assumption of Risk
- 2. The Perils of the Seas
- 3. The Actuarial Science of Freedom
- 4. The Failure of the Freedmanās Bank
- 5. Betting the Farm
- 6. Fraternity in the Age of Capital
- 7. Trading the Future
- 8. The Trust Question
- Epilogue: Freaks of Fortune
- Appendix
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index
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Yes, you can access Freaks of Fortune by Jonathan Levy in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Economics & Finance. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.