Conservatives versus wildcats: a sociology of financial conflict

Description

Common understandings of money, credit, and banking, rely on notions of efficiency--how well they work in allocating resources and coordinating economic activities. This book, by contrast, focuses on how money, credit, and banking are implicated in conflict. It examines how financial elites in general, and certain bankers in particular, create new financial instruments in order to consolidate and reproduce their wealth over time, turning money into an instrument of exclusion, and couching their practices in ideologies of sound banking. Yet, since the boundaries thus erected create resistance, the book also traces the emergence of rival elites (wildcats) who, by increasing the circulation of existing currencies, or incorporating new actors in financial markets through the production of altogether new instruments, attempt to transgress these boundariesa--;Money, banks, and creditworthiness : three myths? -- Banking and finance as organized conflict -- Institutions and the struggle over creditworthiness in 19th-century United States -- Wildcats, reputations, and the formation of the Federal Reserve -- Italian elites and the centralization of creditworthiness -- Italian creditworthiness : from central to national.