Introduction

Jim Fisk, an ebullient Vermonter, had ridden into Wall Street following the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and had become one of the major forces in the volatile and largely unregulated stock market. This chapter focuses on four fundamental themes that will weave through every story. These include friends, cyclicality of financial scandals, hubris, and magic of free markets. Friends in the right places feature prominently in every unsavory chapter of American financial history. The uncritical, unquestioning tendency of the press to follow rather than lead, to parrot rather than report, to swallow inanities rather than investigate, deepens and exaggerates each swing of the pendulum. Financial innovation, technological advances, hubris, and greed all played their part in the American dramas. Financial scandals are always enabled by a fervent faith in the magic of free markets. Finally, the chapter also presents an outline of this book.