Balleisen, Edward J. (Author)
The United States has always proved an inviting home for boosters, sharp dealers, and outright swindlers. Worship of entrepreneurial freedom has complicated the task of distinguishing aggressive salesmanship from unacceptable deceit, especially on the frontiers of innovation. At the same time, competitive pressures have often nudged respectable firms to embrace deception. As a result, fraud has been a key feature of American business since its beginnings. In this sweeping narrative, Edward Balleisen traces the history of fraud in America--and the evolving efforts to combat it--from the age of P.T. Barnum through the eras of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff. Starting with an early nineteenth-century American legal world of "buyer beware," this unprecedented account describes the slow, piecemeal construction of modern regulatory institutions to protect consumers and investors, from the Gilded Age through the New Deal and the Great Society. It concludes with the more recent era of deregulation, which has brought with it a spate of costly frauds, including the savings and loan crisis, corporate accounting scandals, and the recent mortgage-marketing debacle. By tracing how Americans have struggled to foster a vibrant economy without enabling a corrosive level of fraud, this book reminds us that American capitalism rests on an uneasy foundation of social trust. (Publisher)
...MoreReview Eugene Soltes (Summer 2017) Review of "Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff". Business History Review (pp. 394-396).
Article
William J. Novak;
(Winter 2019)
Institutional Economics and the Progressive Movement for the Social Control of American Business
(/isis/citation/CBB921649138/)
Book
Laura Phillips Sawyer;
(2018)
American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the “New Competition,” 1890–1940
(/isis/citation/CBB689794058/)
Book
Samuel W. Buell;
(2016)
Capital offenses: Business crime and punishment in America's corporate age
(/isis/citation/CBB302268691/)
Book
John L. Neufeld;
(2016)
Selling Power: Economics, Policy, and Electric Utilities Before 1940
(/isis/citation/CBB220506803/)
Article
Daniel A. Crane;
(Winter 2019)
A Premature Postmortem on the Chicago School of Antitrust
(/isis/citation/CBB064762036/)
Book
Ronald W. Schatz;
(2021)
The labor board crew : Remaking worker-employer relations from Pearl Harbor to the Reagan era
(/isis/citation/CBB570030891/)
Article
Brian R. Cheffins;
(Winter 2021)
History and Turning the Antitrust Page
(/isis/citation/CBB201029858/)
Article
Reuel Schiller;
(Winter 2019)
The Curious Origins of Airline Deregulation: Economic Deregulation and the American Left
(/isis/citation/CBB299348488/)
Article
Andrew Smith;
Wright, Robert E.;
(2021)
Sowing the Seeds of a Future Crisis: The SEC and the Emergence of the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) Category, 1971–1975
(/isis/citation/CBB270024713/)
Article
Frohlich, Xaq;
(Spring 2022)
Making Food Standard: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Food Standards of Identity, 1930s–1960s
(/isis/citation/CBB979639865/)
Article
Anne Fleming;
(Winter 2019)
Anti-Competition Regulation
(/isis/citation/CBB447297303/)
Book
Jason E. Taylor;
(2019)
Deconstructing the Monolith: The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery Act
(/isis/citation/CBB623332017/)
Book
Joshua Specht;
(2019)
Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America
(/isis/citation/CBB436318919/)
Book
Samuel P. Hanes;
(2019)
The Aquatic Frontier: Oysters and Aquaculture in the Progressive Era
(/isis/citation/CBB514942004/)
Book
John Carreyrou;
(2018)
Bad blood: secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup
(/isis/citation/CBB233577951/)
Book
Jeff Forret;
(2021)
Southern scoundrels : Grifters and graft in the nineteenth century
(/isis/citation/CBB756369235/)
Article
Susanna Fellman;
Martin Shanahan;
(Winter 2018)
Sectoral Influence on Competition Legislation: Evidence from the Cartel Registers, 1920–2000
(/isis/citation/CBB019313761/)
Article
David J. Gerber;
(Winter 2019)
Prisms of Distance and Power: Viewing the U.S. Regulatory Tradition
(/isis/citation/CBB183281762/)
Article
Laura Phillips Sawyer;
Herbert Hovenkamp;
(Winter 2019)
New Perspectives in Regulatory History
(/isis/citation/CBB295912051/)
Article
Burt, William D.;
(Spring-Summer 2016)
Gabriel Kolko Revisited
(/isis/citation/CBB275675911/)
Be the first to comment!