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In recent decades, Tokyo, London, and New York have been the sites of credit bubbles of historically unprecedented magnitude. Central bankers have enjoyed almost unparalleled power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. This book explores how this financialized form of globalism took shape a century ago, when Tokyo joined London and New York as a major financial center. This book shows that close cooperation between central banks began along an unexpected axis, between London and Tokyo, around the year 1900, with the Bank of England's secret use of large Bank of Japan funds to intervene in the London markets. Central-bank cooperation became multilateral during World War I—the moment when Japan first emerged as a creditor country. In 1919 and 1920, as Japan, Great Britain, and the United States adopted deflation policies, the results of cooperation were realized in the world's first globally coordinated program of monetary policy. It was also in 1920 that Wall Street bankers moved to establish closer ties with Tokyo. The text tells the story of how the first age of central-bank power and pride ended in the disaster of the Great Depression, when a rush for gold brought the system crashing down. In all of this, we see also the quiet but surprisingly central place of Japan. We see it again today, in the way that Japan has unwillingly led the world into a new age of post-bubble economics.

This book charts the city's decline since the 1920s and describes the early development of Chicago's famed (and reviled) growth machine. Beginning in the 1940s and led by local politicians, downtown business interest, financial institutions, and real estate groups, place-dependent organizations in Chicago implemented several industrial renewal initiatives with the dual purpose of stopping factory closings and attracting new firms in order to turn blighted property into modern industrial sites. At the same time, a more powerful coalition sought to adapt the urban fabric to appeal to middle-class consumption and residential living. As the book shows, the two aims were never well integrated, and the result was on-going disinvestment and the inexorable decline of Chicago's industrial space. By the 1950s, the book argues, it was evident that the early incarnation of the growth machine had failed to maintain Chicago's economic center in industry. Although larger economic and social forces — specifically, competition for business and for residential development from the suburbs in the Chicagoland region and across the whole United States — played a role in the city's industrial decline, the book stresses the deep incoherence of post-World War II economic policy and urban planning that hoped to square the circle by supporting both heavy industry and middle- to upper-class amenities in downtown Chicago.

This book challenges the conventional view that the UK's ruinous return to gold in 1925 was inevitable. Instead, the book offers a new perspective on the struggles among elites in London to define and redefine the gold standard — from the first discussions during the Great War; through the titanic ideological clash between Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes; to the final, ill-fated implementation of the “new gold standard.” Following World War I, Churchill promised to restore the ancient English gold standard — and thus Britain's greatness. Keynes portended that this would prove to be one of the most momentous — and ill-advised — decisions in financial history. From the vicious peace settlement at Versailles to the Great Depression, the gold standard was central to the worst disasters of the time. Economically, Churchill's move exacerbated the difficulties of repairing economies shattered by war. Politically, it set countries at odds as each endeavored to amass gold, sowing the seeds of further strife. The book reveals that these events turned crucially on the beliefs of a handful of pivotal policymakers. It recasts the legends of Churchill, Keynes, and their collision, and it shows that the gold standard itself was a metaphysical abstraction rooted more in mythology than material reality.