Investing in U.S. Financial History Using the Past to Forecast the Future
By Mark J. Higgins, CFA, CFP®
Alexander Hamilton
Founding Father of the U.S. Financial System
A Guide to U.S. Financial History That Will Improve Your Investment Decisions
Most investors base their decisions only on their life experience. By limiting their field of vision, they often overlook powerful, enduring currents that shape financial systems, economies, and securities markets. Investing in U.S. Financial History fills this void by providing a comprehensive financial history of the United States. The book begins in 1790 with Alexander Hamilton's innovative financial programs and ends in 2023 with the Federal Reserve's ongoing battle with inflation. Investing in U.S. Financial History provides essential education and actionable insights for practicing and aspiring investment professionals. A small sample of questions that this book addresses are:
Why is it critical to establish and maintain a nation's credit?
Why do speculative manias occur repeatedly, and how can investors detect early warning signs?
How did the United States navigate the transition from an agricultural colony to a high-tech services empire, and why did other nations fail?
What are the essential principles of economics, free markets, and effective market regulation?
What are the key principles of effective monetary and fiscal responses to economic depressions and bursts of inflation?
What are the governing dynamics and consequences of financial panics, bank runs, and depressions?
Why do most investors fail to outperform market indices, and what differentiates the small number of investors who are exceptions to the rule?
What has driven the evolution of the investment advisory industry to its present state, and what changes must it embrace to ensure its survival?
Alexander Hamilton
Founding Father of the U.S. Financial System
Fundamental Forces That Have Shaped Financial Markets
There is almost no financial event that has not occurred before, and most have occurred multiple times. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental forces that have shaped financial markets over the past 230 years and continue to shape them today. Market shocks, panics, manias, and frauds will no longer seem surprising, but will instead arrive with an eerie familiarity. Investment professionals, individual investors, trustees, educators, and government policymakers can rely on this book as a reference that will enable them to make more informed investment decisions for themselves and those who rely on their judgment.
Why Buy This Book?
Few investors understand financial history…
“There are no investors and no senior policymakers I know—and I know many and I know the best—who have any excellent understandings of what happened in the past and why.”
- Ray Dalio, Investor
Failure to understand it is costly…
“There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist
The few who understand it can see the future more clearly…
“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.”
- Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome
Investing in U.S. Financial History
Arriving in Bookstores in February 2024