The Equity Culture

The Story of the Global Stock Market

First Edition 2003
Hardcover

STOCK MARKET

The modern stock market, B. Mark Smiths new book makes clear, is only one component of a much broader equity culturea lively and complex international market involving stocks, bonds, mutual funds; joint stock and limited liability corporations; and trading in grain, gold, diamonds, and currency.

The Equity Culture is the story of how that market came aboutfrom shipping magnates banding together in eighteenth-century India to the railroad robber barons of nineteenth-century America to currency traders such as George Soros. Smiths spirited and colorful telling makes two points especially clear: that the equity culture has always been international, with globalization as merely its current phase; and that the equity culture is often surprisingly self-adjusting, with manias, panics, and crashes making possible ever greater risk and innovation.