January 19, 2022 • 32 mins
Zachary Karabell, financial executive and historian, discusses his recent book Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power, outlining the formation of American capitalism told through the history of one often-overlooked bank. He explains how the evolution of trust in financial systems has shaped American capitalism today and informs where it could go in the future.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the
show where we explore the stories behind the stories in
(00:35):
the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As regular listeners know, on
this season of Deep Background, we've been focusing on power
in its many different forms. We've talked a fair amount
about power and global politics. We've talked about power and publishing.
But until now we haven't had a direct conversation about
(00:56):
one of the most important seats of power in the
United States and indeed in the world. Wall Street Today's
guest is here to help us fill that gap. Zachary
Carrabelle is a historian and author who spent years working
on Wall Street, both as head of Global Strategies That
Investment and as president or Fred Alger and Company. He's
(01:16):
the author of a new book called Inside Money, Brown, Brothers,
Harriman and the American Way of Power. The book charts
the long history of this particular investment bank, suggesting that
its ability to survive for two hundred years of boom
and bust cycles comes from its refusal to over extend
itself and to take on too much risk, a lesson
(01:39):
that he believes Wall Street today could learn a lot
from Zach is the perfect person to talk about power,
Wall Street history and where we're going in the future. Zach,
thank you so much for being here. Zach, you are
a polymathic and unusual person, and in a sense, you're
(02:03):
the ideal person to have written this new book because
you have a PhD in history, You've never stopped writing
books of history, no matter what other thing you've been doing.
You've also had several different careers in and around finance,
and that really means that if anyone were going to
write a book that was going to be, in effect
(02:23):
a history of power in American capitalism, it would be you.
I read your new book Inside Money, Brown, Brothers, Harriman
and the American Way of Power as really that a
book that tells the story of capitalism in America through
the eyes of one venerable firm. What gave you the
idea to do this? That's exactly what the book is,
(02:47):
and look narcissistically, it is the perfect culmination of a
lot of what I've done for the past twenty years,
and that it brings together the academic strain and the
financial investment career strain into one delightful four hundred plus
page package. It ended up, I think, in a weird way,
being a lot more interesting to me writing the book
(03:09):
and really thinking through the nature of American capitalism and
the nature of American power over two centuries, and the
sort of arbitrariness of one definition of capitalism that has
emerged in the past thirty years versus multiple different capitalisms
that could just as well have predominated and at earlier
(03:32):
points in the past did And that you know, we're
constantly in the position of remaking our culture and remaking
what we think of our systems. And then a weird way,
this book became pointed in that direction in a way
that I didn't actually expect when I sat down to
write the book. I was going to ask you that
which came first, the chicken or the egg question? Did
you pick your topic this bank and its history, and
(03:55):
then from there you realize that it was emblematic or
were you looking for some concrete story to tell that
would enable you to paint the big canvas. Yeah, and
it was definitely the latter. I did not set out
to write a book about Brown Brothers Harriman. I did
sit out to write a book about the crucial role
of money making American power in the nineteenth century, and
then how the men and they were all men, and
(04:16):
they were all white men, and they were mostly Protestant
white men. How that cohort made the global system of
the twentieth century, and where that leaves us today. So
that's kind of the arc I wanted to look at.
And they're the perfect aperture for that art. They are
maybe the only firm that could actually tell that story
from the get go to the present, because first of all,
they're the only one that has been around for two
(04:39):
plus centuries, which doesn't make them worth writing about. Right,
living long is not living necessarily interesting. I really thought
at one point, like, how am I going to make
a group of stayed bankers, particularly in the nineteenth century,
who wanted to be stayed, who didn't want to be
in the news, who spent a lot of their history
celebrating the fact that every day they woke up and
their name was not in the papers as a good day.
(05:01):
You know, how do you make that interesting? The arc
I thought was interesting. Turned out I think that they're
a lot more interesting than even I thought going into it.
I share with you the sense that there's an alchemy here.
You know the book doesn't. If you were not the
author of the book, I don't think I would have
picked it up, because I would have thought, this is
a great topic, But how the world could you tell
it in a way that is in fact engaging? But
(05:23):
because I've read your other books, I knew you would
be able to find a way to do that. What
was the trick? And for listeners who are thinking, why
in the world would I be interested in this, I'm
definitely interested in the history of capitalism in the nature
of power, But why would I want to hear it
told through these folks? What for you were the features
of those cautious state people who, as you show, we're
(05:44):
trying to be the ones always to avoid going under
What is it about them that you were able to
make interesting? So, first of all, it turns out Brown
Brothers was present at the creation of almost everything vital
in American certainly economic history and in many ways just
American history. They're just in the back row right, They're
(06:04):
they're like the zelle. They're in the second row, back left,
kind of looking like a bank, and they don't really
want to be the story and they don't want to
be the picture. But without them. There's no story and
there's no picture, and there is a lot of drama
in the creation of a nation, and the creation of
a nation like the United States, which kind of emerges
(06:25):
out of nowhere in the nineteenth century, graced with lots
of resources but very little invested capital, and you have
these this firm like Brown Brothers that essentially creates the
paper money system that I think is a huge differential, right,
It's partly what makes the United States the United States.
Is this incredibly chaotic, liquid world where if you had
(06:46):
a hope and a dream, it was way easier to
get money because it was paper. It wasn't people, it
wasn't gold, it wasn't land. And Brown Brothers is kind
of at the epicenter of this, you know, the the
alchemists who were really mindful of the destructive potential of
their alchemy and not animated by greed and not animated
by personal gain at the expense of public good. I
(07:09):
actually found that that section of the book completely gripping,
and I learned a huge amount from it. And I
wonder if you'd spend just a moment telling listeners just
the short version of this. I mean, I guess I
knew in a general sort of way that Fiat backed
currency greenbacks were really a product of the Civil War
(07:31):
in some general way. And I also knew from working
on my own interest in the history of the Constitution,
that in the early years of the Republic, money was
very scarce because there was still a sense that we
had to be dependent on gold and silver, and there
wasn't that much gold and silver in North America relative
(07:53):
to what there was in Europe, and so it was
always hard to get hold of money, and so as
a consequence, there was always a lot of need for
some other mechanisms of credit. What you show so beautifully
in the book is that there was an interim solution there,
and that that solution we've somewhat forgotten today was letters
(08:14):
of credit. Say a word about what that is and
why it matters, and then from there maybe we can
talk about the metaphoric relationship that that has to the
way the capital moves today in the world. So this
is one of these things that narratively I found challenging
the way, like a theoretical physicist can find it challenging
to write a popular story of that in a way
(08:37):
that doesn't put people to sleep. You know, the idea
of writing at great length about letters of credit was
kind of a nonstarter narratively. Nonetheless, just like the strong
and weak forces of an atom, trying to explain that
as a pretty crucial binding force for society seems essential
and completely overlooked in our story of what essentially makes
(09:00):
the United States as affluent and powerful as it was.
So for much of the nineteenth century, you either had
too little money or too much money, too much currency.
People needed money, so they're all these banks issuing a
lot of currency, and it was worth about as much
as it was until it wasn't. And that's why you
had every twenty years in the nineteenth century, you have
a financial crisis, a panic in eighteen nineteen, eighteen thirty seven,
(09:22):
eighteen fifty seven, eighteen seventy three, eighteen ninety three, nineteen
o seven, of course nineteen twenty nine. And behind the
scenes in the system you have a very few number
of players at which Brown Brows was essential, who make
sure that the trains run on time. Literally, I mean
they helped build the first passenger railroad, the BNO, and
they helped create the transatlantic shipping system so that people
(09:43):
knew that if they made stuff and grew stuff, that
someone would buy the stuff. And letters of credit were
the connective tissue, first between cotton growers in the South
and people bought the cotton in England and turned it
into cloth, and then for all sorts of trade, every
single trade, and without which there's no system, right, there's
(10:04):
no assurance that people will be able to buy and
sell stuff. And the amount of cher liquidity in the
United States did lead to these incredible periods of capital
creation and booms, and then it led to these incredibly
tumultuous bus much worse than anything we saw in two
thousand and eight two thousand and nine. I mean, these
(10:24):
panics eviscerated the financial system, and then you had these
bankers at the center of it, of whom Brown Brothers
were the most important, making sure that in spite of everything,
there would be trade, there would be goods. Some of
it was hugely morally problematic, right, the cotton trade was
on the backs of enslaved men and women, and Brown
Brothers was totally complicit in that, and a lot of
(10:46):
which was basically helping the creation of the American economy
and the creation of the United States. And these letters
were what you used as kind of a trusted I
know that if I part with my goods, someone on
the other side, the other side the Atlantic, will buy them,
and if I part with my money, I'll get my goods.
And these letters of credit were that connective tissue. And
we're essentially, if not invented by Brown Brothers, perfected by
(11:09):
them and then used by other banks and other financial intermediaries.
First of all, that was a fantastically clear explanation, so
thank you. But I think you do so well in
the book to show that Brown Brothers played a major
role in answering the question who can you trust? You
know that basically, unless there's an answer to that question
where a person attached, a financial system cannot gain the
(11:32):
kind of trajectory that it needs to get flowing. Flow
is everything, and if you don't trust people, you can't
get flow with the scale that is necessary. Reading that,
one starts immediately to feel the question of what about today?
Where does such trust lie in the system today, if
at all, should it exist to a greater degree than
(11:55):
it in fact does? And what is the presence or
absence of trust in our current system? Tell us about
where things stand, you know, So the interesting thing is,
as you highlight their word was their bond. The reputation
was key a lot of the letters at Alexander Brown
in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century writes
to his four sons, who are the Brown brothers? Heads?
Brown brothers? You sound like some distillation of Ben Franklin
(12:19):
and Poor Richard's Almanac, and Polonius and Hamlet and every
kind of homily and cliche that every parent has ever
given to every child. Don't take risks that are beyond
your means. Make sure you know the people you're in
business with. Its trust is easily lost and hard to gain.
And they kind of live this and breathe it because
(12:41):
they recognize that in a world without a lot of trust,
those things are unequivocally true. What's really fascinating about today
is I don't think we have fully appreciated what a
radical break the past fifty years have been globally in
terms of how human beings conceive of money, right, and
that the idea that a paper promise is worth more
(13:04):
than the paper it's written on was a completely alien
concept for most societies for most of history and still
makes people, you know, radically uncomfortable with the notion of really,
at the end of the day, if I give you
a dollar, whether it's digital or paper, it's a pretty
abstract thing. And the fact that we say that it
has values because all of us have kind of collectively
(13:24):
decided that it has value, not because it actually has
any intrinsic value. And cryptocurrency dramatizes this to an incredible
degree exactly, which is also why I'm really impatient with
a lot of crypto skeptics. Not that I'm a crypto bull,
I'm just saying the crypto skeptics say, oh, come on,
it's not worth anything, right, without recognizing that frankly, we
(13:45):
live in a world that there's no intrinsic value to
most things. You know, it's the value we ascribe to
it with intermediars who we think will be good for it.
And in many ways, you know, us power today, as
cemented by the global possession of the dollar, because there
needs to be some common means of exchange, relies on
a lot of faith in the system. That makes a
(14:07):
lot of people uncomfortable, but it is the product of
several hundred years of evolution, of which the paper money
part of the nineteenth century is like the first chapter
of which we're now living. In the later chapters, the
question of trust isn't interesting, and that like, I don't
necessarily trust my bank in the sense of I think
they're good people, But I trust my bank in the
(14:28):
sense of I clearly believe that if I put money
in the bank, they're good for it. And that's a
combination of a little bit of a regulatory framework, right
new deal law is saying your deposits are insured, and
a little bit of you know, I don't have any
reason to believe otherwise, and I need that, like we
need that to function. And in an early version, you
need something like Brown Brothers, which is surely their reputation.
(14:52):
So I don't think trust has gone away. We just
don't think of it in quite the same way. And
arguably it's a slightly different phenomenon. Right, I mean, we
begin with the idea that I know you, and I
trust you because I know you to be the kind
of person based on my experience of you, whom I
can rely on. Then you get a firm like Brown
(15:12):
Brothers that begins to institutionalize that trust. I may not
know you, but I know your brand and I know
that your bank is committed to not going under, and
so in that sense, I trust you. So that's a
bit of an institutionalization of the trust away from one
person to an institution, but it's still a small institution,
and it's still a family owned institution. What you have today, though,
(15:37):
is a very different stage in the evolution, where the
trust is almost almost not at all in the institutions
and almost all in the governmental structures that create the
conditions where we think that the institution will follow the
rules because otherwise people would go to prison. And that's
(15:58):
a different kind of institutional trust. It's still trust in
a set of institutions, but they're less the institutions, the
financial institutions themselves, and more the regulators of those institutions.
So you're totally right about the regulatory framework and that
being an essential component to people's trust in the financial system.
This is an explicit in the book. It's certainly explicit
(16:19):
in a lot of what I've written about. I think
regulation is necessary but not sufficient, right, and some of
the regulatory craze today in the Biden administration this is
a whole other conversation, but I think it treats regulation
as sufficient and necessary. One of the lessons of a
Brown Brother's culture is that you need a culture. Right.
(16:40):
You can regulate behavior, but you can't really regulate culture,
or you cannot create a regulatory framework that leads companies
in the near and I think even the mid term
to embody a different culture. What's fascinating about an earlier
version of American capitalism was it was an an internal
culture that recognized the ineluctable bond between private gain and
(17:01):
public good, and that individuals and collectives that were private.
It was part of a narrative of we I eat
the individual, and the company is responsible to the collective
because ultimately, we the individual in the company can't thrive
unless the collective in which we're embedded also thrives. That
(17:23):
was a non regulatory ethos, and it led to some
of the behavior that regulation seeks to force. So it
was internal guardrails rather than external guardrails. And I happen
to believe in part of the point of the book
is culture matters, and without those internal guardrails, all the
external guardrails in the world, they can create an adversarial
(17:44):
culture where behavior is constrained, but they cannot easily create
positive behavior, they can curtail negative behavior. We'll be right back.
Let me ask you a question, Zach, about a theme
(18:06):
that is already in the title of your book. There's
a more ultiple meaning to the title inside Money. But
on any of those possible meanings of that phrase, there's
an idea that there is an inside and an outside
to money, that there are elites who understand what's going
on and who have a lot of power and the
(18:27):
capacity to pull strings, and then there's the rest of
us who are on the outside. Maybe our noses are
pressed up against the glass. Maybe we don't even know
where the glass is to press our nose up against it,
And sociologically that remains true. But arguably there is a
democratizing impulse in finance today that it's not the first time.
(18:50):
You know, There's been lots of other moments when the
public got interested, and sometimes that was a sign that
there was about to be a crash, but we certainly
seem to be in one now where people talk about
gamification of trading, They talk about how easy it is
to open a coin base account, they talk about how
easy is to trade on platforms like robin Hood, and
then you actually have the crazy phenomenon of activists whose
(19:14):
nature of their activism is to boost up stocks that
the insiders agree aren't very valuable, and that frankly, any
rational person would agree aren't very valuable, and they're experiencing
it as a kind of thrill of the outsiders. And
in that sense, it's a populist or democratizing with a
small d mode of finance. What do you think about
(19:36):
that when you read about populist impulses to beat the
insiders at their own game, yea? Or when you read
people saying, you know what's wrong with finances, that it's
in the hands of the few. It ought to be
in the hands of the many, right or wrong? Do
you feel some sense of fear when you hear that?
(19:57):
Do you think, oh my god, these poor people are
gonna hurt themselves. Nope. I think I celebrate almost all
of that, but with the cautionary reality of people will
be harmed by that, just as they were harmed by
the system that they're being rejected. You know, revolution is
often necessary, but it's not very balanced. I mean, I
would prefer for evolutionary change. I think we'd all be
healthier for it, because there'd be less collateral damage along
(20:19):
the way, So a populist opening, you know, that's a
little less burn it all down, burn baby burn. I
mean there's an element of the the whole thing that
went on with Game Stop, and there's an element with
Robin Hood that can approach the burn baby burn attitudes
of the late sixties, like the system is irremediably corrupt,
so we should just blow it up and start it again.
(20:39):
I'm not really into that one, but but it's so
interesting you're saying that because I have the exact opposite instinct.
I look at Game Stop and I say, boy, in
the sixties, when they wanted to burn it all down,
they didn't say it and let's do it by trading
and making money. Right. There was a kind of utopian
idealism associated with being anti capitalist. Today, capitalism is so
(20:59):
much the you know, the air we breathe, the water
we drink, that the burn it down comes in the
form of let's do a trade, right, let's let's I
mean that you can't get closer to the ultimate victory
of capitalism than if the people who want to break
capitalism want to break it by capitalist means. They're not
trying to use the master's tools to deconstruct the master's house.
(21:20):
They're trying to use the master's tools to become the masters.
Neither more nor less, that is definitely true. I do
think more inputs, more egalitarian, more access to more capital
for more people who can make their own choices, that
I find a good thing, you know, And the same
way that unlocking capital in the nineteenth century was nett
(21:41):
I think a better thing than not led more people
to have what we would consider to be a middle
class life. It's the story of what's going on in Asia.
You know, it's like unlocking human capital and actually creating
a capital system. But this honestly is a philosophical discussion
because it leads to answers in action of kind of
the cup half full, cup half empty. Right, If you
somewhat celebrate these moves, you have a different attitude. If
(22:04):
I'm at the SEC right now and I think both
game stop and crypto and the kind of unregulated mass
of financial activity is unleashing destructive forces that need to
be bottled, You're going to have a particular regulatory and
or philosophical response if you think that they are inherently
positive developments and that they would create more inclusivity. What
(22:26):
wasn't very elite to system you're going to think in
terms of regulation and guardrails very differently. So in that sense,
I think the where you sit visa VI these developments
shapes what kind of policies and what kind of actions
you take in the present. Really, intimately, I'm really interested
to hear you say that, Zach, because in reading the book,
(22:48):
I felt maybe this is just confirmation bias. But as
I read the book, I thought to myself, Wow, in
the wild, wild West days, with all the booms and
all the busts, there were some people trying to hold
it all together. Thank goodness. Then you know, there's the
role people associated with the firm played in the creation
(23:09):
of the International Financial Institution in the post World War
two era. That too was a group of elites trying
to stabilize things in that case, both globally and domestically.
And then I looked at the contemporary world, where we
seem to be entering a period of relative destabilization, and
I thought, oh, boy, who's playing that role now? But
(23:31):
what I'm hearing from you is something a little different.
What I'm hearing from you is, look, the other institutions
aren't really playing that role, and insiders maybe have a
little bit too much power, and so some spreading of
the power might actually be desirable in this historical moment. Yeah,
and that's why I think it's back to this culture thing,
(23:51):
which I'm going to hammer home on unsatisfying though it
is at times to myself as well, which is, if
you're going to democratize finance and democratize nodes, you also
have to democratize responsibility. And that's where culture becomes really
important individually, right, which is like I don't get to
just pursue what I'm going to pursue without consequence. Some
of that has to be self imposed, right, It cannot
(24:12):
just be imposed by others. And we're not going back
to an elite construct world because there's no evidence that
we could or should. Although I actually think large multinational companies,
by virtue of the pressures on them from governments and
their own employees and financial forces, have become many of
them much more responsible to the global commons than any
(24:34):
one government and then to a lot of people, and
that's a kind of an interesting development. You know, they've
been much more focused on climate change because it hurts
their bottom line. They've been more focused on being efficient,
they've been more focused on sometimes on minimum wages than
government has often self interested. You know, why does Walmart
raise the minimum wage of its workers? The idea, you
know that this can all be done surely by a
(24:56):
regulatory framework, I just think is a mistake. I think
that's a necessary back to that question, necessary but not
sufficient part of what we tried to teach ourselves in
schools and you know, the whole education systems. How do
you create people who feel responsibility as citizens to a
larger good? And I guess you know the utopian translation
(25:16):
of that into the GameStop thing is you just you
can't endlessly make your own money. It's got to come
from somewhere. You can't endlessly destroy or create companies out
of nothing. Eventually there has to be something. And look,
we might look back at this all very quaintly in
ten years as a luxurious discussion for a system that's collapsed.
But we also might look back all of this in
(25:38):
ten or fifteen years as the messiness in the fray
getting to a more constructive place of what you'd call
inclusive or sustainable capitalism. Zach, I want to thank you
for writing yet another book that explains hard to understand
stuff that's really important to those of us who care
to learn the books. Is great, and please keep up
(25:59):
your dual track body of work of writing history to
explain things to us while also continuing to do it
in practice yourself. Thanks so much, Noah, We'll be right back.
(26:21):
Listening to Zach talk about the history of capitalism in
the United States and its future really made me reflect
on a deep tension in the way that power works
in the context of capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism
is a space of radical equality in that my dollar
(26:42):
is worth the exact same amount as your dollar, and
in theory, the markets don't care at all about what
we look like or how we sound. They only care
about how much money we can generate. And yet, at
the same time, on the other side of the split screen,
the history of capitalism is a history of particular people
(27:05):
becoming insiders, as in Zach's title Inside Money, and using
that insider status, either for good or ill, to shape
the future of the power of capital. Brown Brothers begins
in his story as trustworthy and successful because of the
specific identity of the firm and the reputational concern that
(27:26):
it has to be trusted, that trust starts as personal,
and by virtue of it being personal, it creates tremendous
power in the people who are able to establish that reputation.
This kind of capitalism is the capitalism that creates stability,
but that also simultaneously creates fundamental inequality, because in this
(27:47):
world you and I are not equal. When we put
a dollar on the table, it matters entirely who is trusted,
And when you get to the question of who's going
to be trusted, suddenly the determinants of background, identity, race, class,
and sex start to come into the picture. So our
distributional inequalities are partly a result of this aspect of
(28:11):
capitalism itself. Another major takeaway of Zach's book is that
the risk taking that we associate with the most famous
financial firms is not necessarily the only way for big
financial institutions to last and even to get rich. It
(28:31):
is rather a product of a new historical period in which,
as Zach explained, the fact that the big banks are
publicly traded, means that the people who work for them
have a lot to gain by taking risk and very
little to lose. By taking risk, and that is fundamentally
different than the way the system worked when the big
(28:52):
banks were partnerships, and if you took a risk to
make money, that meant you were personally taking a substantial
risk to lose money. As Zach points out, he's not
the first person to have made that point, but he
makes it tremendously powerfully. The third and final takeaway for
me was the question of the democratization or the popularization
(29:13):
of finance. I thought in reading Zach's book that he
would be nervous about GameStop, coin base, robin Hood, crypto,
and the general idea that right now finances being taken
out of the hands of the responsible financial institutions and
increasingly put into the hands of the ordinary investor sitting
(29:34):
at a computer screen and treating the whole thing as
a kind of a game. But to my surprise and
to my interest, Zach is actually very open to the
idea that capital needs to be small d democratized, or
popularized because the institutions at the top are not very
good at caring for the overall well being the way
(29:56):
they once perhaps were, in large part because they don't
care as much as they once did about maintaining their
reputations for trust and caring about the whole. Zach favors
our being more responsible and talking about utopian ideals. At
the same time, He's distrustful enough of our capacity to
do so that he welcomes the possibility of change from
(30:18):
the outside. I love to be surprised in conversation. Indeed,
that's one of the reasons that I love doing this
Deep Background show, because I love to be surprised by
things that people have to say, and that came as
a genuine and interesting surprise to me. I learned a
tremendous amount from the conversation and from the book, and
I hope that you listeners learn something too. Until the
(30:39):
next time I speak to you, breathe deep, think deep thoughts,
and if possible, have some fun. If you're a regular listener,
you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background.
I also really want that communication to run both ways.
I want to know what you think are the most
important stories of the moment and what kinds of guests
(31:01):
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(31:23):
Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer
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(31:45):
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(32:05):
tell a friend. This is Deep Background
Pushkin Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the
show where we explore the stories behind the stories in
(00:35):
the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As regular listeners know, on
this season of Deep Background, we've been focusing on power
in its many different forms. We've talked a fair amount
about power and global politics. We've talked about power and publishing.
But until now we haven't had a direct conversation about
(00:56):
one of the most important seats of power in the
United States and indeed in the world. Wall Street Today's
guest is here to help us fill that gap. Zachary
Carrabelle is a historian and author who spent years working
on Wall Street, both as head of Global Strategies That
Investment and as president or Fred Alger and Company. He's
(01:16):
the author of a new book called Inside Money, Brown, Brothers,
Harriman and the American Way of Power. The book charts
the long history of this particular investment bank, suggesting that
its ability to survive for two hundred years of boom
and bust cycles comes from its refusal to over extend
itself and to take on too much risk, a lesson
(01:39):
that he believes Wall Street today could learn a lot
from Zach is the perfect person to talk about power,
Wall Street history and where we're going in the future. Zach,
thank you so much for being here. Zach, you are
a polymathic and unusual person, and in a sense, you're
(02:03):
the ideal person to have written this new book because
you have a PhD in history, You've never stopped writing
books of history, no matter what other thing you've been doing.
You've also had several different careers in and around finance,
and that really means that if anyone were going to
write a book that was going to be, in effect
(02:23):
a history of power in American capitalism, it would be you.
I read your new book Inside Money, Brown, Brothers, Harriman
and the American Way of Power as really that a
book that tells the story of capitalism in America through
the eyes of one venerable firm. What gave you the
idea to do this? That's exactly what the book is,
(02:47):
and look narcissistically, it is the perfect culmination of a
lot of what I've done for the past twenty years,
and that it brings together the academic strain and the
financial investment career strain into one delightful four hundred plus
page package. It ended up, I think, in a weird way,
being a lot more interesting to me writing the book
(03:09):
and really thinking through the nature of American capitalism and
the nature of American power over two centuries, and the
sort of arbitrariness of one definition of capitalism that has
emerged in the past thirty years versus multiple different capitalisms
that could just as well have predominated and at earlier
(03:32):
points in the past did And that you know, we're
constantly in the position of remaking our culture and remaking
what we think of our systems. And then a weird way,
this book became pointed in that direction in a way
that I didn't actually expect when I sat down to
write the book. I was going to ask you that
which came first, the chicken or the egg question? Did
you pick your topic this bank and its history, and
(03:55):
then from there you realize that it was emblematic or
were you looking for some concrete story to tell that
would enable you to paint the big canvas. Yeah, and
it was definitely the latter. I did not set out
to write a book about Brown Brothers Harriman. I did
sit out to write a book about the crucial role
of money making American power in the nineteenth century, and
then how the men and they were all men, and
(04:16):
they were all white men, and they were mostly Protestant
white men. How that cohort made the global system of
the twentieth century, and where that leaves us today. So
that's kind of the arc I wanted to look at.
And they're the perfect aperture for that art. They are
maybe the only firm that could actually tell that story
from the get go to the present, because first of all,
they're the only one that has been around for two
(04:39):
plus centuries, which doesn't make them worth writing about. Right,
living long is not living necessarily interesting. I really thought
at one point, like, how am I going to make
a group of stayed bankers, particularly in the nineteenth century,
who wanted to be stayed, who didn't want to be
in the news, who spent a lot of their history
celebrating the fact that every day they woke up and
their name was not in the papers as a good day.
(05:01):
You know, how do you make that interesting? The arc
I thought was interesting. Turned out I think that they're
a lot more interesting than even I thought going into it.
I share with you the sense that there's an alchemy here.
You know the book doesn't. If you were not the
author of the book, I don't think I would have
picked it up, because I would have thought, this is
a great topic, But how the world could you tell
it in a way that is in fact engaging? But
(05:23):
because I've read your other books, I knew you would
be able to find a way to do that. What
was the trick? And for listeners who are thinking, why
in the world would I be interested in this, I'm
definitely interested in the history of capitalism in the nature
of power, But why would I want to hear it
told through these folks? What for you were the features
of those cautious state people who, as you show, we're
(05:44):
trying to be the ones always to avoid going under
What is it about them that you were able to
make interesting? So, first of all, it turns out Brown
Brothers was present at the creation of almost everything vital
in American certainly economic history and in many ways just
American history. They're just in the back row right, They're
(06:04):
they're like the zelle. They're in the second row, back left,
kind of looking like a bank, and they don't really
want to be the story and they don't want to
be the picture. But without them. There's no story and
there's no picture, and there is a lot of drama
in the creation of a nation, and the creation of
a nation like the United States, which kind of emerges
(06:25):
out of nowhere in the nineteenth century, graced with lots
of resources but very little invested capital, and you have
these this firm like Brown Brothers that essentially creates the
paper money system that I think is a huge differential, right,
It's partly what makes the United States the United States.
Is this incredibly chaotic, liquid world where if you had
(06:46):
a hope and a dream, it was way easier to
get money because it was paper. It wasn't people, it
wasn't gold, it wasn't land. And Brown Brothers is kind
of at the epicenter of this, you know, the the
alchemists who were really mindful of the destructive potential of
their alchemy and not animated by greed and not animated
by personal gain at the expense of public good. I
(07:09):
actually found that that section of the book completely gripping,
and I learned a huge amount from it. And I
wonder if you'd spend just a moment telling listeners just
the short version of this. I mean, I guess I
knew in a general sort of way that Fiat backed
currency greenbacks were really a product of the Civil War
(07:31):
in some general way. And I also knew from working
on my own interest in the history of the Constitution,
that in the early years of the Republic, money was
very scarce because there was still a sense that we
had to be dependent on gold and silver, and there
wasn't that much gold and silver in North America relative
(07:53):
to what there was in Europe, and so it was
always hard to get hold of money, and so as
a consequence, there was always a lot of need for
some other mechanisms of credit. What you show so beautifully
in the book is that there was an interim solution there,
and that that solution we've somewhat forgotten today was letters
(08:14):
of credit. Say a word about what that is and
why it matters, and then from there maybe we can
talk about the metaphoric relationship that that has to the
way the capital moves today in the world. So this
is one of these things that narratively I found challenging
the way, like a theoretical physicist can find it challenging
to write a popular story of that in a way
(08:37):
that doesn't put people to sleep. You know, the idea
of writing at great length about letters of credit was
kind of a nonstarter narratively. Nonetheless, just like the strong
and weak forces of an atom, trying to explain that
as a pretty crucial binding force for society seems essential
and completely overlooked in our story of what essentially makes
(09:00):
the United States as affluent and powerful as it was.
So for much of the nineteenth century, you either had
too little money or too much money, too much currency.
People needed money, so they're all these banks issuing a
lot of currency, and it was worth about as much
as it was until it wasn't. And that's why you
had every twenty years in the nineteenth century, you have
a financial crisis, a panic in eighteen nineteen, eighteen thirty seven,
(09:22):
eighteen fifty seven, eighteen seventy three, eighteen ninety three, nineteen
o seven, of course nineteen twenty nine. And behind the
scenes in the system you have a very few number
of players at which Brown Brows was essential, who make
sure that the trains run on time. Literally, I mean
they helped build the first passenger railroad, the BNO, and
they helped create the transatlantic shipping system so that people
(09:43):
knew that if they made stuff and grew stuff, that
someone would buy the stuff. And letters of credit were
the connective tissue, first between cotton growers in the South
and people bought the cotton in England and turned it
into cloth, and then for all sorts of trade, every
single trade, and without which there's no system, right, there's
(10:04):
no assurance that people will be able to buy and
sell stuff. And the amount of cher liquidity in the
United States did lead to these incredible periods of capital
creation and booms, and then it led to these incredibly
tumultuous bus much worse than anything we saw in two
thousand and eight two thousand and nine. I mean, these
(10:24):
panics eviscerated the financial system, and then you had these
bankers at the center of it, of whom Brown Brothers
were the most important, making sure that in spite of everything,
there would be trade, there would be goods. Some of
it was hugely morally problematic, right, the cotton trade was
on the backs of enslaved men and women, and Brown
Brothers was totally complicit in that, and a lot of
(10:46):
which was basically helping the creation of the American economy
and the creation of the United States. And these letters
were what you used as kind of a trusted I
know that if I part with my goods, someone on
the other side, the other side the Atlantic, will buy them,
and if I part with my money, I'll get my goods.
And these letters of credit were that connective tissue. And
we're essentially, if not invented by Brown Brothers, perfected by
(11:09):
them and then used by other banks and other financial intermediaries.
First of all, that was a fantastically clear explanation, so
thank you. But I think you do so well in
the book to show that Brown Brothers played a major
role in answering the question who can you trust? You
know that basically, unless there's an answer to that question
where a person attached, a financial system cannot gain the
(11:32):
kind of trajectory that it needs to get flowing. Flow
is everything, and if you don't trust people, you can't
get flow with the scale that is necessary. Reading that,
one starts immediately to feel the question of what about today?
Where does such trust lie in the system today, if
at all, should it exist to a greater degree than
(11:55):
it in fact does? And what is the presence or
absence of trust in our current system? Tell us about
where things stand, you know, So the interesting thing is,
as you highlight their word was their bond. The reputation
was key a lot of the letters at Alexander Brown
in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century writes
to his four sons, who are the Brown brothers? Heads?
Brown brothers? You sound like some distillation of Ben Franklin
(12:19):
and Poor Richard's Almanac, and Polonius and Hamlet and every
kind of homily and cliche that every parent has ever
given to every child. Don't take risks that are beyond
your means. Make sure you know the people you're in
business with. Its trust is easily lost and hard to gain.
And they kind of live this and breathe it because
(12:41):
they recognize that in a world without a lot of trust,
those things are unequivocally true. What's really fascinating about today
is I don't think we have fully appreciated what a
radical break the past fifty years have been globally in
terms of how human beings conceive of money, right, and
that the idea that a paper promise is worth more
(13:04):
than the paper it's written on was a completely alien
concept for most societies for most of history and still
makes people, you know, radically uncomfortable with the notion of really,
at the end of the day, if I give you
a dollar, whether it's digital or paper, it's a pretty
abstract thing. And the fact that we say that it
has values because all of us have kind of collectively
(13:24):
decided that it has value, not because it actually has
any intrinsic value. And cryptocurrency dramatizes this to an incredible
degree exactly, which is also why I'm really impatient with
a lot of crypto skeptics. Not that I'm a crypto bull,
I'm just saying the crypto skeptics say, oh, come on,
it's not worth anything, right, without recognizing that frankly, we
(13:45):
live in a world that there's no intrinsic value to
most things. You know, it's the value we ascribe to
it with intermediars who we think will be good for it.
And in many ways, you know, us power today, as
cemented by the global possession of the dollar, because there
needs to be some common means of exchange, relies on
a lot of faith in the system. That makes a
(14:07):
lot of people uncomfortable, but it is the product of
several hundred years of evolution, of which the paper money
part of the nineteenth century is like the first chapter
of which we're now living. In the later chapters, the
question of trust isn't interesting, and that like, I don't
necessarily trust my bank in the sense of I think
they're good people, But I trust my bank in the
(14:28):
sense of I clearly believe that if I put money
in the bank, they're good for it. And that's a
combination of a little bit of a regulatory framework, right
new deal law is saying your deposits are insured, and
a little bit of you know, I don't have any
reason to believe otherwise, and I need that, like we
need that to function. And in an early version, you
need something like Brown Brothers, which is surely their reputation.
(14:52):
So I don't think trust has gone away. We just
don't think of it in quite the same way. And
arguably it's a slightly different phenomenon. Right, I mean, we
begin with the idea that I know you, and I
trust you because I know you to be the kind
of person based on my experience of you, whom I
can rely on. Then you get a firm like Brown
(15:12):
Brothers that begins to institutionalize that trust. I may not
know you, but I know your brand and I know
that your bank is committed to not going under, and
so in that sense, I trust you. So that's a
bit of an institutionalization of the trust away from one
person to an institution, but it's still a small institution,
and it's still a family owned institution. What you have today, though,
(15:37):
is a very different stage in the evolution, where the
trust is almost almost not at all in the institutions
and almost all in the governmental structures that create the
conditions where we think that the institution will follow the
rules because otherwise people would go to prison. And that's
(15:58):
a different kind of institutional trust. It's still trust in
a set of institutions, but they're less the institutions, the
financial institutions themselves, and more the regulators of those institutions.
So you're totally right about the regulatory framework and that
being an essential component to people's trust in the financial system.
This is an explicit in the book. It's certainly explicit
(16:19):
in a lot of what I've written about. I think
regulation is necessary but not sufficient, right, and some of
the regulatory craze today in the Biden administration this is
a whole other conversation, but I think it treats regulation
as sufficient and necessary. One of the lessons of a
Brown Brother's culture is that you need a culture. Right.
(16:40):
You can regulate behavior, but you can't really regulate culture,
or you cannot create a regulatory framework that leads companies
in the near and I think even the mid term
to embody a different culture. What's fascinating about an earlier
version of American capitalism was it was an an internal
culture that recognized the ineluctable bond between private gain and
(17:01):
public good, and that individuals and collectives that were private.
It was part of a narrative of we I eat
the individual, and the company is responsible to the collective
because ultimately, we the individual in the company can't thrive
unless the collective in which we're embedded also thrives. That
(17:23):
was a non regulatory ethos, and it led to some
of the behavior that regulation seeks to force. So it
was internal guardrails rather than external guardrails. And I happen
to believe in part of the point of the book
is culture matters, and without those internal guardrails, all the
external guardrails in the world, they can create an adversarial
(17:44):
culture where behavior is constrained, but they cannot easily create
positive behavior, they can curtail negative behavior. We'll be right back.
Let me ask you a question, Zach, about a theme
(18:06):
that is already in the title of your book. There's
a more ultiple meaning to the title inside Money. But
on any of those possible meanings of that phrase, there's
an idea that there is an inside and an outside
to money, that there are elites who understand what's going
on and who have a lot of power and the
(18:27):
capacity to pull strings, and then there's the rest of
us who are on the outside. Maybe our noses are
pressed up against the glass. Maybe we don't even know
where the glass is to press our nose up against it,
And sociologically that remains true. But arguably there is a
democratizing impulse in finance today that it's not the first time.
(18:50):
You know, There's been lots of other moments when the
public got interested, and sometimes that was a sign that
there was about to be a crash, but we certainly
seem to be in one now where people talk about
gamification of trading, They talk about how easy it is
to open a coin base account, they talk about how
easy is to trade on platforms like robin Hood, and
then you actually have the crazy phenomenon of activists whose
(19:14):
nature of their activism is to boost up stocks that
the insiders agree aren't very valuable, and that frankly, any
rational person would agree aren't very valuable, and they're experiencing
it as a kind of thrill of the outsiders. And
in that sense, it's a populist or democratizing with a
small d mode of finance. What do you think about
(19:36):
that when you read about populist impulses to beat the
insiders at their own game, yea? Or when you read
people saying, you know what's wrong with finances, that it's
in the hands of the few. It ought to be
in the hands of the many, right or wrong? Do
you feel some sense of fear when you hear that?
(19:57):
Do you think, oh my god, these poor people are
gonna hurt themselves. Nope. I think I celebrate almost all
of that, but with the cautionary reality of people will
be harmed by that, just as they were harmed by
the system that they're being rejected. You know, revolution is
often necessary, but it's not very balanced. I mean, I
would prefer for evolutionary change. I think we'd all be
healthier for it, because there'd be less collateral damage along
(20:19):
the way, So a populist opening, you know, that's a
little less burn it all down, burn baby burn. I
mean there's an element of the the whole thing that
went on with Game Stop, and there's an element with
Robin Hood that can approach the burn baby burn attitudes
of the late sixties, like the system is irremediably corrupt,
so we should just blow it up and start it again.
(20:39):
I'm not really into that one, but but it's so
interesting you're saying that because I have the exact opposite instinct.
I look at Game Stop and I say, boy, in
the sixties, when they wanted to burn it all down,
they didn't say it and let's do it by trading
and making money. Right. There was a kind of utopian
idealism associated with being anti capitalist. Today, capitalism is so
(20:59):
much the you know, the air we breathe, the water
we drink, that the burn it down comes in the
form of let's do a trade, right, let's let's I
mean that you can't get closer to the ultimate victory
of capitalism than if the people who want to break
capitalism want to break it by capitalist means. They're not
trying to use the master's tools to deconstruct the master's house.
(21:20):
They're trying to use the master's tools to become the masters.
Neither more nor less, that is definitely true. I do
think more inputs, more egalitarian, more access to more capital
for more people who can make their own choices, that
I find a good thing, you know, And the same
way that unlocking capital in the nineteenth century was nett
(21:41):
I think a better thing than not led more people
to have what we would consider to be a middle
class life. It's the story of what's going on in Asia.
You know, it's like unlocking human capital and actually creating
a capital system. But this honestly is a philosophical discussion
because it leads to answers in action of kind of
the cup half full, cup half empty. Right, If you
somewhat celebrate these moves, you have a different attitude. If
(22:04):
I'm at the SEC right now and I think both
game stop and crypto and the kind of unregulated mass
of financial activity is unleashing destructive forces that need to
be bottled, You're going to have a particular regulatory and
or philosophical response if you think that they are inherently
positive developments and that they would create more inclusivity. What
(22:26):
wasn't very elite to system you're going to think in
terms of regulation and guardrails very differently. So in that sense,
I think the where you sit visa VI these developments
shapes what kind of policies and what kind of actions
you take in the present. Really, intimately, I'm really interested
to hear you say that, Zach, because in reading the book,
(22:48):
I felt maybe this is just confirmation bias. But as
I read the book, I thought to myself, Wow, in
the wild, wild West days, with all the booms and
all the busts, there were some people trying to hold
it all together. Thank goodness. Then you know, there's the
role people associated with the firm played in the creation
(23:09):
of the International Financial Institution in the post World War
two era. That too was a group of elites trying
to stabilize things in that case, both globally and domestically.
And then I looked at the contemporary world, where we
seem to be entering a period of relative destabilization, and
I thought, oh, boy, who's playing that role now? But
(23:31):
what I'm hearing from you is something a little different.
What I'm hearing from you is, look, the other institutions
aren't really playing that role, and insiders maybe have a
little bit too much power, and so some spreading of
the power might actually be desirable in this historical moment. Yeah,
and that's why I think it's back to this culture thing,
(23:51):
which I'm going to hammer home on unsatisfying though it
is at times to myself as well, which is, if
you're going to democratize finance and democratize nodes, you also
have to democratize responsibility. And that's where culture becomes really
important individually, right, which is like I don't get to
just pursue what I'm going to pursue without consequence. Some
of that has to be self imposed, right, It cannot
(24:12):
just be imposed by others. And we're not going back
to an elite construct world because there's no evidence that
we could or should. Although I actually think large multinational companies,
by virtue of the pressures on them from governments and
their own employees and financial forces, have become many of
them much more responsible to the global commons than any
(24:34):
one government and then to a lot of people, and
that's a kind of an interesting development. You know, they've
been much more focused on climate change because it hurts
their bottom line. They've been more focused on being efficient,
they've been more focused on sometimes on minimum wages than
government has often self interested. You know, why does Walmart
raise the minimum wage of its workers? The idea, you
know that this can all be done surely by a
(24:56):
regulatory framework, I just think is a mistake. I think
that's a necessary back to that question, necessary but not
sufficient part of what we tried to teach ourselves in
schools and you know, the whole education systems. How do
you create people who feel responsibility as citizens to a
larger good? And I guess you know the utopian translation
(25:16):
of that into the GameStop thing is you just you
can't endlessly make your own money. It's got to come
from somewhere. You can't endlessly destroy or create companies out
of nothing. Eventually there has to be something. And look,
we might look back at this all very quaintly in
ten years as a luxurious discussion for a system that's collapsed.
But we also might look back all of this in
(25:38):
ten or fifteen years as the messiness in the fray
getting to a more constructive place of what you'd call
inclusive or sustainable capitalism. Zach, I want to thank you
for writing yet another book that explains hard to understand
stuff that's really important to those of us who care
to learn the books. Is great, and please keep up
(25:59):
your dual track body of work of writing history to
explain things to us while also continuing to do it
in practice yourself. Thanks so much, Noah, We'll be right back.
(26:21):
Listening to Zach talk about the history of capitalism in
the United States and its future really made me reflect
on a deep tension in the way that power works
in the context of capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism
is a space of radical equality in that my dollar
(26:42):
is worth the exact same amount as your dollar, and
in theory, the markets don't care at all about what
we look like or how we sound. They only care
about how much money we can generate. And yet, at
the same time, on the other side of the split screen,
the history of capitalism is a history of particular people
(27:05):
becoming insiders, as in Zach's title Inside Money, and using
that insider status, either for good or ill, to shape
the future of the power of capital. Brown Brothers begins
in his story as trustworthy and successful because of the
specific identity of the firm and the reputational concern that
(27:26):
it has to be trusted, that trust starts as personal,
and by virtue of it being personal, it creates tremendous
power in the people who are able to establish that reputation.
This kind of capitalism is the capitalism that creates stability,
but that also simultaneously creates fundamental inequality, because in this
(27:47):
world you and I are not equal. When we put
a dollar on the table, it matters entirely who is trusted,
And when you get to the question of who's going
to be trusted, suddenly the determinants of background, identity, race, class,
and sex start to come into the picture. So our
distributional inequalities are partly a result of this aspect of
(28:11):
capitalism itself. Another major takeaway of Zach's book is that
the risk taking that we associate with the most famous
financial firms is not necessarily the only way for big
financial institutions to last and even to get rich. It
(28:31):
is rather a product of a new historical period in which,
as Zach explained, the fact that the big banks are
publicly traded, means that the people who work for them
have a lot to gain by taking risk and very
little to lose. By taking risk, and that is fundamentally
different than the way the system worked when the big
(28:52):
banks were partnerships, and if you took a risk to
make money, that meant you were personally taking a substantial
risk to lose money. As Zach points out, he's not
the first person to have made that point, but he
makes it tremendously powerfully. The third and final takeaway for
me was the question of the democratization or the popularization
(29:13):
of finance. I thought in reading Zach's book that he
would be nervous about GameStop, coin base, robin Hood, crypto,
and the general idea that right now finances being taken
out of the hands of the responsible financial institutions and
increasingly put into the hands of the ordinary investor sitting
(29:34):
at a computer screen and treating the whole thing as
a kind of a game. But to my surprise and
to my interest, Zach is actually very open to the
idea that capital needs to be small d democratized, or
popularized because the institutions at the top are not very
good at caring for the overall well being the way
(29:56):
they once perhaps were, in large part because they don't
care as much as they once did about maintaining their
reputations for trust and caring about the whole. Zach favors
our being more responsible and talking about utopian ideals. At
the same time, He's distrustful enough of our capacity to
do so that he welcomes the possibility of change from
(30:18):
the outside. I love to be surprised in conversation. Indeed,
that's one of the reasons that I love doing this
Deep Background show, because I love to be surprised by
things that people have to say, and that came as
a genuine and interesting surprise to me. I learned a
tremendous amount from the conversation and from the book, and
I hope that you listeners learn something too. Until the
(30:39):
next time I speak to you, breathe deep, think deep thoughts,
and if possible, have some fun. If you're a regular listener,
you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background.
I also really want that communication to run both ways.
I want to know what you think are the most
important stories of the moment and what kinds of guests
(31:01):
you think you would be useful to hear from. More So,
I'm opening a new channel of communication to access it.
Just to my website. Noah Dashfelman dot com. You can
sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me
exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really
valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep
(31:23):
Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer
is mo La Board, our engineer is Bentaladay, and our
showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbe. Editorial support from noahm Osband.
Theme music by Luis Guerra at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell,
Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor,
(31:45):
Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on
Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column
for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot
com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts,
go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you
liked what you heard today, please write a review or
(32:05):
tell a friend. This is Deep Background
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