This is one of my branching-out books, one of those periodic attempts to read something other than fantasy and science fiction. And I had my doubts, considering I generally find business writing to be dull as ditch water, but such is not the case here. It's a shame he's long dead, and thus unable to address current events, because Allen is an excellent writer - clear, approachable, often dryly funny, and he is clearly writing for a general audience so he explains everything as he goes in the most lucid way. If more authors wrote about business like this I might be inclined to read more of it.

Anyway, this book was published in 1935, and it covers the financial history of the economic powerhouses of America, from the 1890s up until about the time of publishing. It is both surprisingly interesting and surprisingly familiar. As Gretchen Morgenson states in her Introduction, a lot of the greed, rapacity, flexible ethics, and incestuous economics that is often observed today is here as well... in fact the implication is very strong that because the early problems weren't sufficiently well dealt with, the ability of the very rich to exploit everyone else through unethical - if not actually illegal - business practices goes largely unchecked and keeps on repeating itself. Given the time that Allen is writing in, the stock market crash of 1929 looms large as a potential outcome of such determinedly piggish troughing, as economic houses of cards collapsed under the weight of their own overreach and fictional leverage. It's an honestly entertaining read, but still a bit depressing to see how little has largely changed.