The Money lenders : bankers and a world in Turmoil /
Anthony Sampson
- New York : Viking Press, c1981
- 336 pages ; 24 cm.
Includes index.
1. Midas and the ass -- 2. Who keeps the world? -- 3. The bankers' disgrace -- 4. The brotherhood of man -- 5. The super bankers -- 6. The other world -- 7. London and the euro dollars -- 8. The secret hoard -- 9. The crashes of '74 -- 10. The frontiers of chaos -- 11. Apartheid: The eye of God -- 12. The super competitors -- 13. Money machines -- 14. The global marketplace -- 15. Grey eminences -- 16. An island in the sun -- 17. Iran and the 'Great Satan' -- 18. Country risk -- 19. The world banker -- 20. A new order? -- 21. The financial sheriff -- 22. The dangerous edge.
This is a book about the relationship between bankers and nations, particularly developing nations - from England in the fourteenth century to the United States in the nineteenth century to the many-coloured developing world of the 1980s. I try to show how banks grew up into the huge global organisations that we know today, and how they operate across frontiers in the contemporary world; but I do not attempt to cover the many complex activities of domestic banking and the economic theories that lie behind them. My interest is in the international politics of banking, and the personalities that lie behind them. Many economists have described banking in terms of the interplay of macro-economic forces; but this book tries to show how banks are also affected by the character of their leaders and the problems of particular competition, and I have tried to show how the world looks through the eyes of individual bankers.