Review by Choice Review
The entrepreneurial spirit that has driven the US economy since before the Revolution has also extended to those willing to aggressively market to or swindle unsuspecting citizens, or to create enterprises that moved toward deception. As the economy grew, so too did fraud. Balleisen (history and public policy, Duke Univ.) provides a thoughtful, sweeping examination of fraudulent business activities and the often delayed responses to thwart it. He makes extensive use of newspapers and magazines and a number of institutional archives, such as those of the Better Business Bureau and the National Vigilance Committee, to depict in rich detail numerous fraudulent activities and how people responded. Balleisen notes changes in fraud, particularly exploiting economic innovations and the attitudes toward it. Caveat emptor prevailed and prosecution was difficult prior to the Civil War, but starting in the Gilded Age consumer education programs emerged and, slowly, haphazardly, various government regulations offered protection to consumers and investors, though swindlers circumvented these efforts through increasingly novel means. Balleisen warns that recent deregulation created a climate that has fostered a series of spectacular frauds, from the savings and loan crisis to investor swindling and the mortgage disaster. The chapters on early government regulatory actions are well done. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Raymond M. Hyser, James Madison University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Balleisen (Navigating Failure), associate professor of history at Duke University, explores America's ambivalent attitude toward con-artistry in this colorful survey history of business fraud and the fitful attempts to suppress it. In American fraud's 19th-century golden age, adulterated commodities, shoddy manufactures, counterfeit bank-notes, inflated stocks, Barnum-esque hoaxes, predatory sales contracts, and Ponzi schemes galore were mainstays of commerce. More recently, Balleisen reveals that the methods have kept pace with sociopolitical changes, as evidenced by Medicare fraud, credit default swaps, and more Ponzi schemes. He counterpoints the nature of the swindles with the growing formal-and informal-"anti-fraud state" of postal inspectors, government financial and trade regulators, criminal prosecutors, class-action lawyers, and muckraking reporters (who sometimes colluded with stock scams instead of exposing them). Balleisen shows how anti-fraud regulations were perennially weakened by Americans' grudging admiration for clever con-men, industry lobbying, the doctrine of caveat emptor (the notion that buyers are responsible for avoiding scams), and fears that cracking down too harshly on fraudulent promises might dampen the investor enthusiasm powering the economy. Balleisen's lucid, engagingly written mix of institutional and legal history, behavioral economics, and entertaining anecdotes illuminates this land of bilk and money. Illus. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
Balleisen (Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America) demonstrates that fraud has always existed in capitalist America, but that codification of laws against fraud and increased prosecution of those who commit it has changed over the last two centuries. Balleisen uses many examples from the early 1800s through the present to display the egregious use of fraud and the fallout, or lack thereof, from scams. Moreover, he argues that the main problem is knowing and determining the distinction between absolute hucksterism and acts that simply push the bounds of salesman-/showmanship. Tom Perkins narrates effectively with a soft voice, and his steady pace keeps the listener focused. -VERDICT An engaging look at fraud in America and the laws that have come (and gone) to keep citizens safe from financial harm. Fans of Dean Jobb's Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation will enjoy this book.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A broad-ranging study of the big swindle in American life over the last couple of centuries.Americans, P.T. Barnum divined, have a deeply ingrained habit of needing "to cast suspicious eyes on what was before them"but then "to be taken in regardless." There is something in our character, something at once aspirational and gullible, that makes the nation so avid to embrace the likes of a Charles Ponzi, a Bernie Madoff, and any number of religious and political figures past and present. Balleisen (History and Public Policy/Duke Univ.; Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America, 2001, etc.) casts a gimlet eye on the passing parade of hucksters and charlatans, peppering a narrative long on theory with juicy asides that build toward a comprehensive catalog of "Old Swindles in New Jargon"e.g., the ever popular pyramid scheme. That fundamentally undemocratic bit of fraudI got mine, and it doesn't matter whether you get yoursis built on an ethos of wishful thinking and anxiety alike, for Americans have always had the haunting fear of sliding backward into poverty. Ranging among the disciplines of history, economics, and psychology, Balleisen constructs a sturdy narrative of the many ways in which we have fallen prey to the swindler, and continue to do so, as well as of how American society and its institutions have tried to build protections against the con. But these protections eventually run up against accusations of violating "longstanding principles of due process," since the bigger the con, the more lawyers arrayed behind it. It's in looking at these regulatory mechanisms that the narrative sometimes bogs down in detail, but it all adds up to a useful, if perhaps accidental, operating manual to living in America, a land in which the great novelist Herman Melville pointedly followed up his vast novel Moby-Dick with the savagely satirical The Confidence-Man. A touch arid at times, but overall a fascinating, illuminating look at bunko and the social conditions under which its practitioners operateand flourish. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
