The Moneychangers

Now that Trump has been elected President, this book needs to be re-issued. It is amazing in the following ways: <br />1. it gives explicit details about the ways in which white collar crimes pay off handsomely. All the methods for corporate criminals are still relevant today. Trump is exactly like the guys in this book. Read it and weep. We have not learned any lessons at all in the approximately 100 years since the financial scams described in this book.<br />2. All relationships are influenced by money and power. For example, the woman who gets involved with these creeps and falls for their lies despite being warned about them, and the hero's brother who wants the tangible benefits of being associated with that power. There are also the business people who want to speak up but are afraid to do so. All these people are going to be part of the Trump administration.<br />3. At the end of the book, the hero, who consistently tries to be ethical in his dealings with all these people, realizes that he will have to get involved in politics and try to make a difference... <br /><br />The reality is that Upton Sinclair DID run for office and was attacked by the right wing of his day, just like Hillary Clinton. <br /><br />We have to fight back. This book will show you that there is a long history of radical right wing abuse of power and remind you that we have to take an incremental approach, but never give up....

This is a very good book. I will give a full review later.

This is my 3rd Upton Sinclair book and the only one I struggled to understand. I am not into high finance, society types or Wall Street so much of this book was lost on me. There were schemes and shananigans into order to cause the crash of 1929 with lots of players of various strains ( bankers, directors, board of director members, stockholders.........). I would have enjoyed it much more if I could wrap my head around who was who, the whys and how it was all done.<br /><br />???????

THE MONEYCHANGERS<br /><br />Kind of like the sausages but scarier because it involved high finance.

This book, written over a hundred years ago, is as current as today's headlines. It is the tale of Allan Montague, a young New York lawyer who learns firsthand about the corruption of Wall Street. Written after the Panic of 1907, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/3384600.The_Money_Changers" title="The Money Changers by Upton Sinclair" rel="noopener">The Money Changers</a> by <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/23510.Upton_Sinclair" title="Upton Sinclair" rel="noopener">Upton Sinclair</a> is a well written study about how the purpose of big business is merely the gross accumulation of wealth and power. <br /><br />At the end, a mogul named Dan Waterman causes a run on the banks, which Sinclair describes:<blockquote>And so at last came the fateful Thursday, the climax of the panic. A pall seemed to have fallen upon Wall Street. Men ran here and there, bareheaded and pale with fright. Upon the floor of the Stock Exchange men held their breath. The market was falling to pieces. All sales had stopped; one might quote any price one chose, for it was impossible to borrow a dollar. Interest rates had gone to one hundred and fifty per cent to two hundred per cent; a man might have<br />offered a thousand per cent for a large sum and not obtained it. The brokers stood about, gazing at each other in utter despair. Such an hour had never before been known.</blockquote>It all starts when one of Montague's old friends, a beautiful young widow named Lucy Dupree, enlists his help to sell securities she holds for the Northern Mississippi Railroad. This small act has large consequences as the railroad rouses the attention of Waterman and several other moguls.<br /><br />Sinclair is probably most famous for his book <b>The Jungle</b> about the Chicago meat packers. Later he went into politics, founded a party named End Party in California (EPIC), and unsuccessfully ran for governor there in 1934.<br /><br />The only false note in the book is its last sentence, when Montague says, "I am going into politics. I am going to try to teach the people." I couldn't help a broad smirk at that point.<br /><br />

I find it chilling that the peril of institutions that could be both too big to fail and driven to ruin by disingenuous wreckers was known exactly 100 years prior to the bubble burst of 2008. <i>The Moneychangers</i> is eerie in its similarity to the economic snap that began the so called Great Recession. But it is not perfectly prophetic. Sinclair's target in 1908 was the trusts. In some ways these were the same robber barons as today, but the dynamic has notable differences. Sinclair's panic has a classically literary onus. There are virtuous actors.<br /><br />But there are also real historical contrasts and comparisons for the perceptive reader to note. Presidents (Theodore) Roosevelt and (George W.) Bush would deal with reckless speculation differently. The media circus devoted to the crisis would strike stunningly similar tones.<br /><br />Let the following excerpt speak for itself:<br /><br /><i>"It was very interesting to Montague to read these newspapers and see the picture of events which they presented to the public. They all told what they could not avoid telling - that is, the events which were public matters; but they never by any chance gave a hint of the reasons for the happenings - you would have supposed that all these upheavals in the banking world were so many thunderbolts which had fallen from the heavens above. And each day they gave more of their space to insisting that the previous day's misfortunes were the last - that by no chance could there be any more thunderbolts to fall." (293)</i><br /><br />The protagonist in <i>The Moneychangers</i>, Allan Montague, is a bit like a grown up Nick Carraway, somewhat streetwise but still possessing of his genuine essence and wiser than the great men who tower overhead. Like Fitzgerald's protagonist, Montague is ultimately unable to protect the woman in his charge. Bloodshed ensues. The financial crisis at the center of the melodrama is, in fact, caused by avarice and lust. Much like the Trojan war, the resources of economic empires and the blood of a nation are gambled in retaliation to a woman's rejection of unwanted advances.<br /><br />I am a fan of Sinclair's work, from <i>The Jungle</i> to the Lanny Budd saga. However, I am surprised <i>The Moneychangers</i> doesn't occupy a more prominent place in his catalog, or indeed the progressive political literary canon. Perhaps as our understanding of the Great Recession grows, <i>The Moneychangers</i> will rise to prominence.<br /><br />If only it had been heeded before, not after, it rang uncomfortably prophetic... <br />

For being a book that is almost impossible to find, it's disturbingly appropriate for what is going on in the economy today. Rather than delving into the lives of immigrants and slaughtering critters - this book follows the uppercrust on Wall Street through the stockmarket crash in the early 1900's.<br /><br />Sinclair's characters are tragic, as always - but it is what is going on in this book that is so interesting. The motives and the greed, and the power struggle that finally leads to a stock market crash and runs on the banks. Starting out innocently enough, this tale quickly escalates into vindictive double crossing, back stabbing and finishes off with lives ruined and a country in financial disaster.<br /><br />I found this book to be a much easier read than "The Jungle" in that Sinclair was able to weave his beliefs more deeply into the story rather than bashing the reader over the skull with them as he did in the final chapters of that previous novel.<br /><br />I always find it best to read Upton Sinclair and Ayn Rand back to back to really get the emotional rollercoaster going.<br /><br />Though hard copies of this book are rare to come across (at least in my neck of the woods) it is readily available for free all over the internet (yeay public domain!)<br /><br />Read it... it's a real eye opener.

What a powerful book based on the Panic of 1907. It is a well written quick read, and something I would have expected from Sinclair. <br /><br />I'm not a banker, nor am I into high finance, but I understood the situation as it progressed through the pages. I went a time or two to research history to see if I could place real people into the characters, and I discovered soon enough that the President was, of course, Teddy Roosevelt and the major financier who "saved" the banks was J.P. Morgan. <br /><br />The story is most likely as true an account as there could ever be of what really happened behind the scenes during the days of the major Trusts - copper, steel, electric, and so forth - and the banks and the U.S. Treasury. The power of the nation was held in the hands of a very few, and not a single one of them was Teddy Roosevelt.<br /><br />Sometimes reality is a hard pill to swallow, and I have often wondered if today, still, this continues. I would hazard a guess that it does.

An absorbing tale of the 29 wall street crash. A quite dramatic engaging story of how bankers got together and crashed the market to buy everything back up cheaply. Those at the sharp end were then helpless and left destitute. However what Sinclair poignantly explains is that many corrupt wall street men were actually crushed as well, many with questionable morality who helped build empires were simply stepped on. It was the thirst to monopolize industries, to remove the competition and to gain ultimate power which triggered these selfish greedy bankers to turn off the taps of credit and let everyone flounder. The banks had never been so powerful after the crash and even paid for the recovery, by turning the money taps back on with thanks from the unwitting public and grateful government. A great little book to get the blood boiling after 2008..so many similarities. And what do you know - the current treasury secretary is an ex-Goldmans man, and don't forget about the ex-exon man. Upton Sinclair and Bernie Sanders would have a lot to talk about.

The Moneychangers was published in 1908, and the author must have done his research. Wonder how much of it went into the subsequent World's End series, with its all encompassing panoramic scope that includes finance and business.<br /><br />The book begins guilelessly as usual with the author, this time with a pair of friends discussing a young woman newly arrived in NYC whom one of them knew from home, being brought up on the plantation next to hers until she ran off to New Orleans to marry an older man. But it changes from there rapidly enough, via social parties, wolves after young women, and friends whom the said women trust with protection of their social and financial security, to the real subject of the work.<br /><br />"“They are lively chaps, the Steel crowd,” said the Major, chuckling. “You will have to keep your eyes open when you do business with them.”"<br /><br />The pace is faster here than in World's End series, while seeming relaxed like the Southerner protagonist, which is completely opposite to that of World's End series where it seemed like a whirl all the time, but things happened at their own pace anyway.<br />..............<br /><br />The end shocks one with not just ruin of a wealthy man by another, more powerful one, for sake of revenge about a woman who had a preference for reasons other than the said power or even wealth, but the quiet sacrifice of the young Lucy Dupree, in complete anonymity so no one who cared for her ever knew what happened to her.<br /><br />It shocks because it's representative of reality, one suspects, and the author wanted to expose the stark, grim, cruel nature thereof, of Wall Street and its men at the top.<br /><br />He's exposed a series of pyramids that various industries and their owners form, interconnected randomly via the said men of power who might be involved in more than one, or finance via banks they control, it all ultimately being topped by Wall Street.<br /><br />Lucy Dupree symbolises not just youth and beauty but innocence and naivete, loving heart and a lack of selfishness that is preyed on by the said men of power who are bestial in their vicious pursuit of acquisitions of not just wealth and objects but of women, of young and innocent women whom they'd bend to their will and destroy if the said woman is an unwilling unattainable person rather than an object.<br /><br />Lucy Dupree symbolises all this and more - she's the innocence and naivete not only of youth or of women, but in general of humanity, exploited by the hounds and hyenas and other beasts symbolised in men of power, here mostly those of Wall Street.<br />..............<br /><br />Montague is being tutored by the friend he went to for help, having discovered that someone he went to see has sent a detective after him.<br /><br />“I can introduce you to a man who’s in this room now, who was fighting the Ship-building swindle, and he got hold of a lot of important papers, and he took them to his office, and sat by while his clerks made thirty-two copies of them. And he put the originals and thirty-one of the copies in thirty-two different safe-deposit vaults in the city, and took the other copy to his home in a valise. And that night burglars broke in, and the valise was missing. The next day he wrote to the people he was fighting, ‘I was going to send you a copy of the papers which have come into my possession, but as you already have a copy, I will simply proceed to outline my proposition.’ And that was all. They settled for a million or two.”"<br />..............<br /><br />Montague sees Lucy who's accepted Ryder's invitation.<br /><br />"“Well,” said she, dubiously, “it’s nice to be noticed.”<br /><br />"“It is for those who like it,” said he; “and if a woman chooses to set out on a publicity campaign, and run a press bureau, and make herself a public character, why, that’s her privilege. But for heaven’s sake let her drop the sickly pretence that she is only driving beautiful horses, or listening to music, or entertaining her friends. I suppose a Society woman has as much right to advertise her personality as a politician or a manufacturer of pills; all I object to is the sham of it, the everlasting twaddle about her love of privacy. Take Mrs. Winnie Duval, for instance. You would think to hear her that her one ideal in life was to be a simple shepherdess and to raise flowers; but, as a matter of fact, she keeps a scrap-album, and if a week passes that the newspapers do not have some paragraphs about her doings, she begins to get restless.”"<br /><br />Wonder when Upton Sinclair reconciled himself to the fashionable society women, for they're quite the centre as Lanny's home in first few volumes of the World's End series."<br /><br />Soon Lucy experienced something she wasn't expecting, in her naivety.<br /><br />"“He is a monster!” cried Lucy. “I ought to have him put in jail.”<br /><br />"Montague shook his head. “You couldn’t do that,” he said. “I couldn’t!” exclaimed the other.<br /><br />"“Why not?”<br /><br />"“You couldn’t prove it,” said Montague.<br /><br />"“It would be your word against his, and they would take his every time. You can’t go and have Dan Waterman arrested as you could any ordinary man. And think of the notoriety it would mean!”<br /><br />"“I would like to expose him,” protested Lucy. “It would serve him right!”<br /><br />"“It would not do him the least harm in the world,” said Montague. “I can speak quite positively there, for I have seen it tried. You couldn’t get a newspaper in New York to publish that story. All that you could do would be to have yourself blazoned as an adventuress.”<br /><br />"Lucy was staring, with clenched hands. “Why, I might as well be living in Turkey,” she cried.<br /><br />"“Very nearly,” said he. “There’s an old man in this town who has spent his lifetime lending money and hoarding it; he has something like eighty or a hundred millions now, I believe, and once every six months or so you will read in the newspapers that some woman has made an attempt to blackmail him. That is because he does to every pretty girl who comes into his office just exactly what old Waterman did to you; and those who are arrested for blackmail are simply the ones who are so unwise as to make a disturbance.”<br /><br />"“You see, Lucy,” continued Montague, after a pause, “you must realise the situation. This man is a god in New York. He controls all the avenues of wealth; he can make or break any person he chooses. It is really the truth—I believe he could ruin any man in the city whom he chose to set out after. He can have anything that he wants done, so far as the police are concerned. It is simply a matter of paying them. And he is accustomed to rule in everything; his lightest whim is law. If he wants a thing, he buys it, and that is his attitude toward women. He is used to being treated as a master; women seek him, and vie for his favour. If you had been able to hold it, you might have had a million-dollar palace on Riverside Drive, or a cottage with a million-dollar pier at Newport. You might have had carte blanche at all the shops, and all the yachting trips and private trains that you wanted. That is all that other women want, and he could not understand what more you could want.”<br /><br />"“But, Allan!” protested Lucy. “I can’t help thinking what would have happened to me if you had not come on board! I can’t help thinking about other women who must have been caught in such a trap. Why, Allan, I would have been equally helpless—no matter what he had done!”<br /><br />"“I am afraid so,” said he, gravely. “Many a woman has discovered it, I imagine. I understand how you feel, but what can you do about it? You can’t punish men like Waterman. You can’t punish them for anything they do, whether it is monopolising a necessity of life and starving thousands of people to death, or whether it is an attack upon a defenceless woman. There are rich men in this city who make it their diversion to answer advertisements and decoy young girls. A stenographer in my office told me that she had had over twenty positions in one year, and that she had left every one because some man in the office had approached her.”<br /><br />"He paused for a moment. “You see,” he added, “I have been finding out these things. You thought I was unreasonable, but I know what your dangers are. You are a stranger here; you have no friends and no influence, and so you will always be the one to suffer. I don’t mean merely in a case like this, where it comes to the police and the newspapers; I mean in social matters—where it is a question of your reputation, of the interpretation which people will place upon your actions. They have their wealth and their prestige and their privileges, and they stand at bay. They are perfectly willing to give a stranger a good time, if the stranger has a pretty face and a lively wit to entertain them; but when you come to trespass, or to threaten their power, then you find out how they can hate you, and how mercilessly they will slander and ruin you!”"<br />..............<br /><br />Montague takes Lucy to visit General Prentice.<br /><br />"“It seems to be such a widespread movement,” said Montague.<br /><br />"“It seems incredible that any one man could cause such an upset.”<br /><br />"“It is not one man,” said the General, “it is a group of men. I don’t say that it’s true, mind you. I wouldn’t be at liberty to say it even if I knew it; but there are certain things that I have seen, and I have my suspicions of others. And you must realise that a half-dozen men now control about ninety per cent of the banks of this city.”<br /><br />"“Things will get worse before they get any better, I believe,” said Curtiss, after a pause.<br /><br />"“The banking situation in this country at the present moment is simply unendurable; the legitimate banker is practically driven from the field by the speculator. A man finds himself in the position where he has either to submit to the dictation of such men, or else permit himself to be supplanted. It is a new element that has forced itself in. Apparently all a man needs in order to start a bank is credit enough to put up a building with marble columns and bronze gates. I could name you a man who at this moment owns eight banks, and when he started in, three years ago, I don’t believe he owned a million dollars.”<br /><br />"“You buy a piece of land, with as big a mortgage as you can get, and you put up a million-dollar building and mortgage that. You start a trust company, and you get out imposing advertisements, and promise high rates of interest, and the public comes in. Then you hypothecate your stock in company number one, and you have your dummy directors lend you more money, and you buy another trust company. They call that pyramiding—you have heard the term, no doubt, with regard to stocks; it is a fascinating game to play with banks, because the more of them you get, the more prominent you become in the newspapers, and the more the public trusts you.”<br /><br />"There was Stewart, the young Lochinvar out of the West. He had tried to buy the Trust Company of the Republic long ago, and so the General knew him and his methods. He had fought the Copper Trust to a standstill in Montana; the Trust had bought up the Legislature and both political machines, but Cummings had appealed to the public in a series of sensational campaigns, and had got his judges into office, and in the end the Trust had been forced to buy him out. And now he had come to New York to play this new game of bank-gambling, which paid even quicker profits than buying courts.—And then there was Holt, a sporting character, a vulgar man-about-town, who was identified with everything that was low and vile in the city; he, too, had turned his millions into banks.—And there was Cummings, the Ice King, who for years had financed the political machine in the city, and, by securing a monopoly of the docking-privileges, had forced all his rivals to the wall. He had set out to monopolise the coastwise steamship trade of the country, and had bought line after line of vessels by this same device of “pyramiding”; and now, finding that he needed still more money to buy out his rivals, he had purchased or started a dozen or so of trust companies and banks."<br />..............<br /><br />Mrs Billy Alden talking to Montague.<br /><br />"“I judge you have not many enemies,” added Mrs. Billy, after a pause.<br /><br />"“No especial ones,” said he.<br /><br />"“Well,” said she, “you should cultivate some. Enemies are the spice of life. I mean it, really,” she declared, as she saw him smile.<br /><br />"“I had never thought of it,” said he. “Have you never known what it is to get into a really good fight? You see, you are conventional, and you don’t like to acknowledge it. But what is there that wakes one up more than a good, vigorous hatred? Some day you will realise it—the chief zest in life is to go after somebody who hates you, and to get him down and see him squirm.”<br /><br />"“But suppose he gets you down?” interposed Montague.<br /><br />"“Ah!” said she, “you mustn’t let him! That is what you go into the fight for. Get after him, and do him first.”<br /><br />"“It sounds rather barbarous,” said he.<br /><br />"“On the contrary,” was the answer, “it’s the highest reach of civilisation. That is what Society is for—the cultivation of the art of hatred. It is the survival of the fittest in a new realm. You study your victim, you find out his weaknesses and his foibles, and you know just where to plant your sting. You learn what he wants, and you take it away from him. You choose your allies carefully, and you surround him and overwhelm him; then when you get through with him, you go after another.”"<br />..............<br /><br />"The steel situation is a peculiar one. Prices are kept at an altogether artificial level, and there is room for large profits to competitors of the Trust. But those who go into the business commonly find themselves unexpectedly handicapped. They cannot get the credit they want; orders overwhelm them in floods, but Wall Street will not put up money to help them. They find all kinds of powerful interests arrayed against them; there are raids upon their securities in the market, and mysterious rumours begin to circulate. They find suits brought against them which tend to injure their credit. And sometimes they will find important papers missing, important witnesses sailing for Europe, and so on. Then their most efficient employees will be bought up; their very bookkeepers and office-boys will be bribed, and all the secrets of their business passed on to their enemies. They will find that the railroads do not treat them squarely; cars will be slow in coming, and all kinds of petty annoyances will be practised. You know what the rebate is, and you can imagine the part which that plays. In these and a hundred other ways, the path of the independent steel manufacturer is made difficult. And now, Mr. Montague, this is a project to extend a railroad which will be of vast service to the chief competitor of the Steel Trust."<br />...............<br /><br />"I think I told you once how Davy paid forty thousand dollars for the nomination, and went to Congress. It was the year of a Democratic landslide, and they could have elected Reggie Mann if they had felt like it. I went to Washington to live the next winter, and Price was there ....