Finance

The Millionaires' Factory: The inside story of how Macquarie became a global giant by Joyce Moullakis and Chris Wright

May 2023, no. 453

Respected, not always loved, Macquarie is an exceptional ‘Australian and global financial success story’. So says Steve Harker, a rival investment banker from Morgan Stanley, quoted on the back of this book. The authors tackle an intriguing question: how a bonsai operation grew tall, dominating parts of the world of financial engineering. In 400 pages, with a useful index, plus 25,000 words of notes accessible via a QR code, Moullakis and Wright, two senior financial journalists, provide insights into Macquarie, Australia’s only significant global financial institution, which today directly employs more than 17,000 people in thirty-three countries.

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The Money Power: Four books on the big banks

by Benjamin Huf •

November 2019, no. 416

Ben Huf reviews 'Banking Bad' by Adele Ferguson, 'It’s Your Money' by Alan Kohler, 'The People vs The Banks' by Michael Roddan, and 'A Wunch of Bankers' by Daniel Ziffer

Bank bashing is an old sport in Australia, older than Federation. In 1910, when Labor became the first party to form a majority government in the new Commonwealth Parliament, they took the Money Power – banks, insurers, financiers – as their arch nemesis. With memories of the 1890s crisis of banking collapses, great strikes, and class conflict still raw, the following year the Fisher government established the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ‘The People’s Bank’, as a state-owned trading bank offering cheap loans and government-guaranteed deposits to provide stiff competition to the greedy commercial banks gouging its customers.

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Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world by Adam Tooze

by Rémy Davison •

December 2018, no. 407

Rémy Davison reviews 'Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world' by Adam Tooze

In 1996 the pre-eminent political economist Susan Strange published her final book, The Retreat of the State. Strange had dedicated most of her career to studying the ability of the state to tame the power of international finance. The nexus between state and firm had empowered the United States for more than a century ...

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