Fragile by Design by Charles W. Calomiris, Stephen H. Haber. Knowingo.

At a glance

You will see how an unlikely alliance of megabanks and urban activists shaped American lending before the subprime crisis
You will understand the Game of Bank Bargains, in which groups with clashing interests form coalitions that decide what banks will exist
You will be able to read a banking system as the product of political debate and coalition, not only as a market

Dedication Page
PREFACE
Section One: No Banks without States, and No States without Banks
1 If Stable and Efficient Banks Are Such a Good Idea, Why Are They So Rare?
2 The Game of Bank Bargains
3 Tools of Conquest and Survival: Why States Need Banks
4 Privileges with Burdens: War, Empire, and the Monopoly Structure of English Banking
5 Banks and Democracy: Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Section Two: The Cost of Banker-Populist Alliances: The United States versus Canada
6 Crippled by Populism: U.S. Banking from Colonial Times to 1990
7 The New U.S. Bank Bargain: Megabanks, Urban Activists, and the Erosion of Mortgage Standards
8 Leverage, Regulatory Failure, and the Subprime Crisis
9 Durable Partners: Politics and Banking in Canada
Section Three: Authoritarianism, Democratic Transitions, and the Game of Bank Bargains
10 Mexico: Chaos Makes Cronyism Look Good
11 When Autocracy Fails: Banking and Politics in Mexico since 1982
12 Inflation Machines: Banking and State Finance in Imperial Brazil
13 The Democratic Consequences of Inflation-Tax Banking in Brazil
Section Four: Going beyond Structural Narratives
14 Traveling to Other Places: Is Our Sample Representative?
15 Reality Is a Plague on Many Houses