| CLASS # | TOPICS | ASSIGNMENTS DUE |
|---|---|---|
| Part I: Finance Before 1800 | ||
| 1 | Introduction: Studying Finance as a Social Technology | |
| 2 | Italian Innovations: Late Medieval and Renaissance Technologies of Finance | |
| 3 |
The "Golden Age" of Dutch Finance Recitation 1: Introduction; Finance as Technology; Italian and Dutch Sources | |
| 4 | Credit and Credibility in Britain's "Financial Revolution" | |
| 5 |
First Crashes: The Bubbles of 1720 Recitation 2: North & Weingast; The Bubbles of 1720; Discuss Paper 1 | |
| Part II: Making A Financial World, 1800-1945 | ||
| 6 | Financing a New Nation: The U.S. "Financial Revolution" of the 1790s | |
| 7 |
Capitalizing on Lives in the 19th Century, Free and Unfree Recitation 3: Hamilton vs Logan; Finance and Slavery | |
| 8 | Making Money in 19th Century America | Paper 1 due |
| 9 |
Financial Empires and Global Crises in the Late 19th Century Recitation 4: Andrew Jackson; Fowler on Wall Street; Lawson on "Gaucho Banking" | |
| 10 | Pricing the Future: Chicago and the Commodities Trade, 1850-1900 | |
| 11 |
Other People's Money?: Big Banks and Big Bankers in the Early 20th Century Recitation 5: "A Corner on Wheat" (film); Conant vs Brandeis on Bankers | |
| 12 | Before Black Tuesday: Marginal Investments and the Roaring Twenties | |
| 13 |
Black Tuesday and Beyond: The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression Recitation 6: Crowther & Raskob, "Everybody Ought to Be Rich"; Reacting to the "Great Crash" | |
| Part III: Mathematization and Financialization, 1945-2000 | ||
| 14 | Random Walks and Wall Street: A New Mathematics of Finance | |
| 15 |
Performing Financial Theories: The Black-Scholes Model and Its World Recitation 7: Fama on Efficient Markets; Mackenzie on the "Performativity" of Black-Scholes | Paper 2 due |
| 16 | "Greed Is Good?": Finance Takes Over in the '80s | |
| 17 |
Financialization and Deregulation at the End of the 20th Century Recitation 8: Friedman, Jensen, Clinton | |
| 18 | In-class Exam | |
| Part IV: Finance and Its Futures in the 21st Century | ||
| 19 |
Financial Globalization and its Discontents Recitation 9: Discuss paper revision; Debating Debt and the Debt Vultures | |
| 20 |
Arbitrage: The Philosophy and Practice of Trading in Modern Finance Recitation 10: Two Perspectives on Arbitrage | |
| 21 | (In)Securitization: Financial Engineering and the Great Crash of 2008 | |
| 22 |
Meltdown: Thinking About Risk and Regulation in Finance Recitation 11: Explaining the Crisis of 2008; "The Big Short"; Was 2008 a "Normal Accident"? | Paper revision due |
| 23 | High-Frequency Trading and the Materiality of Finance in a Digital Age | |
| 24 |
Engineering Alternative Futures: Islamic Banking and Bitcoin Recitation 12: Finance, Technology, and the Future | |
| 25 | Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Finance, Innovation, and Philanthropy | |
| 26 | Finance and the Limits of the Technological | Paper 3 due |