A Piece of the Action

In 1958, Bank of America dropped its first 60,000 credit cards on the unassuming city of Fresno, California. This began one of the most astonishing revolutions in modern American life: What I label “the money revolution. ” For decades following, the middle class gained access to credit cards, to mutual funds, retirement accounts—and hundreds of other financial vehicles. In this lively and engaging book, I tell the story of some of the great financial characters of recent times: from turn-of-the-century financiers like John Pierpont Morgan and J. P. Getty to today’s workers at Fidelity Investments and PricewaterhouseCoopers.