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Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.
'Jackson’s account is well worth reading because of the power and continuing resonance of his central insight - impunity facilitated capitalism.’
Robert Kuttner Source: The New York Review of Books
‘[The author] takes on dense and unfathomable sources and debates that few have the temerity to tackle. Unsurprisingly, he has written a complex and sometimes difficult book. It is a measure of his achievement, however, that he has turned difficult material into such a readable account, teeming with biographical studies of colorful characters and the dramas of their age.’
Simon Middleton Source: William and Mary Quarterly
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