Transaction Man
The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
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Narrated by:
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Chris Ciulla
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Nicholas Lemann
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By:
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Nicholas Lemann
About this listen
2019 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year
This program includes a prologue and epilogue read by the author.
Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about?
In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States’ - and the world’s - great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s chief theorist of the economy, imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions. By the 1970s, the corporations’ large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences. Today, Silicon Valley titans such as the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope “networks” can reknit our social fabric.
Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, Transaction Man is the definitive account of the reengineering of America - with enormous consequences for all of us.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Nicholas Lemann (P)2019 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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To save the economy and keep Citi afloat in 2008, the government provided huge infusions of cash through multiple bailouts that frustrated and angered the American public. But, as Wall Street Journal writer James Freeman and financial expert Vern McKinley reveal, the 2008 crisis was just one of many disasters Citi has experienced since its founding more than 200 years ago. In Borrowed Time they reveal Citi’s disturbing history of instability and government support. It’s a story that neither Citi nor Washington wants told.
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Biased
- By CF on 08-09-19
By: James Freeman, and others
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The Company
- A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea [Modern Library Chronicles]
- By: John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Company, the largely unknown history of the joint-stock company is presented by the editors of Economist. One of history's greatest catalysts, the joint-stock company has dramatically changed the way human beings live, work, and conduct business. With companies now affecting the world on a global scale, it is more pressing than ever before to understand this driving force.
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unique history with a unique perspective
- By D. Littman on 10-31-05
By: John Micklethwait, and others
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Homewreckers
- How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream
- By: Aaron Glantz
- Narrated by: Paul Bellantoni
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spirit of Evicted, Bait and Switch, and The Big Short, a shocking, heart-wrenching investigation into America’s housing crisis and the modern-day robber barons who are making a fortune off the backs of the disenfranchised working and middle class - among them, Donald Trump and his inner circle.
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Amazing book - I hope it changes things and mobilizes people to take action!
- By WeaverDreams on 10-20-19
By: Aaron Glantz
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Bought and Paid For
- The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street
- By: Charles Gasparino
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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According to business reporter Charles Gasparino, President Obama is faking his outrage at Wall Street, and his calls for new policies to rein in banks that are "too big to fail" are just pabulum. In reality, Obama has climbed into bed with Wall Street CEOs, giving them what they want so they will support his liberal, big-government agenda.
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Revealing and Convincing
- By Walter on 10-24-11
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Confidence Men
- Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
- By: Ron Suskind
- Narrated by: James Lurie
- Length: 22 hrs
- Unabridged
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The hidden history of Wall Street and the White House comes down to a single American concept: confidence. Both centers of power, New York and Washington, learned how to manufacture it - until August 2007, when that confidence began to crumble. Ron Suskind here tells the story of what happened next, as Wall Street struggled to save itself while a man with little experience and soaring rhetoric emerged from obscurity to usher in "a new era of responsibility".
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Insightful, but...
- By Ray on 10-29-11
By: Ron Suskind
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The Alchemists
- Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
- By: Neil Irwin
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes have run into the trillions of dollars. The book begins in, of all places, Stockholm, Sweden, in the 17th century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then progresses through a brisk but dazzling tutorial on how the central banker came to exert such vast influence over our world, from its troubled beginnings to the age of Greenspan, bringing the listener into the present with a marvelous handle on how these figures and institutions became what they are.
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Couldn't Listen to this narrator
- By Donald on 07-23-13
By: Neil Irwin
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Wall Street
- A History, Updated Edition
- By: Charles R. Geisst
- Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
- Length: 27 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Wall Street is an unending source of legend - and nightmares. It is a universal symbol of both the highest aspirations of economic prosperity and the basest impulses of greed and deception. Charles R. Geisst's Wall Street is at once a chronicle of the street itself - from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant - and an engaging economic history of the United States, a tale of profits and losses, enterprising spirits, and key figures that transformed America into the most powerful economy in the world.
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Many books in one; best linking of stories, eras
- By Philo on 03-23-14
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The Great American Stick Up
- Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them
- By: Robert Scheer
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Instead of going where other journalists have gone in search of this story - the board rooms and trading floors of the big Wall Street firms - Scheer goes back to Washington, D.C., a veritable crime scene, beginning in the 1980s, where the captains of the finance industry, their lobbyists and allies among leading politicians destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning effectively since the era of the New Deal.
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A great telling of an unfortunate part of history
- By Trace on 10-27-20
By: Robert Scheer
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How Money Became Dangerous
- The Inside Story of Our Turbulent Relationship with Modern Finance
- By: Christopher Varelas, Dan Stone
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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From a veteran of the trade, a provocative and entertaining voyage into the turbulent heart of modern money that sheds new light on the rise of our threatening and complicated financial system, how money became our adversary, and why finding a new course is crucial to a healthy society.
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Must read
- By Craig M. Stratton on 02-08-20
By: Christopher Varelas, and others
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Money
- The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
- By: Jacob Goldstein
- Narrated by: Jacob Goldstein
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The cohost of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs.
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well researched and written but,
- By C&S on 09-29-20
By: Jacob Goldstein
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Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929
- Oxford University Press: Pivotal Moments in US History
- By: Maury Klein
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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The first major history of the Crash in over a decade, Rainbow's End tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe. The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls.
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Plenty of fine detail, especially of the 1920s
- By Philo on 04-18-13
By: Maury Klein
What listeners say about Transaction Man
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- Philo
- 09-21-19
Meandering story of some important history
The core concept is the nature of the firms, or nowadays, platforms around which mass business and social lives are arrayed. Parts of this are touched on elsewhere (and I think, with better focus, if narrower scope) in the books (with audios available here) The Myth of the Rational Market and Bloodsport. This book wanders back and forth across the line, unable seemingly to decide whether it is a series of personal-interest stories or an ideas book. Maybe the author is trying to be somewhat like Michael Lewis, who has honed the art to wide popularity. I would rate this book as having done an OK job on both aspects, but with major defects touched on below. At the start I was thrilled to see it, as it is a summary of the books of my most intense interest over the last 10 years. It is right in my wheelhouse, as focusing on topics I think of highest importance. For all that, it still seems a little loose for my taste, seeming to wander into very anecdotal tangents.
Rather than laying out a disciplined logical structure and history of the subject, the author gets into side-stories and loses track, a few times completely. The bio of Michael Jensen, for example, would better have spent more of its time on his worthwhile ideas (useful for mapping things out whether you agree with his extremely transactional views or not), rather than the perhaps more popularly engrossing tale of his lark in the spacy personal questing-seminar sort of industry, which I see only as a reflection of his losing his intellectual edge and falling into navel-gazing. Jensen's character flaws are way off the point, in my opinion. Indeed, in the hands of this author, the pure "Transaction Man" (Jensen) becomes a bit laughable (to some), a straw man, given his later strange ramblings (thinking he discovered and is the avatar of "integrity", to my mind perhaps unconsciously cannibalizing and repackaging bits of the Catholic ethics of his childhood) in a setting of peddling carney-huckster self-discovery seminars. All I see here is Jensen falling apart and undergoing a cheesy conversion experience of a type readily available on every corner in the Bay Area of the time (like cheap soap-flakes), perfect for a nerdy egomaniac to fall into, tghe moment when he finally got his nose out of a book, with himself supposedly reborn but in the spotlight as always, as the great prophet. It is for me a sad coda to his moments of genius. Jensen's best ideas are not well fleshed-out here, and the central bio of this book as a result is too distracted and quirky-entertaining. This sideshow the author can misuse to discredit the better features of the Chicago School and its still-useful, if flawed, concepts for framing incentives in business entities and dealings (which have not gone away, despite the author's shoehorning history into his big labels). A little bit of personalizing spice is nice, and sells books I suppose, and here we tend to get an excess, and occasionally, buckets of it. My complaint overall would be, similarly, at the expense of the core ideas, the things labeled here as distinct Institutions, Transactions, and Networks, were all, always, each of those three things, and still are. It is not like one appeared and became extinct and the other arrived (though this labeling has some utility). The conceptualizing around that is mushy, for me. It doesn't really penetrate to where I would like to see this line of thought going, to be truly, deeply influential. For me the book doesn't pierce deep enough beyond its "popular nonfiction book" labels into the underlying ideas. But, it is not useless. Few have focused on this in a popular book, and this one has its virtues as a basic review of (at least a taste of) high-level views of organizations since the Crash of '29. It sticks well enough to its knitting to be worthwhile for me, though parts are very marginal. As for the narration, the warmed-over and informal tone is a semi-poor fit, but it is competent and reasonably listenable.
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- JJ HUNSECKER
- 09-20-19
Maybe the title's an overreach? Excellent though!
First, this book is well written (Mr. Lemann's a longtime writer for The New Yorker and dean of an ivy league english program and he's expert at constructing beautiful sentences which are a joy to read). And, as always, Mr. Lemann is trying to say something interesting here. The detail and specificity of the case histories he uses help to illuminate the bigger theme of the book. But it sometimes feels slightly unfocussed and unfinished, like a late draft, a stack of an excellent pages that's getting close to great in its journey from writer to editor and back again, rather than the finished book. The final chapter feels overly ambitious and, admirably, seems to try to pull together more than what may actually be in the body of the book.
Second, Mr. Ciulla's narration--always a tough thing on which to comment because of its subjectivity--sometimes feels smarmy and overly 'knowing'(?), overly... familiar (is that too old fashioned a characterization?). And, in his reading, he doesn't always seem to distinguish a comma from a period (or maybe it's just a simple lack of familiarity with the material he's narrating and he's winging it a bit too much?) and this is occasionally confusing (like this review?) and may, in some small way, hurt the credibility of the book. But narration is probably the most subjective part of any audiobook, so go figure. I much prefer the author's narration at the start and finish of the book.
But finally this is a serious book meant to be read, as a book, not to be listened to in this, admittedly, half-assed way and my impression of the book probably has more to do with that (being too lazy to sit down and actually read it properly like a book--a behavior and habit symptomatic of one of the larger themes generally cited as contributing to cultural decline in this book) than any faults of the book.
This book is about interesting and vital things. I'd recommend it!
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