When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great ...

(This) lively new book by New York University economist William Silber, When Washington Shut Down Wall Street, makes a convincing plea for the inclusion of William McAdoo in the Dollar Pantheon.More than just a ripping yarn--and it is that--(When Washington Shut Down Wall Street) is a cautionary tale of how humankind can get suckered into so believing economic myths that they take on a dangerous reality.When I first picked up this book, I wondered whether it described events so long ago that they were irrelevant today and whether it would be written in such an academic fashion as to be turgid and unreadable for the ordinary mortal interested in business and a good read. Well, I was wrong on both counts.It is an engaging story; part economic history, part how-to manual on dealing with financial crises. . . . William Silber's main contention . . . is well taken. It takes a lot to uproot an incumbent world financial leader. Potential rivals need to be smart enough to take advantage if and when a moment of opportunity arises--a moment that almost by definition will be one of global financial crisis.In his fascinating work of financial history, When Washington Shut Down Wall Street, William L. Silber recounts the heroics of Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, who closed the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months--four months!--in 1914 to avert a larger economic crisis. . . . It was, as Silber explains, a brilliant exercise of arbitrary power that helped propel the United States toward global financial supremacy.This short volume tells the intriguing tale of how the financial crisis wrought by Europe's plunge into World War I opened the door to America's emergence as the world's dominant financial and economic power. Few writers have paid much attention to the closing of the Exchange, except as a curiosity exemplifying the shock experienced by Americans when the war came. Silber has done historians a favor by placing that event in a context that reveals it