The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry

"A fascinating account of the early twentieth century emergence of a stock-market-oriented economy." —BusinessWeek

American companies once focused exclusively on providing the best products and services. But today, most corporations are obsessed with maximizing their stock prices, resulting in short-term thinking and the kind of cook-the-books corruption seen in the Enron and WorldCom scandals of the first decade of the twenty-first century. How did this happen?

In this groundbreaking...