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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780452008250
ISBN number: 0452008255
Label: Plume
Manufacturer: Plume
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 464
Printing Date: November 01, 1967
Publishing house: Plume
Sale Popularity Level: 65511
Studio: Plume
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Product Description:
This powerful novel explores the dynamics of the financial world during the Civil War and after the stock market panic caused by the Chicago fire. Frank Cowperwood, a ruthlessly dominating broker, climbs the ladder of success, occasionally missing a rung or two, with his loving mistress championing his every move. Ten 90-minute cassettes and four 60's.
Amazon.com Review:
Based on the life of flamboyant financier C.T. Yerkes, Dreiser's portrayal of the unscrupulous magnate Cowperwood embodies the idea that behind every great fortune there is a crime. You don't read Dreiser for literary finesse, but his great intensity and keen journalistic eye give this portrait a powerful reality.
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Rated by buyers 
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Talk about prescience. On the second page of my 2008 Penguin Classics paperback edition Dreiser writes - "There was a perfect plague of State banks, great and small, in those days [i.e., the Jackson era], issuing notes practically without regulations upon insecure and unknown assets and failing and suspending with astonishing rapidity." Dreiser wasn't attempting to predict the future, he was merely observing the way human greed manifests itself in the world of finance.
I won't go into a long dissertation about the novel and what it means. Suffice it to say that reading Dreiser always pasy dividends. Yes, his prose is clunky in places, and he's a bit predictable, but he is a realist par excellence -- every bit as good, if not better, than Zola, Howells, Norris, et al. Reading him with Nietzsche and the Stoics in mind is particularly illuminating (it's not for nothing that Frank Cowperwood's uncle is named Seneca.)
Rated by buyers 
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This book is a must read for any investor. It makes clear that economic bubbles and financial crises have the same causes in all centuries: excessive debt, secured by speculative assets. Once the collateral falls in price, the lender requires to repay the debt or add more collateral. Since the borrower have used excessive leverage, he is unable to handle the debt and goes bankrupt, which leaves the lender with illiquid assets. Here are some examples:
1871: Frank Cowperwood have used stocks of Philadelphia's railroads as a collateral to huge loans, and when the Great Chicago Fire sparked a financial panic, he could neither repay the debt nor add more collateral, thus became insolvent.
1929: Widespread use of margin, of up to 90% was one of the reasons of the Great Depression. The investor could buy $100,000 worth of stock with $10,000 of own cash, borrowing the remaining $90,000 from the broker. The sharp drop of the stock price made the investors unable repay the debt, they became insolvent. The brokers were left with cheap stocks and became insolvent also.
2007: The dot-com bubble of 2000 contributed to the housing bubble. Once stocks fell, real estate became the primary outlet for the speculative frenzy that the stock market had unleashed. The families were buying houses when they knew that they cannot afford the mortgage for a long time, they were buying only to sell it to later at higher price. The rise in home prices was very attractive for construction industry: the number of newly built houses have significantly increased. When the prices of the houses have fallen due to the balance between the supply and demand, the speculators who run out of cash to repay the mortgages could no longer sell the houses at a price they bought. This essentially led homeowners to foreclosures. The great amount of foreclosures have caused huge losses to the lenders, made them insolvent or put under Government's conservatorship, when the shareholder value was diluted if not wiped out.
Although "The Financier" by Theodore Dreiser is not a skilled picture of smallest traits of a human soul when it comes to love and feelings, the financial aspects are very well covered. I recommend the sequels: "The Titan" and "The Stoic", in addition to this book.
Rated by buyers -
This novel, which closely follows the real-life doings of Philadelphia streetcar magnate Charles T. Yerkes, was the very first volume in a trilogy entitled "A Trilogy of Desire." Dreiser, an astute observer of the business world circa 1900, a critic and questioner of some of the ways of capitalism as it was working itself out in America, especially as it created imbalances in wealth and power among the population - a form of social Darwinism that emphasized the idea of "survival of the fittest" at the expense of the poor and weak - chose Yerkes as a model of the man who had made it to the top of the business heap. He infused his fictional character Frank Cowperwood with many of Yerkes's traits: intelligence, cunning, ruthlessness, amorality; and combined these with a firm belief in monopoly as the surest way to power, along with the necessity of political bribery. Cowperwood makes it to the top almost with ease, very first legally with the help of the government's issuing bonds to finance Civil War military campaigns, and then illegally when he uses Philadelphia city funds for his own purposes. While engaged in this latter scheme, the Panic of 1871 exposes his criminality and he goes to prison for it. He feels no remorse for what he's done, and it's while in prison that he falls in love with Aileen Butler, a woman as amoral as he is, and decides, when he gets out, to divorce his wife and take up with her. Sure enough, after making millions in the stock market thanks to another panic that allows him to buy valuable stocks for a fraction of their worth, the book ends with Aileen and him heading west to Chicago on a train.
If Dreiser has a fault it's his tendency in all his novels to overwrite them; he is so stocked with detailed information regarding the affairs of his characters that he loses sight of what to put in and what to exclude. Other than that, his realistic account of Cowperwood and the business practices he utilizes to make his fortune is a powerful examination of not only the Gilded Age, but of American capitalism and American life that has echoes even down to yesterday in our era of corporate greed and Enron trials. Unsettling is the fact that Dreiser has Cowperwood escape with his money and amoral perspectives still intact.
Rated by buyers -
Theodore Dreiser writes a towering novel in The Financier. It would be a grave oversimplification to state that this is a novel about "business". Rather, he is among the very very first American writers that dealt with realism. Frank North was certainly another. Between them they mark an inflection point in writing. They wrote about the world as they saw it, somewhat akin to journalism. They didn't mind, but rather relished, getting "dirty" in the world of commerce. Men toiled in this world - why not write about it and the troubles and ethical delimas created therein?
This work is about a man's drive, his inability to satisfy himself, relationship destruction, identity loss and society. It demonstrates in very real terms how high one can climb and then fall. It is a book that deals with ethics and ponders about whether needs can ever be truly met by the most driven.
This book clearly belongs up there with the great ones. It shows a writing style and a mind of a genius. It also began to set the pace for some great writing in the 20th Century.
Rated by buyers 
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Ah, Theodore Dreiser... Even though I don't really enjoy reading him at times, I can't stay away. This is the third Dreiser book I've read (The other two: The Titan, and Sister Carrie). I would certainly recommend Sister Carrie over The Financier, but I would recommend this book over its succesor, The Titan.
The Financier is the by now familiar tale of the rise/fall/rise of an aspiring financial tycoon. The only difference between Frank Cowperwood (protagonist of The Financier) and the Gordon Gecko of 80's "Wall Street" fame, is that Cowperwood is working in the 1860's , not the 1980's and he lives in Philly, not NYC.
Cowperwood is the son of a bank vice president. He posseses a preternatural gift for finance and an, ahem, well developed, sense of self interest. Cowperwood is the sort of Spencerian/ Darwinian/Nietchzian "super man" that is as common in early twentieth century American fiction as the self obsessed yuppie has become in early twenty very first century American television.
Cowperwood's catch phrase during this book is "I satisfy myself." Personally, I found that phrase a tad redolent of omanism, if you know what I mean, but I'm sure Dreiser had the purest of intentions at the time.
The plot of the book concerns machinations involving Cowperwood and his handling of city bonds. I know, it sounds dry. Well, it is dry, and boring, especially for the very first hundred and fifty pages, where Dresier seems intent on teaching the readers all about the operation of financial markets in Philly in the 1860's.
The story picks up when a fire hits Chicago, and Cowperwood's shenanigans are detected. Cowperwood is then tried, convicted and sent to prison. It's a good time. Makes for fun reading.
Of almost equal importance is Cowperwood's penchant for the illicit affair. His courtship of Aileen Butler, the daughter of one of his patrons, absorbs a good forty percent of the book. In "The Titan", Butler becomes his wife when they move to Chicago.
Overall, I'd say the book is worth checking out if only for Dreiser's reportage. You can practically taste the 1860's. Also notable is his expert discusion of financial markets in that period, and I might add, his lovely descrption of conditions at the Eastern Pentitentiary.
Check it out.
If you like this book, you might also want to check out the Titan, Sister Carrie, Frank Norris's "The Pit" and that same author's "The Octopus", for similarly themed work.
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