1. No banks without states, and no states without banks
If stable and efficient banks are such a good idea, why are they so rare?
The game of bank bargains
Tools of conquest and survival: why states need banks
Privileges with burdens: war, empire, and the monopoly structure of English banking
Banks and democracy: Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
2. The cost of banker-populist alliances: the United States versus Canada
Crippled by populism: U.S. banking from colonial times to 1990
The new U.S. bank bargain: megabanks, urban activists, and the erosion of mortgage standards
Leverage, regulatory failure, and the subprime crisis
Durable partners: politics and banking in Canada
3. Authoritarianism, democratic transitions, and the game of bank bargains
Mexico: chaos makes cronyism look good
When autocracy fails: banking and politics in Mexico since 1982
Inflation machines: banking and state finance in imperial Brazil
The democratic consequences of inflation-tax banking in Brazil
4. Going beyond structural narratives
Traveling to other places: is our sample representative?
Reality is a plague on many houses.
