A Counterfeiter's Paradise - Ben Tarnoff

As Ben Tarnoff reminds us in this entertaining narrative history,
get-rich-quick schemes are as old as America itself. Indeed, the
speculative ethos that pervades Wall Street today, Tarnoff suggests,
has its origins in the counterfeiters who first took advantage of
America's turbulent economy. In A Counterfeiter's Paradise,
Tarnoff chronicles the lives of three colorful counterfeiters who
flourished in early America, from the colonial period to the Civil War.
Driven by desire for fortune and fame, each counterfeiter cunningly
manipulated the political and economic realities of his day. Through
the tales of these three memorable hustlers, Tarnoff tells the larger
tale of America's financial coming-of-age, from a patchwork of colonies
to a powerful nation with a single currency.