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I finished listening to All The President's Bankers by Nomi Prins

I think it's her best book (reading chronologically from earliest release to latest, so this doesn't include the 2 books released after this one) yet! I will say, it's a big book, it gets detailed, it's dense, and that's really nothing new with Nomi Prins. Is it fun to read??? Um...depends on your definition of fun but I will say that I enjoyed it.

What I love in particular is how she goes chronologically, starting with bankers going to Jekyll Island to create the Federal Reserve. She discusses how bankers went from hiding in the shadows to get banker friendly legislation into government. She discusses bankers relationship with each president of the time. And slowly overtime with money, the media and time the bankers while no longer in the shadows have create enough pull in government to make it nearly impossible to stay at the white house, or be successful without them. It has become an unspoken agreement that Presidents will do what needs to be done to keep them going.

One thing I found particularly interesting is Nomi Prins previous distaste for the Republican party has slowly disseminated into Democratic party after Clinton and Obama also were Banker friendly. It looks like she's seeing, it doesn't matter what party it is, if they are still working with the Bankers, they still suck.

Anyways, it's an incredibly informative book. I'd recommend a read if you want to get good detail on how Bankers started getting into government and how over time they made it their world. Very good read.

I never previously intentionally consumed media about the Royal Family. I just didn't have an interest in reading about them.

Then Prince Harry left and I was somewhat intrigued, but still not enough to follow the journey.

Then I saw this book and I read the synopsis and thought, oh his story sounds like it could be relatable. Not being astronomically rich but being the scapegoat, the black-sheep. Reading how he was really treated as a backup plan sounded incredibly intriguing given the context of his upbringing.

But I haven't even gotten through the first part of the book yet and it's unbearably boring. There are glimmers of this book where I feel empathy and compassion, but really the way this book is written overall was boring.

In between those glimpses of compassion I have for him, the book is a pain to read. So I'm officially putting this book down so I can move onto something that doesn't feel like a drag.

I really truely wanted to finish this book and I had hoped for an emotional book about growing up in such a home as his, but in reality it seemed like a hazy and shallow (perhaps due to memory as he stated himself) recount of some events in his life that may or may not have substance.

Nomi Prins delivered another jam packed book, and this time, it was way easier to read!

Compared to her previous book "Other People's Money", it is understandable, clear, and direct. This book is also a lot shorter, and has a much more impactful message. It does start out a bit dry, but as the book continued I felt more and more invested.

She beautifully describes the importance of having a government that actually looks out for the people. How meaningful it is when the people who make this country the what it is are taken care of by the very government that serves them.

Her message really resonated with me, and the way she brought these interviews together to describe the wider issue was really grounding.

It brings these large country wide issues down to the individual person. Showing the disconnect between the government and its people.

I'd definitely recommend this book if you want to learn the effect the government has on its people through policies good or bad, and how to address the problems with thr bad policies.

This book may be written I'm 2006, but it still seems eerily relevant to know this history for us today.

I really wanted to love this book, but as I got through the first half, I wasn't really liking it, it wasn't until the "Growth" chapter that I liked some of the pages. But overall, it didn't really love it.

I don't want to be too harsh, I was excited to begin reading it. However, as I began reading through, it became repetitive. It feels as though it's trying to force deep feelings that aren't showing up for me. Perhaps a feeling of...connection to the reader and to provide a sense of clarity to the reader. I did not feel either of those. Then when I got to the Growth chapter, and I found the pages that I could connect with and brought clairty to some ideas I may have thought about before. So I have mixed feelings.

The book has a lot of "you" statements, which is not bad, but it can feel like the writer is telling me what is going to work, without really expanding on their thoughts and ideas, but other times it feels like good advice or something I actually might want to remember.

So for the times I couldn't connect with the words, it felt like it was written at me, but when I found one that I really liked it felt more like a bit of advice that helps connect the dots better.

So overall, it's an okay book, with a few nuggets that I enjoyed.

This is normally not the kind of book I would pick up and decide to read. However, getting involved in the APEs community after the GME sneeze, I was beginning to learn some of the corruption that was taking place. Nomi Prins name had come up in the Superstonk community and it was then that I decided I was gonna try to read her books.

This is the second book I've read by her, however the first non-fiction book I read by her. This book reminded me about my smooth brain when it comes to finance. I will say though, I certainly gained a few wrinkles at least. No doubt, after reading this book. However there are still many things to learn before I really truely comprehend this book.

From what I do understand is that no matter the time, there is always corruption going on, and it goes back far into history.

Given Nomi Prins proximity to the heart of the corruption occurring and her amazing knowledge on the inner workings, this book is a wealth of information. It is jam packed and at times a bit hard to read, probably due to the target audience not being someone like me. Perhaps a book for someone to read if they themselves have a finance background. The level of detail she gets into is truely astounding, however it certainly feels very hard to read at times. There are still many moments when it feels like I'm finally understanding and putting some pieces together. So I wouldn't say it's unreadable.

It's a great book that gets into the nitty gritty history and happenings of the crash in the 2000s, a time when I myself was only a child. So its interesting to think about some of the news I was seeing back then and applying a deeper understanding to what was happening around that time and providing more context.

It's also a great backdrop to understanding what is currently happening now and how deep it goes and how difficult it can be to get these issues resolved.

So, if you're like me, it will be a slow crawl with your favorite search engine to get to the end of the book, but you'll certainly learn something or two by the end.

To be honest I came across this book because my husband has done an incredible amount of reading about the stock market since January 2021. The month that GameStop Stock (GME) had the epic sneeze and when many brokers prevented retail investors from buying into GME.

While that was the beginning of our story, it has continued into much more than that. So eventually, we found Nomi Prins. We bought 6 of her books to get the perspective of someone who's been on the inside. I began reading Black Tuesday, thinking it was going to be a historical account of the 1929 market crash, so I thought it would be a good start. Then I realized after reading the back of the book, it's actually a novel! I was so surprised. I looked at the cover to find the small print of "A Novel" under the massive title "Black Tuesday". Of course that didn't stop me, but I felt I may need to revise my expectations. I still love fiction, but I was thinking I would read some hard facts. Nonetheless, I continued with an open heart to see what this book would have in store for me.

The author does a good job of painting a picture of what it's like to live in 1929. Sometimes it's even relatable, closing the gap of 90 years between the story itself and current times. It seems history repeats itself, or some things don't change.

So, it follows the main character Leila, who immigrated to America from Russia with her younger sister. She lives with her aunt and 2 cousins in an apartment. She begins working at a diner, which the Wall Street men frequent. This is in essence the ground for the story to build on. I feel the story overall was really well done and it felt the story unfolded naturally, and left me wonder "oh what will she do?!" pretty often. Reading her thought process, and how Leila navigated some really interesting and complicated feelings, emotions and morally grey actions.

I will say, I found some of the interpersonal conflict resolution with her family/Nelson (bf) to be unrealistic at times, but it was generally always very compassionate and forgiving. I don't like realism all the time so this was a welcome "unrealism".

It's a story about a woman who's trying to figure out her place in the world, while balancing obligations and her own wants/needs. Her family can be suffocating, but they are supportive, while poor; which is contrasted against the "other" world of Wall Street, where there is only conniving and deceit, with loyalty to whoever has the most money. It's creating loyalties with other people within the system, like the judges, lawyers, and other rich people. It's planning what to tell the media, it's blackmail of those who inherit money, it's killing people who are looking for the truth, it's beating people to hide the truth.

The end of the book was not a happily ever after, however, it left me feeling satisfied, and ready to dive into the next Nomi Prins book. It's wasn't all sunshine's and rainbows, but just like in real life, we all must move on for ourselves.

Impressions of part one:

I enjoyed the story about David and Goliath, though it was hard to follow at the beginning, once I got to the meat of the story it became much more interesting. Then the expansion to how "underdogs" seem to win with the example of the young girls basketball team was a fub story!

The book takes a turn to the school system to discuss the inverted U curve. Where briefly he talks about how "society" has a belief that is simply not true ( ex: smaller classes = better classes), but because people believe it, it still is prominent.

Impressions about Part 2:

It seems this portion of the book very loosely ties to the title of the book, and is about how "misfits" can succeed because of the trait/truama that made them a misfit. So if I had to guess how this ties to the title of the book, it's how "David's" are made and how their experiences of life lead them to defeat the "Goliaths".

The vibe I got was, "The diversity of life experiences also brings in new ideas and solutions."

However, it is also somewhat grey in the area about the methods these people use to get to where they want to be. Tricking and pretending and "not playing by the rules" because the rules didn't apply fairly to them, so they scrapped the rules and found a way.

It begs that age old question about "Do the ends justify the means?" And the book doesn't specifically say yes or no. It's a morally grey area that one could take a moral high ground, at the expense of empathy for the struggles these people went through.

However, the next part does seem to counter this point with a story about how allowing our emotions to dictate the prison sentences doesn't necessarily mean better results either.

So the usual theme I've read seems to be: there needs to be a balance and no one knows that balance without trying.

Part Three Impressions:

This part seems to bring in new stories reinforce some of the points in Part 2 (being othered and tie them back to part) and timing back to Part 1's inverted U-curve. I think ending seemed abrupt almost like something was missing.

Overall, the book was not a bad read, it provides some good incite and provided thought-provoking stories woven together to discuss statistics and numbers. I think it had a stronger start, and the interest for me slowly dwindle towards the end.