A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.
--The Atlantic

Extraordinary... Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that's often ignored

With the nation lurching from one crisis to the next, many Americans believe that something fundamental has gone wrong. Why aren't college graduates able to achieve financial security? Why is government completely inept in the face of natural disasters? And why do pundits tell us that the economy is strong even though the majority of Americans can barely make ends meet? In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa Baradaran, one of our leading public intellectuals, argues that the system is in fact rigged toward the powerful, though it wasn't the work of evil puppet masters behind the curtain. Rather, the rigging was carried out by hundreds of (mostly) law-abiding lawyers, judges, regulators, policy makers, and lobbyists. Adherents of a market-centered doctrine called neoliberalism, these individuals, over the course of decades, worked to transform the nation--and succeeded.

They did so by changing the law in unseen ways. Tracing this largely unknown history from the late 1960s to the present, Baradaran demonstrates that far from yielding fewer laws and regulations, neoliberalism has in fact always meant more--and more complex--laws. Those laws have uniformly benefited the wealthy. From the work of a young Alan Greenspan in creating Black Capitalism, to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell's efforts to unshackle big money donors, to the establishment of the Law and Economics approach to legal interpretation--in which judges render opinions based on the principles of right-wing economics--Baradaran narrates the key moments in the slow-moving coup that was, and is, neoliberalism. Shifting our focus away from presidents and national policy, she tells the story of how this nation's laws came to favor the few against the many, threatening the integrity of the market and the state.

Some have claimed that the neoliberal era is behind us. Baradaran shows that such thinking is misguided. Neoliberalism is a failed economic idea--it doesn't, in fact, create more wealth or more freedom. But it has been successful nevertheless, by seizing the courts and enabling our age of crypto fraud, financial instability, and accelerating inequality. An original account of the forces that have brought us to this dangerous moment in American history, The Quiet Coup reshapes our understanding of the recent past and lights a path toward a better future.

This is a kids' book about banking. When you think of a bank, what comes to mind? A building? A safe filled with gold? What if we told you banks weren't any of these things? And (get ready for this)... most money isn't even kept in the bank!

This book was made to help kids aged 5-9 understand banking and how it works. They will learn how banks allow money to move from one place to another, creating opportunities and growth - but they only work with a shared belief in the magic of money!

A Kids Book About Banking features:

• A large and bold, yet minimalist font design that allows kids freedom to imagine themselves in the words on the pages.
• A friendly, approachable, empowering, and child-appropriate tone throughout.
• An incredible and diverse group of authors in the series who are experts or have first-hand experience of the topic.

The A Kids Book About titles are best used when read together. Helping to kickstart important, challenging, and empowering conversations for kids and their grown-ups through beautiful and thought-provoking pages. The series supports an incredible and diverse group of authors, who are either experts in their field, or have first-hand experience on the topic.

A Kids Co. is a new kind of media company enabling kids to explore big topics in a new and engaging way, with a growing series of books, podcasts, and blogs made to empower. Learn more about us online by searching for A Kids Co.

The United States has two separate banking systems today--one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. How the Other Half Banks contributes to the growing conversation on American inequality by highlighting one of its prime causes: unequal credit. Mehrsa Baradaran examines how a significant portion of the population, deserted by banks, is forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services to cover emergency expenses and pay for necessities--all thanks to deregulation that began in the 1970s and continues decades later.

Baradaran argues persuasively that the banking industry, fattened on public subsidies (including too-big-to-fail bailouts), owes low-income families a better deal...How the Other Half Banks is well researched and clearly written...The bankers who fully understand the system are heavily invested in it. Books like this are written for the rest of us.
--Nancy Folbre, New York Times Book Review

How the Other Half Banks tells an important story, one in which we have allowed the profit motives of banks to trump the public interest.
--Lisa J. Servon, American Prospect

Read this book. It explains so much about the moment...Beautiful, heartbreaking work.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. Instead, housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies created an inescapable, but hard to detect, economic trap for black communities and their banks.

The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. Not only could black banks not control the black dollar due to the dynamics of bank depositing and lending but they drained black capital into white banks, leaving the black economy with the scraps.

Baradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap. These initiatives have functioned as a potent political decoy to avoid more fundamental reforms and racial redress. Examining the fruits of past policies and the operation of banking in a segregated economy, she makes clear that only bolder, more realistic views of banking's relation to black communities will end the cycle of poverty and promote black wealth.

Banks aren't buildings full of gold but are currents where digital money flows.

Money is a current-a wave of potential, hope, and energy. Money is an idea we all agree on. Money is valuable because we all believe it has value.

When you think of a bank, what comes to mind? A building? A safe? A locked box full of gold? What if we told you banks weren't any of these things? And (get ready for this)...most money isn't even kept in the bank! Banking is a system that allows money to move from one place to another, creating opportunities and growth. And banks only work well with trust, community, and a shared belief in the magic of money.