A Piece of the Action - How The Middle Class Joined The Money Class (1994)

Winner of the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism One of Business Week 's "Ten Best Business Books of the Year" When it was published in 1994, A Piece of the Action was wildly acclaimed by Fortune , The Wall Street Journal , authors Michael Lewis and Brian Burroughs; it won the Helen Bernstein Prize and was a national bestseller. Joseph Nocera describes the historical process by which millions of middle class Americans went from being savers--people who kept their money in the bank, and spent it frugally--to being unrepentant borrowers and investors. A Piece of the Action is an important piece of financial and social history, and with a new introduction, Nocera's 2013 critique of the uses of the revolution is a powerful warning and admonition to understand what is at stake before we act, to look before we jump. A Piece of the Action begins with the Bank of America's decision to drop credit cards on the unsuspecting citizens of Fresno, California, and the hatching, in relative obscurity, of what has become the key middle-class investing tool, the money market mutual fund. Nocera tells the true tale of great visionaries such as Charlie Merrill (founder of Merrill Lynch) and Dee Hock (creator of Visa), great innovators like Ned Johnson (who, as the untested head of Fidelity Investments, attached check-writing to money funds) and Andrew Kahr (the strange consultant who devised the cash management account and the "non-bank bank"), great investors like Peter Lynch, and great gamblers like Charles Schwab (who put together a nationwide network of storefront discount brokerages) and John Reed (whose $500 million bet pushed Citibank to the top of the credit card world). Nocera reveals not just how the financial world changed but how we changed, too. An America that barely knew the difference between a stock and a bond thirty-five years ago, that prized thrift and security above all, is fueling today's stock market and caught up in its mood swings. This is the story of how that happened and why - and what it means to all of us.

In this entertaining chronicle, Nocera illuminates how the vision and ambition of pioneers like Charles Merrill, Gerry Tsai, Dee Hock, and Peter Lynch reshaped the American economy and brought the rewards--and risks--of financial opportunity to the middle class for the first time in history.

AMERICA BEGAN TO CHANGE on a mid-September day in 1958, when the Bank of America dropped its first 60,000 credit cards on the unassuming city of Fresno, California. Reveals how the credit card and the mutual fund opened doors to the financial world and let the middle class in.