The building on this book’s cover is the Second Bank of the United States, located in
Philadelphia. It operated from 1816 to 1836, serving some of the functions of the modern
Federal Reserve. President Andrew Jackson vetoed legislation to extend the Bank’s charter
because he believed it served “moneyed interests” at the expense of common people (see
Chapter 8).
To the right of the Second Bank, the central photo shows a specialist (in a blue coat) and
traders at work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (see Chapter 5). They are
flanked by two currencies. At the top is a gold certificate, a type of money used in the United
States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapter 2); at the bottom are
Japanese yen.
