TomDispatch.com has a great piece up about “masters of a secretive, sometimes volatile financial universe” ( in other words folks like hedge fund manager John Paulson of Paulson & Co). Steve Frasesr (author of the new book Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace)  traces these “masters” from the 18th century through today:

Fraser, whose book is simply superb (and, in this age of information onslaught, mercifully short), offers a brief history of key images of Wall Street movers and shakers — the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist — taking you on a concise tour of America’s love/hate relationship with Wall Street from the founding of the republic to late last night. [TomDispatch]

On TomDispatch Fraser has a piece up called The Great Silence : Our Gilded Age and Theirs -it explores where we are today and how it relates to the end of the 19th century. As I learned in my first history class, “history always repeats itself”:

Google “second Gilded Age” and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: it’s a matter of déjà vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened “gilded” in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?

Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in The Gilded Age, is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsized as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad’s chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president, to loot the federal treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policy-making. A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq was conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand-strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America. [Fraser on TomDispatch]

For more please visit TomDispatch to read the entire piece and be sure to and read Fraser’s new book!