EVERYONE OUGHT TO BE RICH

by Farber

Today, consumer credit, employee stock options, and citizen investment in the stock market are taken for granted -- fundamental facts of American economic life. But few people realize that they were first widely promoted by John Jakob Raskob (1879-1950), the innovative financier and self-made businessman who built the Empire State building, made millions for DuPont and General Motors, and helped shape the contours of modern capitalism.

David Farber's 'Everybody Ought to Be Rich' is the first biography of Raskob, a man who shunned the limelight (he was the anti-Trump of his time) but whose impact on free market enterprise can hardly be overstated. A colorful figure, Raskob's life evokes the roaring twenties, the Catholic elite, the boardrooms of America's biggest corporations, and the rags-to-riches tale that is central to the American dream. Farber follows Raskob's remarkable trajectory from a teenage candy seller on the railway between Lockport and Buffalo to the pinnacles of wealth and power.

With no formal education but possessed of a boundless energy and an unshakeable faith in individual initiative (his motto was "Go ahead and do something!"), Raskob partnered with great industrialists and financiers, buying up companies, leveraging investments, reorganizing corporations, funneling money into the political system, and creating new pools of credit for rich investors and middle class consumers alike--practices commonplace today but revolutionary at the time. His most famous innovation was mass consumer credit, which he offered to individual car buyers, enabling working and middle-class Americans to purchase GM's more expensive cars. Raskob desperately wanted to bridge class divides and to share the wealth American corporations were fast creating--so that everyone could be rich.

Chronicling Raskob's short-comings as well as his successes, 'Everybody Ought to Be Rich' illuminates a crucial but little-known figure in American capitalism whose influence can still be felt today.

Genres: Biography

361 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really wish that when you mark something as "to read" that Goodreads had a field where I could add info about who recommended this book, or where I heard about it. I have no idea how I heard about this biography. I typically don't read biographies. Perhaps it's because I read media about the new musical "Empire" that premiered off-Broadway in January. Perhaps it was in an industry publication I read, since John Raskob did some very early and innovative fundraising in the first few decades of the 20th century. Or, maybe at one point Amazon offered it free on Kindle and I downloaded it. I don't know.
Through this book, you learn a lot about the US and how, even in 1901, there were so many systems not yet written into existence. John Raskob worked his way up and into extreme wealth, even withstanding the Great Depression. I think it's worth a read.

[Theodore Kinni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific bio of a major, but relatively unknown figure in business finance in the early 1900s. Raskob's financial acumen helped transform DuPont into a leading company and GM become the world's leading car maker - he created GMAC, a major growth engine for the automaker. He also developed the Empire State Building.