# Calendar

Course calendar.
CLASS # | TOPICS | ASSIGNMENTS DUE
--- | --- | ---
Part I: Finance Before 1800
1 | Introduction: Studying Finance as a Social Technology |
2 | Italian Innovations: Late Medieval and Renaissance Technologies of Finance |
3 | The "Golden Age" of Dutch Finance Recitation 1: Introduction; Finance as Technology; Italian and Dutch Sources |
4 | Credit and Credibility in Britain's "Financial Revolution" |
5 | First Crashes: The Bubbles of 1720 Recitation 2: North & Weingast; The Bubbles of 1720; Discuss Paper 1 |
Part II: Making A Financial World, 1800-1945
6 | Financing a New Nation: The U.S. "Financial Revolution" of the 1790s |
7 | Capitalizing on Lives in the 19th Century, Free and Unfree Recitation 3: Hamilton vs Logan; Finance and Slavery |
8 | Making Money in 19th Century America | Paper 1 due
9 | Financial Empires and Global Crises in the Late 19th Century Recitation 4: Andrew Jackson; Fowler on Wall Street; Lawson on "Gaucho Banking" |
10 | Pricing the Future: Chicago and the Commodities Trade, 1850-1900 |
11 | Other People's Money?: Big Banks and Big Bankers in the Early 20th Century Recitation 5: "A Corner on Wheat" (film); Conant vs Brandeis on Bankers |
12 | Before Black Tuesday: Marginal Investments and the Roaring Twenties |
13 | Black Tuesday and Beyond: The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression Recitation 6: Crowther & Raskob, "Everybody Ought to Be Rich"; Reacting to the "Great Crash" |
Part III: Mathematization and Financialization, 1945-2000
14 | Random Walks and Wall Street: A New Mathematics of Finance |
15 | Performing Financial Theories: The Black-Scholes Model and Its World Recitation 7: Fama on Efficient Markets; Mackenzie on the "Performativity" of Black-Scholes | Paper 2 due
16 | "Greed Is Good?": Finance Takes Over in the '80s |
17 | Financialization and Deregulation at the End of the 20th Century Recitation 8: Friedman, Jensen, Clinton |
18 | In-class Exam |
Part IV: Finance and Its Futures in the 21st Century
19 | Financial Globalization and its Discontents Recitation 9: Discuss paper revision; Debating Debt and the Debt Vultures |
20 | Arbitrage: The Philosophy and Practice of Trading in Modern Finance Recitation 10: Two Perspectives on Arbitrage |
21 | (In)Securitization: Financial Engineering and the Great Crash of 2008 |
22 | Meltdown: Thinking About Risk and Regulation in Finance Recitation 11: Explaining the Crisis of 2008; "The Big Short"; Was 2008 a "Normal Accident"? | Paper revision due
23 | High-Frequency Trading and the Materiality of Finance in a Digital Age |
24 | Engineering Alternative Futures: Islamic Banking and Bitcoin Recitation 12: Finance, Technology, and the Future |
25 | Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Finance, Innovation, and Philanthropy |
26 | Finance and the Limits of the Technological | Paper 3 due