Other People's Money And How the Bankers Use It is a collection of essays written by Louis Brandeis and includes the following information:
-- Our Financial Oligarchy
-- How the Combiners Combine
-- Interlocking Directorates
-- Serve One Master Only!
-- What Publicity Can Do
-- Where the Banker is Superfluous
-- Big Men and Little Business
-- A Curse of Bigness
-- The Failure of Banker-Management
-- The Inefficiency of the Oligarchs
The book attacks the use of investment funds to promote the consolidation of various industries under the control of a small number of corporations, which Brandeis alleges are working in concert to prevent competition. Brandeis harshly criticizes investment bankers who controlled large amounts of money deposited in their banks by middle-class people. The heads of these banks, Brandeis points out, routinely sit on the boards of large companies and routinely direct the resources of their banks to promote the interests of their own interests. These companies, in turn, seek to maintain control of their industries by crushing small businesses and stamping out innovators who develop better products to compete against them.
Brandeis supports his contentions with a discussion of the actual dollar amounts—in millions of dollars—controlled by specific banks, industries, and industrialists such as J. P. Morgan, noting that these interests acquire a far larger proportion of American wealth than corporate entities had ever had before. He extensively cites testimony from a Congressional investigation performed by the Pujo Committee, named after Louisiana Representative Arsène Pujo, into self-serving and monopolistic business dealings.