In all of history and in all fields of intellectual endeavor, a tension has existed between theory and practice. Those who earn a living in the real world seldom want to appear as slaves to some set of abstract ideas. It was no surprise, therefore, that the word “baloney” was Wall Street's greeting to the pioneering theories of finance developed by a small group of academics from 1954-1972. Yet those breakthrough theories would in time earn five Nobel Prizes in Economic Science. Baloney they were not.

Bernstein, today's foremost financial historian expands here upon his groundbreaking book of 1992, Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street, to recount how these financial theories finally migrated from towers of ivory to towers of glass on Wall Street and other financial centers around the world. The result has been a global revolution in the nature of financial markets, the menu of investment strategies, the development of exotic financial instruments, and the role o