How We Got Here

Andy Kessler, a bestselling author, returns to the ground covered in his earlier book Running Money and fills in what it left out. This account follows the rise of major new technologies and the financial markets that paid for them. It moves from the Industrial Revolution through the eras of computing, communications, money, gold and stock trading, with Silicon Valley and Wall Street at its center.

Several passages were cut from the original manuscript by an editor. They were meant to show how a new technology can start as a money-losing novelty and later become an investment that everyone depends on. Kessler presents the book as the guide he wishes he had been given as a freshman engineering student at Cornell, and again on his first day working on Wall Street.

The narrative connects historical events to the present, tracing the path that brought the world to its current state.