A sweeping history of the legendary private investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, exploring its central role in the story of American wealth and its rise to global power. Conspiracy theories have always swirled around Brown Brothers Harriman, and not without reason. Throughout the 19th century, when America was convulsed by a devastating financial panic essentially every twenty years, Brown Brothers quietly went from strength to strength, propping up the US financial system at crucial moments and catalyzing successive booms, from the cotton trade and the steam ship to the railroad, while managing to avoid unwelcome attention that plagued some of its competitors. By the turn of the 20th century, Brown Brothers was unquestionably at the heart of what was meant by an American Establishment. As America's reach extended beyond its shores, Brown Brothers worked hand in glove with the State Department, notably in Nicaragua in the early 20th century, where the firm essentially took over the country's economy. To the Brown family, the virtue of their dealings was a given; their form of muscular Protestantism, forged on the playing fields of Groton and Yale, was the acme of civilization, and it was their duty to import that civilization to the world. When, during the Great Depression, Brown Brothers ensured their strength by merging with Averell Harriman's investment bank to form Brown Brothers Harriman, the die was cast for the role the firm would play on the global stage during World War 2 and thereafter. The core leadership cadre, including Robert Lovett, Harriman, and Prescott Bush, were all Skull and Bones men from Yale, which is to say they accepted it as their birthright to lead. The architecture of the postwar global economy, like the architecture of the Nicaraguan economy in a previous era, was erected according to the assumptions of Brown Brothers Harriman when it came to American power. In Inside Money, acclaimed historian, commentator and long-time investor Zachary Karabell offers the first full and frank look inside this institution against the backdrop of American history. Blessed with complete access to the company's archives, as well as a thrilling understanding of the larger forces at play, Karabell has created an x-ray of American power -- financial, political, cultural - as its evolved from 1818 to the present. Unlike so many of its competitors, Brown Brothers Harriman remains to this day a private partnership, quietly forgoing the heady speculative upsides of the past 30 years but also avoiding any role in the devastating downsides. From their founding at the dawn of the 19th century to their current incarnation in the early 21st, the firm and its partners understood the need to be prepared for the worst and ready to seize the opportunities that a changing world presents, skills never more imperative than in our pandemic age. They embraced capitalism and gain, but they also shunned its excesses. Brown Brothers is no longer in the command capsule of the American economy, but in many respects, arguably, that is to its credit. If its partners cleaved to any one adage over the generations, it is that a relentless pursuit of more can destroy more than it creates.