Renowned financial market historian William N. Goetzmann, the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies and the faculty director of the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management, takes the audience on a fascinating journey that spans lessons for investors from the Mississippi Company and South Sea company stock market bubbles to interplanetary finance. Along the way, he shares his views on why equity participation may be a way to deal with extreme inequality and explains his thesis that finance is a technology and a set of tools for solving the fundamental problems of humankind.

The Take 15 Series is a collection of illuminating, short conversations with noted economists, best-selling authors, leading researchers, and successful practitioners on topics ranging from geopolitics and whistleblowing to irrationality and outlooks.