Super Swindle: The Panic of 1825 -- The Bank of England on the brink of collapse, an imaginary borrower, and too much money

This is an account of what some have called the first emerging markets crisis. It features a hero of the war of Venezuelan independence who’s really, really good at retreating, mostly without his troops; then there's the fall of Napoleon and the fallout from that, the hassles involved in moving on to a gold standard, hot IPOs from the era’s hottest industries, and the Greeks. (They defaulted, of course they defaulted.) How could we forget the Greeks?