I'd probably recommend that you start by reading economics text books. For investment banking itself, one good thing to read is probably books on the valuation of firms and investments. Check the books by Damodaran if you can, from what I remember they are pretty good. And do remember, the essence of banking is being an intermediary. While is important for a bank (be it a commercial bank or an investment bank) to have assets, as without them the bank won't be robust and people won't trust it, the main purpose of the bank is to serve as an intermediary between people who have money and people who needs money, so to allow investments and keep the economy moving.
And on the IMF and the such: As much as certain groups love to blame all evil on them, believe me when I say that it existing is far better than it not existing. It's whole purpose is to lend money to countries that find themselves unable to balance their accounts (or generally, more specifically their external accounts). Getting money there is voluntary, but when a country does get money there it's normally because no one else would lend them money, and of course, its better than ignoring the debts or decree a moratorium, which does have all kinds of international consequences. Sure, it does impose conditions, with the intention of making the country able to pay the loan back, as nearly all countries that gets loans from the IMF have previously demonstrated a pretty high level of financial irresponsibility, specially those whose loans come with more strings attached. Not that the institution is perfect, some of the imposed conditions may not be ideal, specially for when the country is in bad straits and actually should spend more than normal (for what it should have saved when the situation were good, but well, politics...), but still, it's a mean of trying to force them to be financially responsible, since they aren't capable of doing so in their own.
Back on your basic proposition: You are proposing two very different games though. The investing and trying to make money grow is actually pretty common, with a lot of them being net simulations that give you fake money to make it grow into more fake money, but keeping with real stock prices and etc. The politics part on the other hand, while sounding quite interesting, would not really happen like that, specially if you assume that someone who starts with a fund of a reasonable size manages to grow that much that quickly.
Also, since I was ninja'd a bit: Fractional Reserve banking is the idea that people deposit their money, you keep some with you and the rest you lend to others (therefore multiplying the money, because the people who took the money will spend it, and those who received will deposit, which in turn becomes more loans, and so on, until the fraction you lend becomes to small). The interest charged in these loans is what pays the interest the banks pays you, and the difference between the two is called the spread, which is the profit of the bank in this case. Yes, it does sound somewhat terrifying that your money is kept in such manner, but that's what makes the economy works. And of course, the kind of deposit you make (savings, checkings, or make an high risk investment) changes the kind of loans they will make with that money. That, and the number of people involved means that normally your money will be pretty safe, specially in checkings and savings, where unless they literally run out of money (before paying anyone else) the savings and checkings will be ok. And there are insurances.
Full reserve banking means that you might as well have a safe deposit box. They get your money and keep it. It would mean the collapse of the economy as loans would become incredibly limited as banks would have lost nearly all their function as intermediaries.
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Topic: Can anyone tell me about banking? (Read 1082 times)