Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "There is terrific prescience to be found in Lords of Finance's] portrait of times past... A] writer of great verve and erudition, Ahamed] easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today. - The New York Times It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers... View More...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "There is terrific prescience to be found in Lords of Finance's] portrait of times past... A] writer of great verve and erudition, Ahamed] easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today. - The New York Times It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers... View More...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "There is terrific prescience to be found in Lords of Finance's] portrait of times past... A] writer of great verve and erudition, Ahamed] easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today. - The New York Times It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers... View More...
Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize "A magisterial work...You can't help thinking about the economic crisis we're living through now."--The New York Times Book Review It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of that economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades. As yet another period of economic turmoil m... View More...
From acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, the case for why government is needed to restore confidence in the economy The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, animal spirits are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform e... View More...
The core methods in today's econometric toolkit are linear regression for statistical control, instrumental variables methods for the analysis of natural experiments, and differences-in-differences methods that exploit policy changes. In the modern experimentalist paradigm, these techniques address clear causal questions such as: Do smaller classes increase learning? Should wife batterers be arrested? How much does education raise wages? Mostly Harmless Econometrics shows how the basic tools of applied econometrics allow the data to speak. In addition to econometric essentials, Mostly Harmles... View More...
-Before reading The Panic of 1907, the year 1907 seemed like a long time ago and a different world. The authors, however, bring this story alive in a fast-moving book, and the reader sees how events of that time are very relevant for today's financial world. In spite of all of our advances, including a stronger monetary system and modern tools for managing risk, Bruner and Carr help us understand that we are not immune to a future crisis.- --Dwight B. Crane, Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School -Bruner and Carr provide a thorough, masterly, and highly readable account of the 190... View More...
Almost everything that happens in a firm flows through informal networks builts by advice, coordination, cooperation, friendship, gossip, knowledge, and trust. In this book, Ron Burt builds upon his celebrated work on network analyses to explain how these informal networks functions and the role of network entrepreneurs who have amassed social capital. Burt shows that social capital is a critical element in business strategy. Who has it, how it works and how to develop it have become key questions as markets, organizations and careers become more and more dependent on informal discretionary re... View More...
A collection of stories from Vanity Fair magazine about the current financial crisis by some of the country's best business journalists, including Michael Lewis (Moneyball, Liar's Poker), Bryan Burrough (Barbarians at the Gate), and Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down), edited by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and with an introduction by Cullen Murphy (Are We Rome?). View More...
China is hot. The world sees a glorious future for this sleeping giant, three times larger than the United States, predicting it will blossom into the world's biggest economy by 2010. According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People's Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao's death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of... View More...
On September 11, 1844, Henry Lehman arrived in New York City on a boat from Germany. Soon after, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he and his brother Emanuel established a modest cotton brokering firm that would come to be called Lehman Brothers. On September 15, 2008, Dick Fuld, the last CEO of Lehman Brothers, filed for corporate bankruptcy amid one of the worst financial crises in American history. After 164 years, one of the largest and most respected investment banks in the world was gone, leaving everyone wondering, "How could this have happened?" Peter Chapman, an editor and writ... View More...
Nearly forty percent of humanity lives on an average of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to systematically explain how the poor find solutions to their everyday financial problems. The authors conducted year-long interviews with impoverished villagers and slum dwellers in Bangl... View More...
Established by Martin Eakes and Bonnie Wright in North Carolina in 1980, the nonprofit Center for Community Self-Help has grown from an innovative financial institution dedicated to civil rights into the nation's largest home lender to low- and moderate-income borrowers. Self-Help's first capital campaign--a bake sale that raised a meager seventy-seven dollars for a credit union--may not have done much to fulfill the organization's early goals of promoting worker-owned businesses, but it was a crucial first step toward wielding inclusive lending as a weapon for economic justice. In Lending Pow... View More...
A renowned economist's classic book on capitalism in the developing world, showing how property rights are the key to overcoming poverty The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph, writes Hernando de Soto, is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis. In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail?In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything... View More...
affluenza, n. a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more. We tried to warn you The 2008 economic collapse proved how resilient and dangerous affluenza can be. Now in its third edition, this book can safely be called prophetic in showing how problems ranging from loneliness, endless working hours, and family conflict to rising debt, environmental pollution, and rampant commercialism are all symptoms of this global plague. The new edition traces the role overconsumption played in the Great Recession, di... View More...
Called a "fascinating exploration of economic civil disobedience" by Publishers Weekly, Lisa Dodson's stunning book The Moral Underground features stories of middle-class managers and professionals who refuse to be complicit in an economy that puts a decent life beyond the reach of the working poor. Whether it's a nurse choosing to treat an uninsured child, a supervisor padding a paycheck, or a restaurant manager sneaking food to a worker's children, these unsung heroes reach across the economic fault line to restore a sense of justice to the working world. This vivid account of working-class ... View More...
In many American cities, the urban cores still suffer. Poverty and unemployment remain endemic, despite policy initiatives aimed at systemic solutions. Rashmi Dyal-Chand's research has focused on how businesses in some urban cores are succeeding despite the challenges. Using three examples of urban collaborative capitalism, this book extrapolates a set of lessons about sharing. It argues that sharing can fuel business development and growth. Sharing among businesses can be critical for their economic survival. Sharing can also produce a particularly stable form of economic growth by giving eco... View More...
From an award-winning New York Times reporter comes the full, mind-boggling true story of the lies, crimes, and ineptitude behind the Enron scandal that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever. It was the corporate collapse that appeared to come out of nowhere. In late 2001, the Enron Corporation--a darling of the financial world, a company whose executives were friends of presidents and the powerful--imploded virtually overnight, leaving vast wreckage in its wake and sparking a criminal investigation that would last for years. Kurt Ei... View More...
