Download or read book Lords of Finance written by Liaquat Ahamed and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Depression occurred as a result of poor decisions on the part of four central bankers who jointly attempted to reconstruct international finance by reinstating the gold standard.
Download or read book Lords of Finance written by Liaquat Ahamed and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. The current financial crisis has only one parallel: the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s, which crippled the future of an entire generation and set the stage for the horrors of the Second World War. Yet the economic meltdown could have been avoided, had it not been for the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers. In Lords of Finance, we meet these men, the four bankers who truly broke the world: the enigmatic Norman Montagu of the bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the NY Federal Reserve, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbanlk and the xenophobic Emile Moreau of the Banque de France. Their names were lost to history, their lives and actions forgotten, until now. Liaquat Ahamed tells their story in vivid and gripping detail, in a timely and arresting reminder that individuals - their ambitions, limitations and human nature - lie at the very heart of global catastrophe.
Download or read book Lords of Finance written by Liaquat Ahamed and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Many of us take it as a given that the Great Depression - the consequences of which reverberated for decades, crippling the future of an entire generation and setting the stage for WWII - resulted from a confluence of inexorable forces beyond any one per
Download or read book The Lords of Easy Money written by Christopher Leonard and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller from business journalist Christopher Leonard infiltrates one of America’s most mysterious institutions—the Federal Reserve—to show how its policies spearheaded by Chairman Jerome Powell over the past ten years have accelerated income inequality and put our country’s economic stability at risk. If you asked most people what forces led to today’s unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve. For most of its history, the Fed has enjoyed the fawning adoration of the press. When the economy grew, it was credited to the Fed. When the economy imploded in 2008, the Fed got credit for rescuing us. But here, for the first time, is the inside story of how the Fed has reshaped the American economy for the worse. It all started on November 3, 2010, when the Fed began a radical intervention called quantitative easing. In just a few short years, the Fed more than quadrupled the money supply with one goal: to encourage banks and other investors to extend more risky debt. Leaders at the Fed knew that they were undertaking a bold experiment that would produce few real jobs, with long-term risks that were hard to measure. But the Fed proceeded anyway…and then found itself trapped. Once it printed all that money, there was no way to withdraw it from circulation. The Fed tried several times, only to see the market start to crash, at which point the Fed turned the money spigot back on. That’s what it did when COVID hit, printing 300 years’ worth of money in a few short months. Which brings us to now: Ten years on, the gap between the rich and poor has grown dramatically, inflation is raging, and the stock market is driven by boom, busts, and bailouts. Middle-class Americans seem stuck in a stage of permanent stagnation, with wage gains wiped out by high prices even as they remain buried under credit card debt, car loan debt, and student debt. Meanwhile, the “too big to fail” banks remain bigger and more powerful than ever while the richest Americans enjoy the gains of a hyper-charged financial system. The Lords of Easy Money “skillfully” (The Wall Street Journal) tells the “fascinating” (The New York Times) tale of how quantitative easing is imperiling the American economy through the story of the one man who tried to warn us. This is the first inside story of how we really got here—and why our economy rests on such unstable ground.
Download or read book Minding the Markets written by D. Tuckett and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-05-27 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tuckett argues that most economists' explanations of the financial crisis miss its essence; they ignore critical components of human psychology. He offers a deeper understanding of financial market behaviour and investment processes by recognizing the role played by unconscious needs and fears in all investment activity.
Download or read book Money and Tough Love written by Liaquat Ahamed and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the world's bankers, it is not April that is the cruellest month, but September. It is when most financial crises hit and the world's stock markets have their biggest tumbles. During the 19th and 20th century it was thought that the pattern was caused by the crop seasons. But even as agriculture has declined dramatically in significance, the seasonal spike continues. Perhaps it has to do with the end of the vacation season: all those well-heeled bankers, returning to work after the long hazy days of summer, are jolted back into reality.
Download or read book This Time Is Different written by Carmen M. Reinhart and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-07 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An empirical investigation of financial crises during the last 800 years.
Download or read book Lords of Strategy written by Walter Kiechel and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2010-03-03 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine, if you can, the world of business - without corporate strategy. Remarkably, fifty years ago that's the way it was. Businesses made plans, certainly, but without understanding the underlying dynamics of competition, costs, and customers. It was like trying to design a large-scale engineering project without knowing the laws of physics. But in the 1960s, four mavericks and their posses instigated a profound shift in thinking that turbocharged business as never before, with implications far beyond what even they imagined. In The Lords of Strategy, renowned business journalist and editor Walter Kiechel tells, for the first time, the story of the four men who invented corporate strategy as we know it and set in motion the modern, multibillion-dollar consulting industry: Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group Bill Bain, creator of Bain & Company Fred Gluck, longtime Managing Director of McKinsey & Company Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professor Providing a window into how to think about strategy today, Kiechel tells their story with novelistic flair. At times inspiring, at times nearly terrifying, this book is a revealing account of how these iconoclasts and the organizations they led revolutionized the way we think about business, changed the very soul of the corporation, and transformed the way we work.
Download or read book Tower of Basel written by Adam LeBor and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tower of Basel is the first investigative history of the world's most secretive global financial institution. Based on extensive archival research in Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, and in-depth interviews with key decision-makers -- including Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England; and former senior Bank for International Settlements managers and officials -- Tower of Basel tells the inside story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS): the central bankers' own bank. Created by the governors of the Bank of England and the Reichsbank in 1930, and protected by an international treaty, the BIS and its assets are legally beyond the reach of any government or jurisdiction. The bank is untouchable. Swiss authorities have no jurisdiction over the bank or its premises. The BIS has just 140 customers but made tax-free profits of 1.17 billion in 2011-2012. Since its creation, the bank has been at the heart of global events but has often gone unnoticed. Under Thomas McKittrick, the bank's American president from 1940-1946, the BIS was open for business throughout the Second World War. The BIS accepted looted Nazi gold, conducted foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank, and was used by both the Allies and the Axis powers as a secret contact point to keep the channels of international finance open. After 1945 the BIS -- still behind the scenes -- for decades provided the necessary technical and administrative support for the trans-European currency project, from the first attempts to harmonize exchange rates in the late 1940s to the launch of the Euro in 2002. It now stands at the center of efforts to build a new global financial and regulatory architecture, once again proving that it has the power to shape the financial rules of our world. Yet despite its pivotal role in the financial and political history of the last century and during the economic current crisis, the BIS has remained largely unknown -- until now.
Download or read book The Match King written by Frank Partnoy and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2010-03-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of the roaring '20s, Swedish 'migr' Ivar Kreuger made a fortune raising money in America and loaning it to Europe in exchange for matchstick monopolies. His enterprise was a rare success story throughout the Great Depression. Yet after Kreuger's suicide in 1932, the true nature of his empire emerged. Driven by success to adopt ever-more perilous practices, Kreuger had turned to shell companies in tax havens, fudged accounting figures, off-balance-sheet accounting, even forgery. He created a raft of innovative financial products -- many of them precursors to instruments wreaking havoc in today's markets. When his Wall Street empire collapsed, millions went bankrupt. Frank Partnoy, a frequent commentator on financial disaster for the Financial Times, New York Times, NPR, and CBS's "60 Minutes," recasts the life story of a remarkable yet forgotten genius in ways that force us to re-think our ideas about the wisdom of crowds, the invisible hand, and the free and unfettered market.
Download or read book How Markets Fail written by Cassidy John and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did we get to where we are? John Cassidy shows that the roots of our most recent financial failure lie not with individuals, but with an idea - the idea that markets are inherently rational. He gives us the big picture behind the financial headlines, tracing the rise and fall of free market ideology from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. Full of wit, sense and, above all, a deeper understanding, How Markets Fail argues for the end of 'utopian' economics, and the beginning of a pragmatic, reality-based way of thinking. A very good history of economic thought Economist How Markets Fail offers a brilliant intellectual framework . . . fine work New York Times An essential, grittily intellectual, yet compelling guide to the financial debacle of 2009 Geordie Greig, Evening Standard A powerful argument . . . Cassidy makes a compelling case that a return to hands-off economics would be a disaster BusinessWeek This book is a well constructed, thoughtful and cogent account of how capitalism evolved to its current form Telegraph Books of the Year recommendation John Cassidy ... describe[s] that mix of insight and madness that brought the world's system to its knees FT, Book of the Year recommendation Anyone who enjoys a good read can safely embark on this tour with Cassidy as their guide . . . Like his colleague Malcolm Gladwell [at the New Yorker], Cassidy is able to lead us with beguiling lucidity through unfamiliar territory New Statesman John Cassidy has covered economics and finance at The New Yorker magazine since 1995, writing on topics ranging from Alan Greenspan to the Iraqi oil industry and English journalism. He is also now a Contributing Editor at Portfolio where he writes the monthly Economics column. Two of his articles have been nominated for National Magazine Awards: an essay on Karl Marx, which appeared in October, 1997, and an account of the death of the British weapons scientist David Kelly, which was published in December, 2003. He has previously written for Sunday Times in as well as the New York Post, where he edited the Business section and then served as the deputy editor. In 2002, Cassidy published his first book, Dot.Con. He lives in New York.
Download or read book Lords of Finance written by Liaquat Ahamed and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. The current financial crisis has only one parallel: the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s, which crippled the future of an entire generation and set the stage for the horrors of the Second World War. Yet the economic meltdown could have been avoided, had it not been for the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers. In Lords of Finance, we meet these men, the four bankers who truly broke the world: the enigmatic Norman Montagu of the bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the NY Federal Reserve, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbanlk and the xenophobic Emile Moreau of the Banque de France. Their names were lost to history, their lives and actions forgotten, until now. Liaquat Ahamed tells their story in vivid and gripping detail, in a timely and arresting reminder that individuals - their ambitions, limitations and human nature - lie at the very heart of global catastrophe.
Download or read book The Money Lords written by Matthew Josephson and published by Signet Book. This book was released on 1972 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes material on Samuel Insull, the Van Sweringen brothers, A.P. Giannini, Robert R. Young, among others.
Download or read book The Ascent of Money written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-11-13 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 10th anniversary edition, with new chapters on the crash, Chimerica, and cryptocurrency "[An] excellent, just in time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis." —The Washington Post "Fascinating." —Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek In this updated edition, Niall Ferguson brings his classic financial history of the world up to the present day, tackling the populist backlash that followed the 2008 crisis, the descent of "Chimerica" into a trade war, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, with his signature clarity and expert lens. The Ascent of Money reveals finance as the backbone of history, casting a new light on familiar events: the Renaissance enabled by Italian foreign exchange dealers, the French Revolution traced back to a stock market bubble, the 2008 crisis traced from America's bankruptcy capital, Memphis, to China's boomtown, Chongqing. We may resent the plutocrats of Wall Street but, as Ferguson argues, the evolution of finance has rivaled the importance of any technological innovation in the rise of civilization. Indeed, to study the ascent and descent of money is to study the rise and fall of Western power itself.
Download or read book The Devil s Derivatives written by Nicholas Dunbar and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling narrative on what went wrong with our financial system—and who’s to blame. From an award-winning journalist who has been covering the industry for more than a decade, The Devil’s Derivatives charts the untold story of modern financial innovation—how investment banks invented new financial products, how investors across the world were wooed into buying them, how regulators were seduced by the political rewards of easy credit, and how speculators made a killing from the near-meltdown of the financial system. Author Nicholas Dunbar demystifies the revolution that briefly gave finance the same intellectual respectability as theoretical physics. He explains how bankers worldwide created a secret trillion-dollar machine that delivered cheap mortgages to the masses and riches beyond dreams to the financial innovators. Fundamental to this saga is how “the people who hated to lose” were persuaded to accept risk by “the people who loved to win.” Why did people come to trust and respect arcane financial tools? Who were the bankers competing to assemble the basic components into increasingly intricate machines? How did this process achieve its own unstoppable momentum—ending in collapse, bailouts, and a public outcry against the giants of finance? Provocative and intriguing, The Devil’s Derivatives sheds much-needed light on the forces that fueled the most brutal economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Download or read book The Great Rupture written by Viktor Shvets and published by Boyle & Dalton. This book was released on 2020-06-24 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do we need to be free to be innovative, prosperous, or even happy? The lessons of the last five centuries were unequivocal--without freedom, there could be no prosperity or happiness. However, does this still hold true in the Information Age? Modern technologies are disrupting our societies, altering every facet of our lives, from the nature of work and what we intrinsically value, to how we are informed, entertained, and educated--it promises to be a far deeper disruption than Industrial Revolutions. Humanity is at a major turning point, and how we respond to the merger of technology and financialization will decide our future. Will it be capitalism or communism, feudalism or despotism? By learning from the past and projecting into the future, global market strategist Viktor Shvets explores the weakening nexus between freedom and prosperity and what that means for the future of humanity. From the birth of our modern world, pivotal events in human history have led to the collapse of non-Western civilizations--Mongol warriors sweeping across Eurasian steppes; the Black Death and a re-awakening of human spirit; Zheng He's voyages and the collapse of Novgorod republic; and finally, the ban on printing in Arabic. What can we learn from these events to better prepare ourselves for the future? As we hurtle toward that uncertain future, we must decide whether our cherished individual freedoms are still necessary for success and prosperity, or if in adapting to new technologies, non-Western civilizations are now better positioned for this new world, creating illiberal orders that might no longer suffer from stagnation of ideas. For the first time in at least five centuries, we have an opportunity and tools to build a different society and economy. Will we embrace the challenge?
Download or read book Central Banking 101 written by Joseph Wang and published by Joseph Wang. This book was released on 2020-01-18 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central banking is magic. With a few words, the Fed can lift the stock market out of desperation and catapult it towards euphoric highs. With a few keystrokes, the Fed can conjure up trillions of dollars and fund virtually unlimited Federal spending. And with a few poor decisions, the Fed can plunge the entire world into a recession. The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful institutions in the world, and also one of the most difficult to understand. The Fed acts through its Open Markets Desk, which sits at the heart of the global financial system as the world’s ultimate and limitless provider of dollars. On behalf of policy makers, the Desk gathers market intelligence from all the major market participants, sifts through reams of internal data, and works behind the scenes keep the financial system intact. It is responsible for all of the Fed's market operations, from trillions in quantitative easing to hundreds of billions in repo and FX-swap loans. The financial crises of 2008 and 2020 abated only through the emergency interventions of the Desk. Joseph Wang spent five years studying the monetary system as a trader on the Desk. From that vantage point, Joseph saw firsthand how the Fed operates and how the financial system really works. This book is a distillation of his experience that aims to educate and demystify. After reading this book, you will understand how money is created, how the global dollar system is structured, and how it all fits into the broader financial system. The views in this book do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.
