Download or read book The Enigma of Money written by Makoto Nishibe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new way of understanding modern money and markets by stressing their self-fulfilling/self-destructive properties as institutions from evolutionary perspectives. In contrast to an unrealistic view of the neoclassical general equilibrium theory that models the price mechanism of a “concentrated market” without using money, presented here is an alternative theory of markets on how a realistic “dispersive market” using a stock of money and inventory as buffers can work as a multilayered price-quantitative adjustment system. The central features of modern sovereign moneys seen in inconvertible IOUs of central banknotes can be depicted as “The Emperor's New Clothes” that correspond to the U.S. dollar and the Euro void of their own value. The image captures such characteristics of national currencies as “self-fulfilling ideas” by the inertia of conventions in the past and expectations of an uncertain future. Both ideas normally make money more acceptable and circulative so that its value can become more stable unless expectations for the future turn very pessimistic. The same logic also applies to such other currencies as Bitcoin and community currencies. Their recent diffusion has shown that Hayek's idea of denationalization of money and competition between multiple currencies in terms of its qualities, not its quantities sought as in ongoing quantitative easing, become more relevant under current situations. The qualities of money refer not only to stable monetary values and low transaction costs, but also to high ability in creating, sharing, and communicating social and cultural value. The potential of the logic of self-fulfillment of ideas can thus open up a new economic society when we realize that such various non-national currencies all depend on the same logic of money.
Download or read book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas written by Corey Robin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. “One of the marvels of Robin’s razor-sharp book is how carefully he marshals his evidence.... It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling.” – The New York Times Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin– one of the foremost analysts of the right (The Reactionary Mind) – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.
Download or read book The Ways of the World written by David Harvey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Harvey is one of most famous Marxist intellectuals in the past half century, as well as one of the world's most cited social scientists. Beginning in the early 1970s with his trenchant and still-relevant book Social Justice and the City and through this day, Harvey has written numerous books and dozens of influential essays and articles on topics across issues in politics, culture, economics, and social justice. In The Ways of the World, Harvey has gathered his most important essays from the past four decades. They form a career-spanning collection that tracks not only the development of Harvey over time as an intellectual, but also a dialectical vision that gradually expanded its reach from the slums of Baltimore to global environmental degradation to the American imperium. While Harvey's coverage is wide-ranging, all of the pieces tackle the core concerns that have always animated his work: capitalism past and present, social change, freedom, class, imperialism, the city, nature, social justice, postmodernity, globalization, and the crises that inhere in capitalism. A career-defining volume, The Ways of the World will stand as a comprehensive work that presents the trajectory of Harvey's lifelong project in full.
Download or read book The Enigma of Reason written by Hugo Mercier and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Brilliant...Timely and necessary.” —Financial Times “Especially timely as we struggle to make sense of how it is that individuals and communities persist in holding beliefs that have been thoroughly discredited.” —Darren Frey, Science If reason is what makes us human, why do we behave so irrationally? And if it is so useful, why didn’t it evolve in other animals? This groundbreaking account of the evolution of reason by two renowned cognitive scientists seeks to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue, helps us justify our beliefs, convince others, and evaluate arguments. It makes it easier to cooperate and communicate and to live together in groups. Provocative, entertaining, and undeniably relevant, The Enigma of Reason will make many reasonable people rethink their beliefs. “Reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant...Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?...Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber [argue that] reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems...[but] to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker “Turns reason’s weaknesses into strengths, arguing that its supposed flaws are actually design features that work remarkably well.” —Financial Times “The best thing I have read about human reasoning. It is extremely well written, interesting, and very enjoyable to read.” —Gilbert Harman, Princeton University
Download or read book Dinosaurs in Your Backyard written by Hugh Brewster and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses species of dinosaurs found on the continent of North America 70 million years ago.
Download or read book Other People s Money written by John Kay and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions. Why? What is finance for? John Kay, with wide practical and academic experience in the world of finance, understands the operation of the financial sector better than most. He believes in good banks and effective asset managers, but good banks and effective asset managers are not what he sees. In a dazzling and revelatory tour of the financial world as it has emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 crisis, Kay does not flinch in his criticism: we do need some of the things that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs do, but we do not need Citigroup and Goldman to do them. And many of the things done by Citigroup and Goldman do not need to be done at all. The finance sector needs to be reminded of its primary purpose: to manage other people's money for the benefit of businesses and households. It is an aberration when the some of the finest mathematical and scientific minds are tasked with devising algorithms for the sole purpose of exploiting the weakness of other algorithms for computerized trading in securities. To travel further down that road leads to ruin. A Financial Times Book of the Year, 2015 An Economist Best Book of the Year, 2015 A Bloomberg Best Book of the Year, 2015
Download or read book I O U written by John Lanchester and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most people, the reasons for the sudden collapse of our economy still remain obscure. I.O.U. is the story of how we came to experience such a complete financial disaster, starting with the magical proliferation of credit that led to an explosion of lending on the global and local landscapes of banking and finance. Viewing the crisis through the lens of politics, culture, and contemporary history—from the invention and widespread misuse of financial instruments to the culpability of subprime mortgages—Lanchester deftly draws conclusions on the limitations of financial and governmental regulation, capitalism’s deepest flaw, and most important, on the plain and simple facts of human nature where cash is concerned. With newly updated, superbly written reportage, Lanchester delivers a shrewd perspective and a digestible, comprehensive analysis that connects the dots for expert and casual reader alike. Part economic primer, part fiscal and historical analysis, I.O.U. is an eye-opener of a book.
Download or read book Money and Calculation written by Massimo Amato and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2010-09-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotions, reputations, relationships -- so many aspects of social and organizational life today are subject to quantification and other calculative practices. Calculation develops due to a demand for control and accountability. Money is one such instrument of calculation, and the foremost. As a unit of account and means of payment, it serves the purpose of exchange. Yet, money has itself increasingly become an object of calculation and exchange on financial markets tending less to the production and exchange of real goods than the elimination of uncertainty by means of exchangeability. Has the economy therefore lost its measure? The essays collected in Money and Calculation investigate, from various viewpoints, how calculation and money bear upon the meaning of measure in contemporary economic life. They will excite and give much pause for thought to economists, sociologists, and all who have an interest in the meaning of life in our globalized world.
Download or read book Origins of Money The written by Carl Menger and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 2009 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Blackhope Enigma written by Teresa Flavin and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sunni, her stepbrother Dean, and an art-student friend trace the footsteps of a labyrinth built in Blackhope Tower by a sixteenth-century artist, and suddenly find themselves trapped inside his painting, trying desperately to get out.
Download or read book Enigma Variations written by André Aciman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From André Aciman, the author of Call Me by Your Name (now a major motion picture and the winner of the OscarTM for Best Adapted Screenplay) comes “a sensory masterclass, absorbing, intelligent, unforgettable” (Times Literary Supplement). André Aciman, hailed as a writer of “fiction at its most supremely interesting” (The New York Review of Books), has written a novel that charts the life of a man named Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents’ cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men; whether he’s on a tennis court in Central Park, or on a New York sidewalk in early spring, his attachments are ungraspable, transient, and forever underwritten by raw desire—not for just one person’s body but, inevitably, for someone else’s as well. In Enigma Variations, Aciman maps the most inscrutable corners of passion, proving to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid, he casts a sensuous, shimmering light over each facet of desire to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of those who may want to offer only what we crave from them. Ahead of every step Paul takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love lingers. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. But sooner or later we discover who we’ve always known we were.
Download or read book Rethinking the Theory of Money Credit and Macroeconomics written by John Smithin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive re-working of the basic principles of monetary macroeconomics in an alternative monetary model (AMM) of economic growth, the business cycle, inflation and income distribution. These principles differ considerably from those advanced in the standard macroeconomics literature and in textbooks. However, the latter have been demonstrably unsuccessful in the promotion of usable macroeconomic policy advice for the past several years, actually decades. A different approach is needed. In particular, the new approach takes seriously the vital role of credit creation and endogenous money in capitalism. It does not imagine that all of the difficult questions of economic policy-making may be resolved within a paradigm that conceptualizes economic activity as merely a question of barter exchange. The result is a blueprint for a set of growth-friendly macroeconomic policies which will promote full employment, financial stability and higher real wages – essentially for the benefit of the long-suffering middle and working classes rather for the chamber of commerce and financial interests.
Download or read book How Money Became Dangerous written by Christopher Varelas and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a veteran of the trade, a provocative and entertaining voyage into the turbulent heart of modern money that sheds new light on the rise of our threatening and complicated financial system, how money became our adversary, and why finding a new course is crucial to a healthy society In the not too distant past, money was simple. You might have had a bank account and a mortgage, perhaps some basic investments. Wall Street didn’t have a reputation for greed and recklessness. That all started to change in the eighties, as our financial systems became increasingly complex, moving beyond the understanding of the general public while impacting our lives in innumerable ways. The financial world began to feel like an enigma—a rogue force working against us, seemingly controlled by no one. From an industry veteran who’s had firsthand involvement in the events that shaped modern money, How Money Became Dangerous journeys from the crime-ridden LA jewelry district to the cutthroat Salomon Brothers trading floor, from the high-stakes world of investment banking to the center of the technology boom, capturing the key deals, developments, and players that made the financial world what it is today. The book illuminates the dark, hidden forces of Wall Street and how it has dehumanized and left behind everyday Americans. A fresh and enlightening take on how we reached this point, How Money Became Dangerous also makes the case for why Wall Street needs to be saved, if only to save ourselves.
Download or read book Money written by Michel Aglietta and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major French economist offers a new theory of money As the financial crisis reached its climax in September 2008, the most important figure on the planet was Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The whole financial system was collapsing, with little to stop it. When a senator asked Bernanke what would happen if the central bank did not carry out its rescue package, he replied, “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.” What saved finance, and the Western economy, was fiscal and monetary stimulus – an influx of money, created ad hoc. It was a strategy that raised questions about the unexamined nature of money itself, an object suddenly revealed as something other than a neutral signifier of value. Through its grip on finance and the debt system, money confers sovereign power on the economy. If confidence in money is not maintained, crises follow. Looking over the last 5,000 years, Michel Aglietta explores the development of money and its close connection to sovereign power. This book employs the tools of anthropology, history and political economy in order to analyse how political structures and monetary systems have transformed one another. We can thus grasp the different eras of monetary regulation and the crises capitalism has endured throughout its history.
Download or read book The Enigma of Capital written by David Harvey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the basic workings of capitalism, how it came to dominate the world, and why it resulted in a financial crisis in 2008, arguing that a radical overhaul of the economic system is the only way to create a sustainable future.
Download or read book A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and its Crisis written by Dimitris Sotiropoulos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent financial meltdown and the resulting global recession have rekindled debates regarding the nature of contemporary capitalism. This book analyses the ongoing financialization of the economy as a development within capitalism, and explores the ways in which it has changed the organization of capitalist power. The authors offer an interpretation of the role of the financial sphere which displays a striking contrast to the majority of contemporary heterodox approaches. Their interpretation stresses the crucial role of financial derivatives in the contemporary organization of capitalist power relations, arguing that the process of financialization is in fact entirely unthinkable in the absence of derivatives. The book also uses Marx’s concepts and some of the arguments developed in the framework of the historic Marxist controversies on economic crises in order to gain an insight into the modern neoliberal form of capitalism and the recent financial crisis. Employing a series of international case studies, this book will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the financial crisis, and all those seeking to comprehend the workings of capitalism.
Download or read book The Enigma of Capital written by David Harvey and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For three centuries the capitalist system has shaped western society, informed its rulers, and conditioned the lives of its people. Has the time come to move beyond it? Using his unrivalled knowledge of the subject, Harvey lays bare the follies of the international financial system, looking at the nature of capitalism, how it works and why sometimes it doesn't. He examines the vast flows of money that surge round the world in daily volumes well in excess of the sum of all its economies. He looks at the cycles of boom and bust in the world's housing and stock markets and shows that periodic episodes of meltdown are not only inevitable in the capitalist system but essential to its survival. The Enigma of Capital is a timely call-to-arms for the end of the capitalism, and makes a compelling case for a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane
