Author: Liaquat Ahamed Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 9781594201820 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 584
Book Description
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.
Author: Christopher Leonard Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1982166649 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
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.
Author: Walter Kiechel Publisher: Harvard Business Press ISBN: 1422157318 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
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.
Author: Adam LeBor Publisher: PublicAffairs ISBN: 1610392558 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
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.
Author: Frank Partnoy Publisher: PublicAffairs ISBN: 0786741546 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
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.
Author: Thomas Levenson Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0812987969 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
The sweeping story of the world’s first financial crisis: “an astounding episode from the early days of financial markets that to this day continues to intrigue and perplex historians . . . narrative history at its best, lively and fresh with new insights” (Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lords of Finance) A Financial Times Economics Book of the Year ● Longlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award In the heart of the Scientific Revolution, when new theories promised to explain the affairs of the universe, Britain was broke, facing a mountain of debt accumulated in war after war it could not afford. But that same Scientific Revolution—the kind of thinking that helped Isaac Newton solve the mysteries of the cosmos—would soon lead clever, if not always scrupulous, men to try to figure a way out of Britain’s financial troubles. Enter the upstart leaders of the South Sea Company. In 1719, they laid out a grand plan to swap citizens’ shares of the nation’s debt for company stock, removing the burden from the state and making South Sea’s directors a fortune in the process. Everybody would win. The king’s ministers took the bait—and everybody did win. Far too much, far too fast. The following crash came suddenly in a rush of scandal, jail, suicide, and ruin. But thanks to Britain’s leader, Robert Walpole, the kingdom found its way through to emerge with the first truly modern, reliable, and stable financial exchange. Thomas Levenson’s Money for Nothing tells the unbelievable story of the South Sea Bubble with all the exuberance, folly, and the catastrophe of an event whose impact can still be felt today.
Author: Simon Johnson Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307379221 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
In spite of its key role in creating the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, the American banking industry has grown bigger, more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever. Anchored by six megabanks whose assets amount to more than 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, this oligarchy proved it could first hold the global economy hostage and then use its political muscle to fight off meaningful reform. 13 Bankers brilliantly charts the rise to power of the financial sector and forcefully argues that we must break up the big banks if we want to avoid future financial catastrophes. Updated, with additional analysis of the government’s recent attempt to reform the banking industry, this is a timely and expert account of our troubled political economy.
Author: Charles W. Calomiris Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691168350 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 584
Book Description
Why stable banking systems are so rare Why are banking systems unstable in so many countries—but not in others? The United States has had twelve systemic banking crises since 1840, while Canada has had none. The banking systems of Mexico and Brazil have not only been crisis prone but have provided miniscule amounts of credit to business enterprises and households. Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents. Calomiris and Haber combine political history and economics to examine how coalitions of politicians, bankers, and other interest groups form, why they endure, and how they generate policies that determine who gets to be a banker, who has access to credit, and who pays for bank bailouts and rescues. Fragile by Design is a revealing exploration of the ways that politics inevitably intrudes into bank regulation.
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Author: Liaquat Ahamed
Author: Christopher Leonard
Author: Carmen M. Reinhart
Author: Matthew Josephson
Author: Walter Kiechel
Author: Adam LeBor
Author: Frank Partnoy
Author: Thomas Levenson
Author: Simon Johnson
Author: Charles W. Calomiris