Finance Biography

Black Market Billions blows the lid off the world's fastest-growing illicit industry: organized retail crime. Hitha Prabhakar reveals how criminals with ties to terrorist groups around the world are committing huge product thefts, and using the profits to fund terrorist acts. Prabhakar connects the dots and follows the money - from consumers dying for a deal to terrorist cells eager to do the killing.

Join David Denby, New Yorker critic and otherwise sensible man, on a whirlwind ride through an exuberant stock market, investment feeding frenzy, and the cataclysmic result of greed and illusion.

As president of the World Bank for a decade, James Wolfensohn tackled world poverty with a passion and energy that made him a uniquely important figure in a fundamental arena of change. Using a lifetime of experience in the banking sector, he carved a distinct path in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe for the institution that serves as the major lender to the world's poor.

Here is the fascinating story of the making of the high-tech business revolution and the birth of the Digital Age. Journalist Jeffrey Young chronicles six decades of unbridled technological innovation, taking you inside today's business empires and introducing you to the dreamers, the schemers, the entrepreneurs, and the inventors who built them...

Magazine entrepreneur Randall Lane had a prime seat at Wall Street's biggest greed fest. The Zeroes is a memoir about the excesses and bad behavior of an outsider who got pulled into a crazy, self-contained world.

The stories in this book are all true. Its author has been held up at gunpoint at night on a road in Guatemala and shot with a machine gun in the chest and shoulder in Vietnam. He's come close to dying of thirst in the Sahara and freezing to death in the Himalayas. He's contracted malaria and typhoid fever in Ethiopia and hepatitis in India. There have been accidents involving motorcycles and automobiles. He's had close calls involving lions (twice), elephants (three times) and a rhino (once).

Ever since the Reagan era, Washington has been captured by a conservative economic agenda that has failed in every respect and that has long since lost any respect among serious economists. Finally, highly regarded economist James Galbraith presents a full-bore attack on the bankrupt economic policies of the Republican Party - and a much needed reality check on where to go from here.

Since he left office in 2007, the empire of Tony Blair has grown exponentially. As a businessman he has been unprecedentedly successful for a former public servant, with a large property portfolio and an estimated GBP80 million of earnings accrued in just a few short years. But how has he managed to achieve this? Being an ex-prime minister comes with certain advantages, and besides his excellent state pension and twenty-four-hour security team, Blair enjoys the best contacts that money can buy.

Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were the weapons of choice at Wall Street investment bank Lazard Frères & Co. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.

Growing up in a doomed hometown with a missing father and a single mother, Nicholas Dawidoff listened to baseball every night on his bedside radio, the professional ballplayers gradually becoming the men in his life. A portrait of a childhood shaped by a stoical, enterprising mother, a disturbed, dangerous father, the private world of baseball, and the awkwardness of first love, The Crowd Sounds Happy is the moving tale of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in troubled times.

In 1919, Texas rancher J. Frank Norfleet lost everything he had in a stock market swindle. He did what many other marks did - he went home, borrowed more money from his family, and returned for another round of swindling. Only after he lost that second fortune did he reclaim control of his story. Instead of crawling back home in shame, he vowed to hunt down the five men who had conned him. Through Norfleet's ingenious reverse-swindle, Amy Reading reveals the mechanics behind the scenes of the big con.

During the harshest year of the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, a top woman news reporter of the day and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was hired by FDR’s right-hand man Harry Hopkins to embark upon a grueling journey to the hardest-hit areas of the country to report back on the degree of devastation. Distinguished historian Michael Golay draws on a trove of original sources - including the moving, remarkably intimate, almost daily letters between Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt - as he re-creates that extraordinary journey.

Den of Thieves tells, in masterfully reported detail, the full story of the insider-trading scandal that nearly destroyed Wall Street, the men who pulled it off, and the chase that finally brought them to justice. Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart shows for the first time how four of the biggest names on Wall Street - Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine - created the greatest insider-trading ring in financial history and almost walked away with billions.

Some extraordinary and unexpected factors are revealed in Taylor's fascinating new book that explains why some people become billionaires. Despite the fact that the sample of 17 self-made billionaires come from disparate backgrounds, work in different industries, have very different personalities, and superficially appear to have different upbringings, they have one important thing in common: they are all outsiders.

Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators' path to conquest. Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.

Hired by ForbesTraveler.com to review some of the most luxurious accommodations on Earth, and then inspired by a chance encounter in Dubai with the impoverished workers whose backbreaking jobs create such opulence, Bob Harris had an epiphany: He would turn his own good fortune into an effort to make lives like theirs better.

In 2000, after the Tribune Company acquired Times Mirror Corporation, it comprised the most powerful collection of newspapers in the world. How then did Tribune nosedive into bankruptcy and public scandal? In The Deal from Hell, veteran Tribune and Los Angeles Times editor James O'Shea takes us behind the scenes of the decisions that led to disaster in boardrooms and newsrooms from coast to coast, based on access to key players, court testimony, and sworn depositions.

Gary Rivlin tells the story of Ron Conway, the man who has placed more bets on Internet start-ups than anyone else in Silicon Valley. Conway is a listener-friendly way into the realm of angel financing, where independently wealthy investors link up with companies just as they are being born. The Godfather of Silicon Valley takes you into this fascinating world on the edges of the financial universe, where the pace is frantic, the story lines are rich, and every moment is perilous.

In 2004, Argentina’s President, Nestor Kirchner, appointed Martín Redrado to lead their country’s Central Bank. It was the logical choice, considering that Harvard-educated and Wall Street-seasoned Redrado brought to the table an extensive knowledge of world economics. Redrado’s primary assignment as president was to provide monetary and financial stability to a country wrecked with cyclical breakups. In early 2010, Cristina Kirchner ordered the Central Bank to fund public spending and pay national debts. Martín Redrado refused.

A landmark work from one of the preeminent historians of our time: the first published biography of Andrew W. Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each. Following a boyhood in 19th-century Pittsburgh, during which he learned from his Scotch-Irish immigrant father the lessons of self-sufficiency and wealth accumulation, Andrew Mellon overcame painful shyness to become one of America's greatest financiers.