Finance Biography

Imagine a year without spending - or even touching - money. Former businessman Mark Boyle did just that and here is his extraordinary story. Going back to basics and following his own strict rules, Mark learned ingenious ways to eliminate his bills and discovered that good friends are all the riches you need.

With a plan for reducing US oil dependency. It’s never too late to top your personal best. Now eighty years old, T. Boone Pickens is a legendary figure in the business world. Known as the “Oracle of Oil” because of his uncanny ability to predict the direction of fuel prices, he built Mesa Petroleum, one of the largest independent oil companies in the United States, from a $2,500 investment. In the 1980s, Pickens became a household name when he executed a series of unsolicited buyout bids for undervalued oil companies.

Erin Arvedlund, the financial reporter who questioned the amazing returns of Bernie Madoff's hedge funds way back in 2001, traces the life of the infamous swindler and addresses the tough questions surrounding the collapse of his Ponzi scheme.

The UCLA tradition carries on in the work of dozens of economists who earned their PhDs at UCLA during its golden years. Because their work spread beyond UCLA, the tradition lives on in the work of scores of economists who had no formal connection with the school.

In the 30 years after the Civil War, the United States blew by Great Britain to become the greatest economic power in world history. That is a well-known period in history, when titans like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan walked the earth. But as Charles R. Morris shows us, the platform for that spectacular growth spurt was built in the first half of the century. By the 1820s, America was already the world's most productive manufacturer and the most intensely commercialized society in history.

Want to crack the code of commodity futures markets? Back to the Futures provides a unique and educational perspective on the world of commodity futures markets, shaped by the personal experiences and professional insights of Dr. Scott Irwin, a leading expert in the field.

There is the Bitcoin story of the headlines, but there is a more important one behind them: tangled plots sprawling like roots deep underground, entire worlds in which we are just passersby. In Once a Bitcoin Miner, journalist and author Ethan Lou takes listeners on a richly told first-person narrative through the proverbial cryptocurrency Wild West.

Hard Sell tells you things about the American pharmaceutical industry you'd rather not know and about practices you'd rather weren't happening. But once you pick it up, you won't want to put this book down.Jamie Reidy is to the pharmaceutical business what Jerry Maguire was to professional sports and Frank Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can) was to bank fraud. He's the guy who's been there, done that, and walked away with the insider stories.

"La crise. On ne parlait que de ça, mais sans savoir réellement qu'en dire, ni comment en prendre la mesure. Tout donnait l'impression d'un monde en train de s'écrouler."

The high-stakes battle between two casino titans over the Las Vegas of the East Coast. It's all quiet now on the eastern front of the American gaming industry - Atlantic City, New Jersey - but for five chaotic years, real estate developer Richard "Skip" Bronson was at the white-hot center of a titanic clash of money and power that transformed Atlantic City from a struggling day-tripper place with buses in and out to a born again destination drawing tourists from New York, Philadelphia, and other major cities along the eastern seaboard.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is a classic, first published in 1923. It tells the story of a fictitious young stockbroker and his experiences on Wall Street, although the story is heavily influenced by real-life trader Jesse Livermore.

Kip Tindell, the founder and CEO of The Container Store, reveals the seven secrets to keeping both customers and employees happy and all fully engaged. In Uncontainable, Tindell reveals his approach for building a business where everyone associated with it thrives through embodying the tenets of conscious capitalism. Tindell's seven foundation principles are the road map that drives everyone at The Container Store to achieve the goals of the company.

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.

The Blue Sweater is the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty. It all started back home in Virginia, with the blue sweater, a gift that quickly became her prized possession - until the day she outgrew it and gave it away to Goodwill. Eleven years later in Africa, she spotted a young boy wearing that very sweater, with her name still on the tag inside.

When Michael Woodford was made president of Olympus - the company to which he had dedicated thirty years of his career - he became the first Westerner ever to climb the ranks of one of Japan’s corporate giants. Some wondered at the appointment - how could a gaijin who didn’t even speak Japanese understand how to run a Japanese company? But within months Woodford had gained the confidence of most of his colleagues and shareholders.

Part memoir, part manifesto, NFTs Are a Scam is the story of Bobby Hundreds’s journey into NFTs, Web3, and the Metaverse from 2020 to 2022. Hundreds’s first memoir, This is Not a T-Shirt, told his streetwear brand’s story of community, commerce, and style. Now, he wants to tell the story of when a community itself builds the brand. In NFTs Are a Scam, Hundreds’s shares his thoughts and philosophy around a decentralized digital revolution. Are NFTs a cult or a religion? And who do their followers pray to?

Sudhir Venkatesh, acclaimed sociologist at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day, returns to the streets to connect the dots of New York's divergent economic worlds and crack the code of the city's underground economy. Based on Venkatesh's interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the city's true engine of social transformation and economic prosperity - revealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York.

In September 2014, a Chinese company that most Americans had never heard of held the largest IPO in history - bigger than Google, Facebook, and Twitter combined. Alibaba, now the world's largest ecommerce company, mostly escaped Western notice for over 10 years, while building a customer base larger than Amazon's and handling the bulk of ecommerce transactions in China. How did it happen? And what was it like to be along for such a revolutionary ride?

When economists are called “influential,” it usually means they’ve changed the way other economists think. By that standard, Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of all time.

In 2008, when the Bitcoin Whitepaper was published online, the technology world changed forever. Hero / Villain: Satoshi: The Man Who Built Bitcoin tells the story of how an awkward Australian security specialist first created something revolutionary under the moniker “Satoshi Nakamoto” and how he spent every moment thereafter either in self-imposed hiding or in court trying to protect his invention.