International Economics

The award-winning author of The Battle of Bretton Woods reveals the gripping history behind the Marshall Plan—told with verve, insight, and resonance for today.

In the wake of World War II, with Britain’s empire collapsing and Stalin's on the rise, US officials under new secretary of state George C. Marshall set out to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism. Their massive, costly, and ambitious undertaking would confront Europeans and Americans alike with a vision at odds with their history and self-conceptions. In the process, they would drive the creation of NATO, the European Union, and a Western identity that continues to shape world events.

Focusing on the critical years 1947 to 1949, Benn Steil’s thrilling account brings to life the seminal episodes marking the collapse of postwar US-Soviet relations—the Prague coup, the Berlin blockade, and the division of Germany. In each case, we see and understand like never before Stalin’s determination to crush the Marshall Plan and undermine American power in Europe.

Given current echoes of the Cold War, as Putin’s Russia rattles the world order, the tenuous balance of power and uncertain order of the late 1940s is as relevant as ever. The Marshall Plan provides critical context into understanding today’s international landscape. Bringing to bear fascinating new material from American, Russian, German, and other European archives, Steil’s account will forever change how we see the Marshall Plan and the birth of the Cold War. A polished and masterly work of historical narrative, this is an instant classic of Cold War literature.

The way most white-collar crime works is by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. Financial crime seems horribly complicated, but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what’s theirs.

After a decade of rapid growth, the world’s most celebrated emerging markets are poised to slow down. Which countries will rise to challenge them? To identify the economic stars of the future, we should abandon the habit of extrapolating from the recent past and lumping wildly diverse countries together. We need to remember that sustained economic success is a rare phenomenon. As an era of easy money and easy growth comes to a close, China in particular will cool down.

A case for why regionalization, not globalization, has been the biggest economic trend of the past forty years.

Shaped by his 25 years traveling the world and enlivened by encounters with tycoons, presidents, and villagers from Rio to Beijing, Ruchir Sharma's The Rise and Fall of Nations rethinks the "dismal science" of economics as a practical art. Narrowing the thousands of factors that can shape a country's fortunes to 10 clear rules, Sharma explains how to spot political, economic, and social changes in real time. He shows how to read political headlines, black markets, the price of onions, and billionaire rankings as signals of booms, busts, and protests.

This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. When it was first published, this national best-seller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank.

Una frattura si allarga sempre di più. L'abbiamo ignorata, sottovalutata, creduta lontana, eppure da cinquant'anni si amplia e si ramifica, spalancando voragini tra i continenti, le nazioni e i cittadini stessi. È "The Divide", il divario economico tra ricchi e poveri del mondo: 4,3 miliardi di persone vivono con meno di 5 dollari al giorno mentre otto uomini posseggono la stessa ricchezza della metà più povera del pianeta.

The IMF and World Bank were created to help countries survive financial crises and to help them develop into prosperous economic actors. But their 75-year track record shows the opposite: their loans and structural adjustment policies have plunged poor countries into impossibly large debt traps and forced the Third World to focus on producing goods for consumption in the West, instead of growing consumption and industry at home.

Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.

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.

In A Splendid Exchange, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. He transports listeners from ancient sailing ships that brought the silk trade from China to Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the 16th.

In this broad-scoped, inside-Ottawa memoir, Thomas d’Aquino, described by Peter C. Newman as “the most powerful influence on public policy formation in Canadian history,” offers personal insights on four decades of bold leadership at the apex of power.

Jim Rogers, whose entertaining accounts of his travels around the world - studying the markets from Russia to Singapore from the ground up - has enthralled investors and Wall Street aficionados for two decades. In his engaging memoir Street Smarts, Rogers offers pithy commentary from a lifetime of adventure, from his early years growing up a naïve kid in Demopolis, Alabama, to his fledgling career on Wall Street, to his cofounding the wildly successful Quantum Fund [omit George Soros], Rogers always had a restless curiosity to experience and understand the world around him.

$uperhubs is a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how the world's most powerful titans, the superhubs, pull the levers of our global financial system. Combining insider's knowledge with principles of network science, Sandra Navidi offers a startling new perspective on how superhubs build their powerful networks and how their decisions impact all our lives. $uperhubs reveals what happens at the exclusive, invitation-only platforms - the World Economic Forum in Davos, the meetings of the International Monetary Fund, think tanks....

Ein Insider schildert den wirtschaftlichen Aufstieg in China: Analyse und Prognose zugleich.

China steigt zur größten Volkswirtschaft der Welt auf und könnte schon in wenigen Jahren die amerikanische Wirtschaft überholen. Konrad Seitz erzählt die dramatische Geschichte Chinas: von der Jahrtausende alten Geschichte Chinas und seiner "vollendeten Zivilisation", vom Zusammenbruch der konfuzianischen Welt im 19. Jahrhundert und der Verzweiflung der Chinesen an ihrer eigenen Kultur, und von der Geburt des neuen China seit 1949.

In this provocative new book, Rifkin argues that the coming together of the Communication Internet with the fledgling Energy Internet and Logistics Internet in a seamless twenty-first-century intelligent infrastructure—the Internet of Things—is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them essentially free.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

In this 20th-anniversary edition, Korten shares insights from his personal experience as a participant in the growing movement for a new economy. A new introduction documents the further concentration of wealth and corporate power since 1995 and explores why our institutions resolutely resist even modest reform. A new conclusion chapter outlines high-leverage opportunities for breakthrough change.

In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, author Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.

Africa's Business Revolution provides the inside story on business in Africa and its future growth prospects and helps executives understand and seize the opportunities for building profitable, sustainable enterprises.