International Economics

For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they've not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they've secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself. These Americans are known as foreign lobbyists, and many of them spent years ushering dictatorships directly into the halls of Washington, all while laundering the reputations of the most heinous regimes in the process.

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.

"The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail?

This all happened while Perkins was a Peace Corps volunteer. Then he became an "economic hit man" (EHM), convincing developing countries to build huge projects that put them perpetually in debt to the World Bank and other US-controlled institutions. Although he'd learned in business school that this was the best model for economic development, he came to understand it as a new form of colonialism.

Penguin Audio presents Has the West Lost It? by Kishore Mahbubani, read by Jonathan Keeble. The West's centuries-old status as the centre of global wealth and power is coming to an end. As the new powers - China and India from Asia and others from Africa and Latin America - rise to the top of the world's pecking order, how should the West react?

Looking underneath the cover of globalization, Wood shatters the false narrative of a promised utopia and exposes the true nature of the deception used to promote this new economic order, in this audiobook. Those elite who hate the bedrock of American liberty and its time-tested constitution have pulled out all the stops to destroy both, and it's time for citizens to stand up to reject them. As always, Wood closes with the nature of effective resistance and the tools that can help to achieve success.

The world is at a turning point. The benefits of globalization - through the freer flow of money, people, ideas, and trade - have been many. But rather than a world that is flat, what has emerged is one of jagged peaks and rough, deep valleys characterized by wealth inequality, indebtedness, political recession, and imbalances across the world's economies. These peaks and valleys are undergoing what Michael O'Sullivan calls "the levelling" - a major transition in world economics, finance, and power. What's next is a levelling-out of wealth....

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.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) began in 1995, but even in the first 10 years of its existence it generated debate, controversy, and even outrage. Rulings on beef hormones and tuna-dolphin cases provide graphic examples of how the organization regulates and intrudes into areas of individual consumer choice, ethical preferences, and cultural habits. This deep and far-ranging impact of the WTO on peoples' everyday lives means that it is not just an institution of interest to economists, but to everyone.

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.

Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world - one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism, the leading source of the world's most popular drug, and perhaps the most widespread word on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 500-year transformation from a mysterious Muslim ritual into an everyday necessity.

Signals is the story of the world economy, told in the language of everyday objects, places and events - from magazine covers and supermarkets to public protests. Pippa Malmgren argues that by being alert to the many signals around us, we can be empowered to deal with the varied troubles and treasures the world economy inevitably brings. Economics is not just maths and data. Perfume and makeup are part of the world economy, too.

Ancient Futures is a lyrical and moving portrait of tradition and change in Ladakh, or “Little Tibet", as it was once known. The book is also an engaging critique of the global economy and a call for economic localization. When author Helena Norberg-Hodge first arrived in Ladakh in the 1970s, she found a pristine environment and a people who exhibited remarkable vitality and joy. Not long after, came economic growth and development, and Norberg-Hodge watched how a whole range of problems began to appear for the first time.

In The Secret History of the American Empire, Perkins zeroes in on hot spots around the world and, drawing on interviews with other hit men, jackals, reporters, and activists, examines the current geopolitical crisis. Instability is the norm; it's clear that the world we've created is dangerous and no longer sustainable. How did we get here? Who's responsible? What good have we done and at what cost? And what can we do to change things for the next generations?

The ongoing tumult in financial markets and the global economy began when some of our most esteemed financial institutions, our government, and even average citizens abdicated their collective responsibilities, eventually selling out investors and selling off the American Dream itself.

Macroeconomics takes a broad perspective on the economy of a country or region; it studies economic changes in the aggregate, collecting data on production, unemployment, inflation, consumption, investment, trade, and other aspects of national and international economic life. Policymakers depend on macroeconomists' knowledge when making decisions about such issues as taxes and the public budget, monetary and exchange rate policies, and trade policies-all of which, in turn, affect decisions made by individuals and businesses.

It's the ultimate road trip. Legendary investor Jim Rogers and his fiancee travel to 116 countries in a custom-built, four-wheel-drive, bright yellow Mercedes. Over three years, they make their way through war zones, are guarded by military convoys, observe a 50-million-person pilgrimage, eat disgusting food, put the car on barges for transport between countries, and have their lives threatened at every turn.

In this eloquent challenge to the reigning wisdom on globalization, Dani Rodrik reminds us of the importance of the nation-state, arguing forcefully that when the social arrangements of democracies inevitably clash with the international demands of globalization, national priorities should take precedence. Combining history with insight, humor with good-natured critique, Rodrik’s case for a customizable globalization supported by a light frame of international rules shows the way to a balanced prosperity as we confront today’s global challenges in trade, finance, and labor markets.

No one, from economists to bankers to politicians, has been able to quantify exactly how much of the world's assets are currently hidden - until now. Gabriel Zucman is the first economist to offer reliable insight into the actual extent of the world's money held in tax havens. And it's staggering. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman offers an inventive and sophisticated approach to quantifying how big the problem is, how tax havens work and are organized, and how we can begin to approach a solution.

Why are cellphone plans so much more expensive in the United States than in Europe? It seems a simple question. But the search for an answer took Thomas Philippon on an unexpected journey through some of the most complex and hotly debated issues in modern economics. Ultimately, he reached a surprising conclusion: American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on healthy competition.