Money Economics

Innovations rarely come from “experts.” Elon Musk was not an “electric car person” before he started Tesla. When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the wider tech sector, and, by extension, the world.

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.

In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. Yet as capitalism became established from the late Middle Ages onwards, denunciations of interest were tempered because interest was a necessary reward for lenders to part with their capital. And interest performs many other vital functions: it encourages people to save; enables them to place a value on precious assets, such as houses and all manner of financial securities; and allows us to price risk.

Whether we realize it or not, we all take risks large and small every day. Even the most cautious among us cannot opt out - the question is always which risks to take, not whether to take them at all. What most of us don't know is how to measure those risks and maximize the chances of getting what we want out of life. In An Economist Walks into a Brothel, Schrager equips listeners with five principles for dealing with risk, principles used by some of the world's most interesting risk takers.

Capitalism didn’t fail, it was ruined. What went wrong with capitalism? Ruchir Sharma’s account is not like any you will have heard before. He says progressives are right, in part, when they mock modern capitalism as “socialism for the rich.” For a century, governments have expanded in just about every measurable dimension, from spending to regulation and the scale of financial rescues when the economy wobbles. The result is expensive state guarantees for everyone—bailouts for the rich, entitlements for the middle class, welfare for the poor.

Ludwig von Mises is to economics what Albert Einstein is to physics. Human Action is his greatest work: a systematic study that covers every major topic in the science of economics. It is also one of the most convincing indictments of socialism and statism ever penned. When it first appeared in 1949, it ignited an eruption of critical acclaim.

Today, your favorite products are missing from store shelves, caught in supply chain limbo somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But what does this supply chain disruption look like six months, or even three years, from now? While we hope that post-pandemic recovery will absolve these issues, the reality is that digital currency, meme stonks, and social media can’t solve the age-old problem of producing and moving physical goods across oceans and continents. Jim Rickards argues that consumer frustration is only the tip of a large, menacing iceberg that threatens global economic collapse.

Whether driven by mass psychology, fear, or greed of investors, the forces of supply and demand, or a combination, technical analysis has flourished for thousands of years on the outskirts of the financial establishment. In The Evolution of Technical Analysis: Financial Prediction from Babylonian Tablets to Bloomberg Terminals, MIT's Andrew W. Lo details how the charting of past stock prices for the purpose of identifying trends, patterns, strength, and cycles within market data has allowed traders to make informed investment decisions based in logic, rather than on luck.

The defining, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and dominant pop cultural entities in America’s history - Marvel Comics - and the outsized personalities who made Marvel, including Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby.

Clayton M. Christensen, the author of such business classics as The Innovator’s Dilemma and the New York Times best-seller How Will You Measure Your Life, and coauthors Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon reveal why so many investments in economic development fail to generate sustainable prosperity and offers a groundbreaking solution for true and lasting change.

Eighteen years after the genocide that made Rwanda international news, yet left it all but abandoned by the West, the country has achieved a miraculous turnaround. Rising out of the complete devastation of a failed state, Rwanda has emerged on the world stage yet again - this time with a unique model for governance and economic development under the leadership of its strong and decisive president, Paul Kagame. Here, Patricia Crisafulli and Andrea Redmond look at Kagame’s leadership.

With the stock market turning into a roller-coaster ride of all-time highs and stomach-churning lows, where does that leave your portfolio? Pretty much back where you started in 2000. Which may be fine for visitors to Six Flags, but for your retirement, savings, and investments, you’d like to actually get somewhere.

Cybersecurity incidents make the news with startling regularity. Each breach makes headlines, inspires panic, instigates lawsuits, and is then forgotten. The cycle of alarm and amnesia continues with the next attack, and the one after that. Cybersecurity expert Josephine Wolff argues that we shouldn't forget about these incidents, we should investigate their trajectory, from technology flaws to reparations for harm done to their impact on future security measures. We can learn valuable lessons in the aftermath of cybersecurity breaches.

Millions of Americans have lost confidence in our political and economic system. After years of stagnant wages, volatile job markets, and an unwillingness by those in power to deal with profound threats such as climate change, there is a mounting sense that the system is fixed, serving only those select few with enough money to secure a controlling stake. With the characteristic clarity and passion that has made him a central civil voice, Robert B. Reich shows how wealth and power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the middle class, and undermine democracy.

For years, America has been plagued by slow economic growth and increasing inequality. In The Captured Economy, Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles identify a common factor behind these twin ills: breakdowns in democratic governance that allow wealthy special interests to capture the policymaking process for their own benefit.

Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.

The New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur investigates what would happen if a new financial world order took hold, one in which global elites own everything and you own nothing—and yet you are somehow happy. In You Will Own Nothing¸ Roth reveals how the agendas of Wall Street, world governments, international organizations, socialist activists, and multinational corporations like Blackrock all work together to reduce the power of the dollar and prevent millions of Americans from taking control of their wealth.

Written by the New York Times best-selling author team of John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper, Code Red spills the beans on the central banks in the US, UK, EU, and Japan and how they've rigged the game against the average saver and investor. More importantly, it shows you how to protect your hard-earned cash from the bankers' disastrous monetary policies and how to come out a winner in the irresponsible game of chicken they're playing with the global financial system.

Devil Take the Hindmost is a lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to the present day. Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world.

The "end of America"? Most likely. The "demise of liberty"? You betcha! The "destruction of Western civilization"? Of course! But why let all of the above get you down? Learn to "enjoy the decline"!