Money Finance History

In this fascinating character-driven history, a New York Times editorial writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist spotlights the American economists who championed the rise of markets and fundamentally reshaped the modern world.

Le 9 novembre 1989, le mur de Berlin s’écroule. Peu de temps après l’Union Soviétique est dissoute. La guerre froide est finie, l’économie de marché et la démocratie l’emportent sur la technocratie et le totalitarisme. L’avenir s’annonce tout à la fois paisible et prospère. Trente-quatre ans plus tard, où en sommes-nous ? La guerre a ravagé la Serbie, l’Iraq, la Syrie, le Yémen, la Lybie, le Soudan et fait rage en Ukraine.

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.

Our world is being transformed by the Internet and the near limitless choice that it provides to consumers; tomorrow's markets belong to those who can take advantage of this. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance, an entirely new model for business that is just starting to show its power as unlimited selection reveals new truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it.

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.

In 2006, hedge fund manager John Paulson realized something few others suspected - that the housing market and the value of subprime mortgages were grossly inflated and headed for a major fall. Paulson's background was in mergers and acquisitions, however, and he knew little about real estate or how to wager against housing. He had spent a career as an also-ran on Wall Street. But Paulson was convinced this was his chance to make his mark. He just wasn't sure how to do it. Colleagues at investment banks scoffed at him and investors dismissed him.

Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts - austerity - to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system.

How did InBev, a Belgian company controlled by Brazilians, take over one of America's most beloved brands after barely a whimper of a fight? With timing - and some unexpected help from powerful members of the Busch dynasty, the very family that had run the company for more than a century. From the very heart of America's heartland to the European continent to Brazil, Dethroning the King is the ultimate corporate caper and a fascinating case study that's both wide-reaching and profound.

From the days of the Mayflower and the Virginia Company, America has been a place for people to dream, invent, build, tinker, and bet the farm in pursuit of a better life. Americana takes us on a 400-year journey of this spirit of innovation and ambition through a series of Next Big Things - the inventions, techniques, and industries that drove American history forward: from the telegraph, the railroad, guns, radio, and banking, to flight, suburbia, and sneakers, culminating with the Internet and mobile technology at the turn of the 21st century.

Best-selling author and world-renowned historian Niall Ferguson has won widespread acclaim for thought-provoking works such as Civilization and High Financier. The Great Degeneration tackles nothing less than the decline of Western civilization. Ferguson posits that slowing growth, outrageous debt, and antisocial behavior are contributing to the erosion of the West’s once rock-solid foundations. Ferguson excavates the causes and shows how heroic leadership and radical reform are needed to right the course.

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries.

In this passionate manifesto for Canadian renewal, business leaders Assaf, Hejazi, and Manget draw on interviews with over 100 thought leaders, politicians, CEOs, and union leaders to craft a new way of thinking about our national opportunities. Now that technology has democratized the tools of modern productivity, they argue, we need to shift our focus from tired old industrial strategies and protectionist policies to nurturing individual talent.

During the twentieth century, Vietnam and Poland were both victims not only of devastating wars, but also of socialist planned economies that destroyed whatever war hadn’t already. In 1990, Vietnam was still one of the poorest countries in the world, while Poland was one of the poorest in Europe. But in the three decades since then, both countries have drastically improved their citizens’ standards of living and escaped the vicious cycle of national poverty.

In 1920-1921, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding met a deep economic slump by seeming to ignore it, implementing policies that most 21st-century economists would call backward. Confronted with plunging prices, wages, and employment, the government balanced the budget and, through the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates. No "stimulus" was administered, and a powerful, job-filled recovery was under way by late 1921. Yet by 1929, the economy spiraled downward as the Hoover administration adopted the policies that Wilson and Harding had declined to put in place.

Rothbard's posthumous masterpiece is the definitive book on the Progressives. It will soon be the must read study of this dreadful time in our past. (from the foreword by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano) The current relationship between the modern state and the economy has its roots in the Progressive Era. (from the introduction by Patrick Newman) In short, the Progressive Era ushered the modern American politico-economic system into being. (from the preface by Murray N. Rothbard)

The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals, and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China, and the other "emerging markets" have transformed their economies, Africa's resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 percent of the world's reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 percent of the world's population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.

Imagine running a business without a strategy. It would be akin to driving blindfolded, to building a house without a blueprint. The concept of strategy changed all that, paving the way for the creation of the modern corporate world. The Lords of Strategy provides listeners with a deeper understanding of the world they compete in, and a sharper eye for what works — and what doesn’t — when forging strategy.

Financial crises happen time and again in post-industrial economies - and they are extraordinarily damaging. Building on insights gleaned from many years of work in the banking industry and drawing on a vast trove of data, Richard Vague argues that such crises follow a pattern that makes them both predictable and avoidable. A Brief History of Doom examines a series of major crises over the past 200 years in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and China - including the Great Depression and the economic meltdown of 2008.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last 70 years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times.

The story of Ethereum begins with Vitalik Buterin, a supremely gifted 19-year-old autodidact who saw the promise of blockchain when the technology was in its earliest stages. He convinced a crack group of coders to join him in his quest to make a super-charged, global computer. The Infinite Machine introduces Vitalik’s ingenious idea and unfolds Ethereum’s chaotic beginnings. It then explores the brilliant innovation and reckless greed the platform has unleashed and the consequences that resulted as the frenzy surrounding it grew.