World Finance

To look south and skyward from Central Park these days is to gaze upon a physical manifestation of tens of billions of dollars in global wealth: a series of soaring spires stretching from Park Avenue to Broadway. Known as Billionaires’ Row, this set of slender high-rise residences has transformed the skyline of New York City, thanks to developer-friendly policies and a seemingly endless gush of cash from tech, finance, and foreign oligarchs. And chances are most of us will never be invited to step inside.

In 2007, a stranger-than-fiction multibillion-dollar bidding war for the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) erupted between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and Atlanta’s Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). Zero-Sum Game: The Rise of the World’s Largest Derivatives Exchange takes listeners behind the scenes of this battle to tell the gripping - and often comical - story of how the historic merger between CME and CBOT almost didn’t happen.

Have you ever wondered who started banking and for what reason? Or where money came from and how it's regulated? Ever wonder how banks are able to lend out billions of dollars at a time? This book gives a detailed outline of the history of banking from the 15 century to present day. Whether you are a fellow banker like myself, aspiring to work in the world of finance, or just plain curious, this book covers everything you need to know from top to bottom.

Gross domestic product is failing. For decades it has rewarded environmental destruction and obscured inequality. Its formula can be - and has been - gamed to the detriment of developing countries. In this powerfully argued book, now updated with a new chapter, science writer Ehsan Masood shows how GDP fell from the path envisaged by its architects, and how its long-term misapplication has kept large parts of the world in poverty, while helping accelerate global warming and biodiversity loss.

With in-depth research, interviews, and provocative analysis, Mira Kamdar offers a penetrating view of India and its cultural and economic impact on the United States and the world. From Bollywood to the Indian diaspora to India's effect on global politics, she reports on the people, companies, and places shaping the new India. Kamdar examines the challenges India faces while celebrating India's tremendous vitality and the opportunities this Asian democracy has to shape its own and all of our destinies.

Contending with the 24/7 news cycle and an endless barrage of choices and information has stymied leadership and decision-making strategies. The broad-based reaction to this chaotic, unmanageable assault has been to retrench, and to focus on immediate, controllable decisions. In the process, we lose sight of the horizon. More dangerous still, is the shift we've seen from value creation to wealth creation, in a transaction-based society in which the "deal" is more important than the value it drives or the relationships it is based on.

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.

From the development of international trade fairs in the 12th century to the innovations made in China, India, and the Arab world, it turns out that historical economies were much more sophisticated that we might imagine, tied together by webs of credit and financial instruments much like our modern economy.

The concept of beating markets is just a lot of hype. Successful investors don't find "alpha," they find value - and that's what this book helps you do. Chris Schelling explains why strategies based on "beating the markets" are doomed to failure and provides a simple three-step framework for making better investment decisions: Behavior (smart thinking), Process (smart habits), Organization (smart governance).

The Upside of Aging: How Long Life Is Changing the World of Health, Work, Innovation, Policy and Purpose explores a titanic shift that will alter every aspect of human existence, from the jobs we hold to the products we buy to the medical care we receive - an aging revolution is underway across America and the world. Moving beyond the stereotypes of dependency and decline that have defined older age, The Upside of Aging reveals the vast opportunity and potential of this aging phenomenon, despite significant policy and societal challenges that must be addressed.

China's economic growth is sputtering, the Euro is under threat, and the United States is combating serious trade disadvantages. Another Great Depression? Not quite. Noted economist and China expert Michael Pettis argues instead that we are undergoing a critical rebalancing of the world economies.

El capital de Karl Marx (1818-1883) es una obra clave para entender el desarrollo del comunismo en el siglo XX, la naturaleza del capitalismo, y también la situación geopolítica en la que se encuentra el mundo moderno.

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.

Powerful technologies - including artificial intelligence - are uprooting and reshaping daily life across the globe. This "flat world" is one of tremendous possibility, but it also poses challenges to stability, shared prosperity, and core values such as privacy, agency and fairness. In Rules for a Flat World, Gillian Hadfield argues that the legal rules that currently guide technological development globally are no longer working, and they are struggling to keep up with rapid advances in Big Tech.

In this searing exposé, former Wall Street insider Nomi Prins shows how the 2007-2008 financial crisis turbo-boosted the influence of central bankers and triggered a massive shift in the world order. Packed with tantalizing details about the elite players orchestrating the world economy, Collusion takes the listener inside the most discreet conversations at exclusive retreats like Jackson Hole and Davos. A work of meticulous reporting and bracing analysis, Collusion will change the way we understand the new world of international finance.

A deeply researched investigation that reveals how the United States is like a spider at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control, which it weaves in the form of globe-spanning networks such as fiber optic cables and obscure payment systems.

In January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor teaching in Austin, Texas, was elected to the Greek parliament with more votes than any other member of parliament. He was appointed finance minister, and, in the whirlwind five months that followed, everything he had warned about was confirmed as the "troika" (the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission) stonewalled his efforts to resolve Greece's economic crisis.

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.

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.

In Bending Adversity, Financial Times Asia editor David Pilling presents a fresh vision of Japan, drawing on his own deep experience, as well as observations from a cross section of Japanese citizenry, including novelist Haruki Murakami, former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, industrialists and bankers, activists and artists, teenagers and octogenarians. Through their voices, Pilling captures the dynamism and diversity of contemporary Japan.