American Finance

Who invented supply-side economics - the idea that cutting tax rates can result in more growth, more prosperity at all income levels, and even more tax revenue flowing into the IRS? Most people would credit the economic team that advised Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But in fact supply-side economics came of age two decades earlier. And the first president who embraced it was one of the biggest icons of the Democratic Party - John F. Kennedy.

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

At the start of 1932, the nation's worst economic crisis has left one-in-four workers without a job, countless families facing eviction, banks shutting down as desperate depositors withdraw their savings, and growing social and political unrest. Amid this turmoil, a political decision looms that will determine the course of the nation. It's a choice between two men with very different visions of America: Incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover and New York's Democratic Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The best-selling author of Perfectly Legal returns with a powerful new expose.

The tragedy of our Indian policies demands reexamination immediately - not only because they make the lives of millions of American citizens harder and more dangerous - but also because they represent a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with modern liberalism. They are the result of decades of politicians and bureaucrats showering a victimized people with money and cultural sensitivity instead of what they truly need-the education, the legal protections, and the autonomy to improve their own situation.

Conceived in the early 1800s and completed in 1825, the Erie Canal was the boldest and biggest American engineering project of its century, with enduring political, social, and economic effects. It was the Erie Canal that first opened up the West to American enterprise and imagination, bringing vast riches and a far-reaching vision to a rapidly expanding nation.In this compelling narrative, author Gerard Koeppel tells the complete, sweeping story of the creation of the canal.

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.

Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.

Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, The Love Jones Cohort centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts.

Money Games is a riveting tale of one of the most successful buyout deals ever: the acquisition and turnaround of what used to be Korea's largest bank by the American firm Newbridge Capital. Full of intrigue and suspense, this insider's account is told by the chief architect of the deal itself, the celebrated author and private equity investor Weijian Shan. With billions of dollars at stake, and the nation's economic future on the line, Newbridge Capital sought to become the first foreign firm in history to take control of one of Korea's most beloved financial institutions.

How do THEY do it? Those people who are able to save and invest and not fret about their financial futures? Meet ordinary people who know how to make their money work for them.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery.

During the next 20 years, more than $500 billion is expected to pour into the philanthropic sector. Some of it will come from retiring baby boomers, but even more will come from newly rich Silicon Valley billionaires. Since 2006, the idea of "giving while living" has grown in its appeal such that many philanthropic donors now expect not just to give money during their lifetimes, but to create organizations or ventures - some for profit, others not for profit - whose missions are expected to be completed within the lifetime of the donors.

Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America's founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith's ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention.

In American Mojo: Lost and Found, Peter D. Kiernan, the award-winning author of the New York Times best-seller Becoming China's Bitch, focuses on America's greatest challenge and opportunity: restoring the middle class to its full promise and potential. Our educated, skilled, and motivated middle class was the cornerstone of America's postwar economic might, but the country's dynamic core has struggled and changed dramatically through the last three decades.

Are we living the good life - and what defines good, anyway? Americans today are constructing a completely different framework for success than their parents' generation, using new metrics that TEDWomen speaker and columnist Courtney Martin has termed collectively the "New Better Off".

Private foundations have been the dynamo of social change since their invention at the beginning of the last century. Yet just over 10 percent of the public knows they even exist; and for those who are aware of them, as well as even those who seek grants from them, their internal workings remain a complete mystery

This book is about the partnership of God and Mammon in the New World - about how Americans have made money and lost money, and about how they have thought about that obsessive and peculiarly American subject. Money is the basic American thing, the life's blood of the country. God and Mammon shows how the dynamics of money in its many dimensions (material, spiritual, cultural, psychological) worked to make America what it is. It traces the grand American binaries of success and failure to their theological origins in Calvinism's anxieties about salvation and damnation.

Sheila Ramos’s story mirrors the lives of millions of Americans who have lost their homes since the beginning of the housing crisis in 2007. The Great American Foreclosure Story details with clarity and empathy the road that led Ramos and so many like her toward financial ruin. Alongside Ramos’s story are additional investigations documenting the systematic failures at banks, mortgage servicers, and government watchdogs that have exacerbated the country’s most severe foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression.

Small businesses are the backbone of the US economy. They are the biggest job creators and offer a path to the American dream. But for many, it is difficult to get the capital they need to operate and succeed. In the Great Recession, access to capital for small businesses froze and in the aftermath, many community banks shuttered their doors and other lenders that had weathered the storm turned to more profitable avenues. For years after the financial crisis, the outlook for many small businesses was bleak. But then a new dawn of financial technology, or 'fintech', emerged.