Economics Great

Triffin’s Dilemma: Why Economic Power Always Ends in Collapse is a gripping deep dive into the structural flaw at the core of every global currency system. From ancient empires to the modern dollar-based order, this meticulously researched narrative exposes a repeating pattern: monetary dominance leads to overreach, overreach leads to fragility, and collapse follows. It’s not ideology—it’s math. Named after economist Robert Triffin, the dilemma explains why any nation issuing the world’s reserve currency must eventually undermine its own economic foundation. The book tracks this ...

In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression. But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster.

Acclaimed economist and BBC broadcaster Linda Yueh profiles the great economic minds who focused on the big questions: growth, innovation, and the nature of markets. Most of them have won the Nobel Prize. All of them have had lasting impact on both the development of the discipline and how public policy has been and continues to be shaped. But Dr. Yueh goes a step further: In accessible and clear prose, she will explain the impact their respective research has on combating today's great economic problems.

A dazzlingly original account of the life and thought of Adam Smith, the greatest economist of all time. In Adam Smith, political philosopher Jesse Norman dispels the myths and caricatures, and provides a far more complex portrait of the man. Offering a highly engaging account of Smith's life and times, Norman explores his work as a whole and traces his influence over two centuries to the present day. Finally, he shows how a proper understanding of Smith can help us address the problems of modern capitalism.

Taming the Street describes how President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled to regulate Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression. With deep reporting and vivid storytelling, Diana B. Henriques takes listeners back to a time when America’s financial landscape was a jungle ruled by the titans of vast wealth, largely unrestrained by government. Roosevelt ran for office in 1932 vowing to curb that ruthless capitalism and make the world of finance safer for ordinary savers and investors.

The Great Contraction, 1929-1933 argued that the Federal Reserve could have stemmed the severity of the Depression, but failed to exercise its role of managing the monetary system and ameliorating banking panics. This edition of the original text includes a new preface by Anna Jacobson Schwartz, as well as a new introduction by the economist Peter Bernstein.

After spearheading the economic policy for the Reagan Revolution, Stockman worked on Wall Street at the highest levels and is now an adviser to professional investors. With this book, listeners at all investment levels can have access to his groundbreaking financial advice.

Over the course of a decade spent reporting on the ground in China as a financial journalist, Dinny McMahon gradually came to the conclusion that the widely held belief in China’s inevitable economic ascent is dangerously wrong. Debt, entrenched vested interests, a frenzy of speculation, and an aging population are all pushing China toward an economic reckoning. China’s Great Wall of Debt unravels an incredibly complex and opaque economy, one whose fortunes - for better or worse - will shape the globe like never before.

"Amanda Clayton was 24 when she won the Michigan State lottery of $1 million in 2011; she was a single mom of two, then. Unexpectedly, she was involved in welfare fraud soon after someone recorded her using a snap card (food stamps) at a gas station even after the windfall. Eventually, she was sentenced to nine months of probation and ordered to repay $5,500 in food and medical assistance to the State. Then, astonishingly, Amanda was found dead of OD in a friend's home in 2012; that was just one year after the winning and she was only 25. I wonder if she could have been OK until now if she ...

That was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s vow as the worst financial panic in more than fifty years gripped the world and he struggled to avoid the once unthinkable: a repeat of the Great Depression. Brilliant but temperamentally cautious, Bernanke researched and wrote about the causes of the Depression during his career as an academic. Then when thrust into a role as one of the most important people in the world, he was compelled to boldness by circumstances he never anticipated.

Through perseverance, solid ingenuity, and unwavering determination, family-run companies - dynasties - have dominated wealth and business throughout the last two centuries. One third of Fortune 500 firms are family owned and, in most cases, the ideal of the family business is one synonymous with continuity, watchful leadership, and dedication to success. But what happens when bad behavior, extravagance, and laziness, all very real enemies of industry, are allowed to proliferate?

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang brilliantly debunked many of the predominant myths of neoclassical economics. Now, in an entertaining and accessible primer, he explains how the global economy actually works - in real-world terms. Writing with irreverent wit, a deep knowledge of history and a disregard for conventional economic pieties, Chang offers insights that will never be found in the textbooks.

The book covers Walter P. Chrysler's life and automotive career before 1925, when he founded the Chrysler Corporation, to 1998, when it merged with Daimler-Benz. Chrysler made a late entrance into the industry in 1925, when it emerged from Chalmers and Maxwell, and further grew when it absorbed Dodge Brothers and American Motors Corporation.

In The Great Divide, Joseph E. Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in his best-selling book The Price of Inequality and suggests ways to counter America's growing problem. With his signature blend of clarity and passion, Stiglitz argues that inequality is a choice - the cumulative result of unjust policies and misguided priorities.

In this study, Edward Yardeni and Melissa Tagg, two of the world’s most experienced and widely followed investment strategists and Fed watchers, provide investors with a practical understanding of the forces that drove monetary and fiscal policies during 2020 in response to the Great Virus Crisis. The focus is on the Fed. At the beginning of the year, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues expected that the longest economic expansion in US history would continue and that the federal funds interest rate would remain range-bound between 1.50% and 1.75%.The outlook changed dramatically ...

In 2018, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Hank Paulson came together to reflect on the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis 10 years on. Recognizing that, as Ben put it, "the enemy is forgetting," they examine the causes of the crisis, why it was so damaging, and what it ultimately took to prevent a second Great Depression. And they provide to their successors in the United States and the finance ministers and central bank governors of other countries a valuable playbook for reducing the damage from future financial crises.

The American economy is strong in large part because nobody believes that America would ever default on its debt. Yet in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that, when in a bid to pull the country out of depression, he depreciated the US dollar in relation to gold, effectively annulling all debt contracts. American Default is the story of this forgotten chapter in America's history.

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.

Here is a bold new history of economics, the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built a rigorous social science without peer.

Josh Harris had been New York's first net millionaire. He founded the city's first dotcom, Pseudo.com, and paved the way for a cadre of net-savvy 20-somethings to follow, riding a wave of tech euphoria to unimagined wealth and fame for five years, before losing it all in the great dotcom crash of 2000. Long before then, however, Harris's view of where the web would take us had darkened, and he began a series of lurid social experiments aimed at illustrating his worst fear: that the internet would soon alter the very fabric of society - cognitive, social, political, and otherwise.