Financial History

Over the past few years, Brianna Wiest has gained renown for her deeply moving, philosophical writing. This new compilation of her published work features pieces on why you should pursue purpose over passion, embrace negative thinking, see the wisdom in daily routine, and become aware of the cognitive biases that are creating the way you see your life. Some of these pieces have never been seen; others have been read by millions of people around the world. Regardless, each will leave you thinking: This idea changed my life.

What happens when money loses meaning and debt replaces discipline? The Ponzi Dollar: How Fiat Currency Bankrupted the World delivers a hard-hitting, expertly researched autopsy of the global financial system built on illusion, inflation, and institutional denial. From Nixon’s 1971 abandonment of the gold standard to the Federal Reserve’s unchecked money creation, this book exposes the deliberate shift from real value to financial fabrication. Through chapters that dissect Bretton Woods, the Vietnam War’s monetary fallout, central banking alchemy, and the rigged architecture of ...

History doesn’t just repeat—it compounds. "Boom, Bust, Repeat: How Financial Disasters Shaped Modern Finance" pulls readers into the high-stakes world of market crashes, shady schemes, and government bailouts that built the financial empires we live with today. From Alexander Hamilton’s first bailout in 1792 to the global tremors of the 2008 financial crisis, Joseph Ejike Ojih delivers a page-turning journey through the chaos that created modern money power. This is not your typical economics book. It reads like a thriller. With shocking tales of fake countries like Poyais, reckless ...

Financial Fates: A Psychological Thriller of Men Who Dared to Challenge The Fed In the shadowy corridors of power, where financial empires rise and fall, a dangerous conspiracy lurks. Financial Fates is a gripping psychological thriller that follows the men who dared to defy the ultimate authority—the Federal Reserve. As ambition collides with secrecy, the truth becomes a weapon, and survival is anything but guaranteed. When a group of influential men uncovers unsettling secrets about the creation of the Fed, they embark on a treacherous journey to expose the truth. But the deeper they ...

Edited by three of the policymakers who led the government's response to the crisis, with chapters written by the teams tasked with finding policy solutions, this book provides a comprehensive accounting of the internal debates and controversies surrounding the measures that were taken to stabilize the financial system and the economy. Offering previously untold insight into the key choices (including rejected options) and a frank evaluation of successes and failures, this volume is both an important historical document and an indispensable guide for confronting future financial calamities.

In 2006, an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the world's largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor - the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide - was set daily by a small group of easily manipulated functionaries, and that they could reap huge profits by nudging it to suit their trading portfolios.

Inflation isn’t just coming—it’s already here. Hyperinflation is Here is a wake-up call for anyone still clinging to the illusion that central banks can print their way out of crisis. As prices skyrocket, wages stagnate, and savings erode in real time, this book breaks down the truth most economists won’t say out loud: your money is dying—and faster than you think. This survival guide cuts through the noise to explain what inflation really is, the different forms it takes, and why hyperinflation is the final phase of monetary collapse. Through gripping historical case studies—...

In this book, Greg Oliver elucidates the practical workings of a new groundbreaking global economic and political system. Amongst other topics, this volume includes: A new global economic model Competent democracy model Anti-corruption structures An ethically fair society model Global garden city design proposal Greg’s work is an essential guidebook for open-minded political activists and thought leaders. Everyone who seriously seeks workable and ethically fair answers to our current global political, economic, environmental, as well as many other equally important questions, should read ...

The peril of paper money was seen in 1782 when Josiah Quincy wrote George Washington "that there never was a paper pound, a paper dollar, or a paper promise of any kind, that ever obtained a general currency but by force or fraud, generally by both." Are you interested in preserving your hard-earned purchasing power for the future beyond banksters' manipulation and their illness, inflation? There are only two ways to save for the future in our modern society: intrusive banks or stacking precious metals. The outcome of both choices is the antithesis of each other. The former system leads to ...

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. In Material World, Ed Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates.

With Cutler Dawson at the helm for the last 14 years, Navy Federal Credit Union, the world's largest credit union, has quadrupled the size of the organization and made it an industry leader in customer service. It is now one of the most fiercely trusted and smoothly run financial institutions in the world ranked by Fortune magazine as a Best Place to Work for eight years. This book reveals an honest and straightforward look at Dawson's leadership philosophy and guiding principles.

In the space of a few months, across Asia, a miracle became a nightmare. This was the Asian financial crisis of 1995-98. In this economic crisis, hundreds of people died in rioting, political strongmen were removed, and hundreds of billions of dollars were lost by investors. This crisis saw the US dollar value of some Asian stock markets decline by 90 percent. Why did almost no one see it coming? The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98 charts Russell Napier’s personal journey during that crisis as he wrote daily for institutional investors about an increasingly uncertain future.

In 1995, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin re-defined the next thirty years of currency policy that ushered in exceptional prosperity and cheap foreign goods, but the strong dollar policy also played a role in the devastating hollowing out of America’s manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, abroad, the United States increasingly turned to the dollar as a weapon of war. In Paper Soldiers, Saleha Mohsin reveals how the Treasury Department has shaped U.S. policy at home and overseas by wielding the American dollar as a weapon—and what that means in a new age of crisis.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman's Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman's Bank collapsed. Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman's Bank and its depositors

It was a time when anything seemed possible, instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury, and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors' money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam to an art form and raked in millions at his office in downtown Boston.

With investors more eager than ever to protect their investments, The Empire of Debt is an essential guide to the future of finance, harnessing history to accurately plot where we are and where we're going.

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 ...

Alan S. Blinder - esteemed Princeton professor, Wall Street Journal columnist, and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under Alan Greenspan - is one of our wisest and most clear-eyed economic thinkers. In After the Music Stopped, he delivers a masterful narrative of how the worst economic crisis in postwar American history happened, what the government did to fight it, and what we must do to recover from it.

Look at a map of the world and you’ll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism.

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.