Trade History

In this absorbing, smart, and accessible blend of economic and cultural history in the vein of the works of Michael Lewis and Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial executive and CNBC contributor examines the five most significant stock market crashes in the United States over the past century, revealing how they have defined the nation today.

A Mystery Book set in the United States around the Great Lakes region and Chicago during the early 20th century. Embark on an unforgettable journey through the treacherous waters of the Great Lakes and the bustling streets of early 20th century Chicago in a tale where maritime trade, personal identities, and the mysteries of human connections are intricately woven together. The book begins with a legend of an Indian drum that beats to signal shipwrecks on the northern end of Lake Michigan. In 1895, the steel freighter Crayford mysteriously vanishes, making its disappearance an enduring myth...

The Fascinating World of Rare Lincoln Pennies: A Beginner's Introduction is an ebook that explores the world of rare and valuable Lincoln pennies. It covers the history of the Lincoln cent series and discusses some of the most well-known and sought-after rare Lincoln pennies, including the 1909-S VDB, the 1914-D, the 1922 No D, and many others. The ebook provides an overview of the different factors that can make a Lincoln penny valuable, such as rarity, condition, and demand among collectors. It also covers the process of collecting and trading Lincoln pennies, including tips for ...

With irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of real-life examples, Ha-Joon Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other neo-liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty.

At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers; reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it, until now.

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, chess “life master” and king of the credit-default swap.

If the 20th century was the American century, then the 21st century belongs to China. Now the one and only Jim Rogers shows how any investor can get in on the ground floor of "the greatest economic boom since England's Industrial Revolution". In this indispensable new book, Rogers, one of the world's most successful investors, brings his unerring investment acumen to bear on this huge and unruly land now being opened to the world and exploding in potential.

The dramatic story behind the most audacious power grab in American history. The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn’t past but prologue. The stunning rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class - made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding - has been growing in power for a generation, transferring wealth upward through increasingly complex financial mechanisms.

This guide will take you on a journey across time, from the late 1400s to the very end of the 19th century, as well as across the globe, from Europe, across Africa, to the American continents. It will tell you the story of human greed and heartlessness toward fellow human beings, and it will lead you through the painful and often macabre voyage of the transatlantic slave trade. You’ll learn why and how the slave trade began, where most of the enslaved people came from and where most of them were shipped to, the European nations that participated in the slave trade, and more.

In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands couldn't help but notice that thousands of normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens were caught up in an extraordinary frenzy of buying and selling. The object of this unprecedented speculation was the tulip, a delicate and exotic Eastern import that had bewitched horticulturists, noblemen, and tavern owners alike. For almost a year, rare bulbs changed hands for incredible and ever-increasing sums, until single flowers were being sold for more than the cost of a house. Historians would come to call it tulipomania.

Bitcoin was promised to be a liberating technology, a free market alternative to state-controlled money. But that promise was broken after a small group of insiders took over the project and fundamentally changed Bitcoin's design.

From the early 19th century, the image of an American empire extending to both coasts became a rallying cry. The Pacific Ocean represented, in Jefferson's mind, the most effective western border. His view was in part inaccurate, as he expected the Rocky Mountains to resemble the gentler Appalachians, not a range of American Alps.

From the Financial Times' global finance correspondent, the incredible true story of the iconoclastic geeks who defied conventional wisdom and endured Wall Street's scorn to launch the index fund revolution, democratizing investing and saving hundreds of billions of dollars in fees that would have otherwise lined fat cats' pockets.

Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the Portuguese finally reached the spice islands of the Moluccas in 1511, they set in motion a fierce competition for control.

On May 6, 2010, financial markets around the world tumbled simultaneously and without warning. In the span of five minutes, a trillion dollars of valuation was lost. The Flash Crash, as it became known, represented the fastest drop in market history. When share values rebounded less than half an hour later, experts around the globe were left perplexed. A real-life financial thriller, Flash Crash uncovers the remarkable, behind-the-scenes narrative of a mystifying market crash, a globe-spanning investigation into international fraud, and the man at the center of them both.

An exciting, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning presence in Africa - a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting, French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth.

A century before Britain became involved in this terrible business, whole villages and towns in European countries were being depopulated by slavers, who transported the men, women, and children to Africa, where they were sold. This is the forgotten slave trade, one which saw over a million Christians forced into captivity in the Muslim world. Starting in the ancient world, Simon Webb traces the history of slavery in Europe, showing that the numbers involved were vast and that the victims were often treated far more cruelly than black slaves in America and the Caribbean.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 destroyed the World Trade Center, New Yorkers and Americans faced a critical set of questions: What should be done with the site? Could the towers be replaced? And how best to memorialize those lost on that day? For Larry Silverstein, a lifelong New Yorker who had signed a lease for the properties just a few months before the attacks, the answer was clear: America had to rebuild as quickly as possible.

How did Wall Street become a self-serving and ultimately destructive profit machine that imploded? Wall Street's real job is to be our "financial utility"---good financial plumbers that funnel capital to companies so the economy can expand and create jobs and also provide the means for individual investors to build portfolios that will increase personal wealth.

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World.