World Finance

Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy paints an epic picture of change in an intimate way by telling the stories of the tools, people, and ideas that had far-reaching consequences for all of us. From the plough to artificial intelligence, from Gillette's disposable razor to IKEA's Billy bookcase, best-selling author and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford recounts each invention's own curious, surprising, and memorable story.

China's economy has been booming for decades now. A formidable and emerging power on the world stage, the China that most Americans picture is only a rough sketch, based on American news coverage, policy, and ways of understanding. Enter Keyu Jin: a world-renowned economist and a professor at the London School of Economics. A person fluent in both Eastern and Western cultures, and a voice of the new generation of Chinese who represent a radical break from the past, Jin is uniquely poised to explain how China became the most successful economic story of our time.

A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Prize. In The Quest, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change and conflict, in a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them. The Quest tells the inside stories, tackles the tough questions, and reveals surprising insights about coal, electricity, and natural gas.

In When McKinsey Comes to Town, two prizewinning investigative journalists have written a portrait of the company sharply at odds with its public image. Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining tens of thousands of revelatory documents, and following rule #1 of investigative reporting: Follow the money. When McKinsey Comes to Town is a a devastating portrait of a firm whose work has often made the world more unequal, more corrupt, and more dangerous.

The way most white-collar crime works is by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. Financial crime seems horribly complicated, but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what’s theirs.

Current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all — the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Leveraging the fresh insights of behavioral economics, Brian Portnoy demystifies the opaque world of elite hedge funds, addresses the limits of mass market mutual funds, and discards the false dichotomy between " traditional" and " alternative" investments. He also explores why hedge funds have recently become such a controversial and disruptive force. It' s not the splashy headlines but something much more fundamental.

Legendary investor Jim Rogers gives us his view of the world on a 22-month, 52-country motorcycle odyssey in his best-selling business/adventure book, Investment Biker, which has already sold more than 200,000 copies.

Before you invest another dollar anywhere in the world (including the United States), read this book by the man Time magazine calls "the Indiana Jones of finance". Jim Rogers became a Wall Street legend when he co-founded the Quantum Fund. Investment Biker is the fascinating story of Rogers’s global motorcycle journey/investing trip.

From the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Last Tycoons and House of Cards, a revelatory history of Goldman Sachs, the most dominant, feared, and controversial investment bank in the world. William D. Cohan has constructed a vivid narrative that looks behind the veil of secrecy to reveal how Goldman has become so profitable - and so powerful.

Harry Macklowe is one of the most notorious wheelers and dealers of the real-estate world, and The Liar's Ball is the story of the gamblers and thieves who populate his world. Watch as Harry makes the gutsy bid for midtown Manhattan's famous GM building and puts almost no money down, landing the billion-dollar transaction that made him the poster child for New York's real-estate royalty. Listen in on the secret conversations, back-door deals, and blackmail that put Macklowe and his cronies on top - and set them up for an enormous fall.

Why just be contrarian when you can bet against consensus and be right? Through a meta-analysis of what moves markets and what drives human behavior, New York Times bestselling author and founder of Verdad Advisers, Daniel Rasmussen cuts through the 60/40 portfolio, exposing where empirical evidence shows the best opportunities—and where projections, models, and experts often fail—to create an asset allocation that can withstand the tests of time.

Pasta, guita, plata, parné, duros. Da igual cómo lo llamemos, pero lo cierto es que el dinero importa ahora más que nunca. En El triunfo del dinero Niall Ferguson demuestra que la historia de las finanzas es el trasfondo de toda la Historia. ¿Cuándo pasó el dinero de metal a papel? ¿Por qué los tipos de interés suben y bajan como un yoyó? ¿Por qué la gente nunca aprende que las burbujas bursátiles siempre acaban estallando? ¿Por qué los seguros ya no son la mejor manera de protegerse contra el riesgo?

Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world - one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism, the leading source of the world's most popular drug, and perhaps the most widespread word on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 500-year transformation from a mysterious Muslim ritual into an everyday necessity.

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.

"Economic hit men," John Perkins writes, "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder."

Brimming with energy and lively examples, How Things Are Made maps the awe-inspiring global system of manufacturing that enables virtually every aspect of our existence. By making sense of this surprising and hidden world, we are able to make better choices for ourselves, our communities, and the planet.

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.

If you feel like you’ve “missed the boat” on bitcoin, think again. Because while bitcoin continues to hit all-time highs, this book will show you it’s not too late to invest in “digital gold". You’ll find easy-to-follow advice in how to buy and store bitcoin yourself, without having to pay expensive fees to middlemen. So even if you’re never listened to a single finance or investing book in your life, you will immediately understand how to become a successful long-term investor.

The chief endowment officers at (CIOs) at endowments, foundations, family offices, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds are the leaders in the world of finance. They marshal trillions of dollars on behalf of their institutions and influence how capital flows throughout the world. But these elite investors live outside of the public eye. Across the entire investment industry, few participants understand how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital.

Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history and beyond the traditional left-right divides as he champions ideas whose time has come.