World Finance

How will we live well in a super-networked, information-soaked, yet predictably irrational world? The only way to know is to understand how the way we think is changing. As economist Tyler Cowen boldly shows in Create Your Own Economy, the way we think now is changing more rapidly than it has in a very long time. Not since the Industrial Revolution has a man-made creation - in this case, the World Wide Web - so greatly influenced the way our minds work and our human potential.

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.

At its heart Lessons from the Mouse presents 10 lessons that guide listeners in applying excellence in their own organizations, careers, and lives. Whether being used as a tool for increased organizational effectiveness or a guide for the college grad or new entrepreneur, Lessons from the Mouse offers timeless, straightforward advice.

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.

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles, and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company's practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today.

A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This "bigger mind" - human and machine capabilities working together - has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results?

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.

As an economist and former banker, Mark Carney has spent his life in various financial roles, in both the public and private sector. Value(s) is a meditation on his experiences that examines the short-comings and challenges of the market in the past decade, which he argues has led to rampant public distrust and the need for radical change. Focusing on four major crises - the global financial crisis, the global health crisis, climate change, and the fourth Industrial Revolution - Carney proposes responses to each.

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.

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.

The foundation for all modern economic thought and political economy, The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of Scottish economist Adam Smith, who introduces the world to the very idea of economics and capitalism in the modern sense of the words.

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.

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.

Power in the modern world—military, economic, geopolitical—is built on a foundation of computer chips. America has maintained its lead as a superpower because it has dominated advances in computer chips and all the technology that chips have enabled. In Chip War economic historian Chris Miller recounts the fascinating sequence of events that led to the United States perfecting chip design, and how faster chips helped defeat the Soviet Union (by rendering the Russians’ arsenal of precision-guided weapons obsolete).

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.

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.

Jude Wanniski's masterpiece defined the policies at the heart of the Reagan economic boom that continues today and promises a coming century of global peace and prosperity. Writing with a simplicity and liveliness uncommon to his subject, Wanniski offers a fresh general theory of the world's political evolution that explains how and why economies fail and succeed, now and as far as we can imagine.

David Rakoff's best-selling collection of autobiographical essays, Fraud, established him as one of today's funniest and most insightful writers. Now, in Don't Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff moves from the personal to the public, journeying into the land of unchecked plenty that is contemporary America. Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily skewered.

The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause. Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: degrowth.