American Money

Drive through rural America and you’ll see small town after small town empty and decaying. As you drive past the abandoned manufacturing plants and shuttered Victorian homes once inhabited by its workers and executives, you can picture what the town was like forty years ago. A thriving community where the company president and assembly line worker went to the same church and whose children went to the same school.

Authors Jack Ryan and John Tamny make a powerful case that the purchase of a home slows wealth attainment—rendering owners immobile in ways that further restrain their wealth chances—and that the act of homeownership deprives owners of the time and ability to do what they do best, which further dampens individual economic achievement.

Here we find the roots of growing public resentment. Despite headlines heralding growth and prosperity, most Americans have fallen behind. They’re working harder year upon year not to get ahead but merely to stay apace. For them, the American dream appears to be slipping farther and farther away. Beneath the resentment is something else: The misleading statistics that shape our understanding of reality are steering powerful policymakers to make misguided decisions at the federal, state, and local levels alike. And, for most Americans, the results continue to be catastrophic.

This book addresses productivity, capital, labor, stocks, wealth, and more on a lecture-length audiobook, promoted by Harvard Business School Press.

Your legacy is more than your money and property. In this audiobook, you’ll discover powerful strategies to leave future generations the knowledge to build a successful life, including family stories, traditions, heirlooms, life lessons, and your own experiences. This book is the vision of a community of individuals who desire to preserve and pass on their legacy, fusing financial, legal, and legacy planning into a movement of positive cultural transformation.

Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.

In Reefer Madness, the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation investigates America's black market and its far-reaching influence on our society through three of its mainstays - pot, porn, and illegal immigrants.

In this deeply personal memoir, Schwab describes his passion to have Main Street participate in the growing economy as investors and owners, not only earners. Schwab opens up about his dyslexia and how he worked around and ultimately embraced it, and about the challenges he faced while starting his fledgling company in the 1970s. A year into his grand experiment in discounted stock trading, living in a small apartment in Sausalito with his wife, Helen, and new baby, he carried a six-figure debt and a pocketful of personal loans.

The best-selling author of Perfectly Legal returns with a powerful new expose.

With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socioeconomic consequences as a result of living in a slave society.

Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name and imagine knowing the man. But what did he really want for the country? What risks did he run in pursuing those vaulting ambitions? Who tried to stop him? How did they fight? It's ironic that the Hamilton revival has obscured the man's most dramatic battles and hardest-won achievements—as well as downplaying unsettling aspects of his legacy.

A landmark work from one of the preeminent historians of our time: the first published biography of Andrew W. Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each. Following a boyhood in 19th-century Pittsburgh, during which he learned from his Scotch-Irish immigrant father the lessons of self-sufficiency and wealth accumulation, Andrew Mellon overcame painful shyness to become one of America's greatest financiers.

Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car...to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches minimum wage.

In his best-selling The Russians, Hedrick Smith took millions of readers inside the Soviet Union. In The Power Game, he took us inside Washington’s corridors of power. Now Smith takes us across America to show how seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have transformed America. As only a veteran reporter can, Smith fits the puzzle together, starting with Lewis Powell’s provocative memo that triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power from then until today.

While factories across the Midwest shutter their doors, Cleveland-based manufacturer Lincoln Electric has thrived for more than a century. In addition to being profitable and technologically innovative, through good times and bad, the company has fulfilled its unique promise of "guaranteed continuous employment." Workers are viewed as assets—not liabilities.

In the spirit of Evicted, Bait and Switch, and The Big Short, a shocking, heart-wrenching investigation into America’s housing crisis and the modern-day robber barons who are making a fortune off the backs of the disenfranchised working and middle class - among them, Donald Trump and his inner circle.

Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas, and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets to automatic weapons and even bombs. Welcome to New York City's Chinatown in 1925.

In the depths of the Great Recession, a cancer nurse, a car dealership worker, and an insurance fraud specialist helped uncover the largest consumer crime in American history - a scandal that implicated dozens of major executives on Wall Street. They called it foreclosure fraud: Millions of families were kicked out of their homes based on false evidence by mortgage companies that had no legal right to foreclose.

Molly McClain tells the remarkable story of Ellen Browning Scripps (1836-1932), an American newspaperwoman, feminist, suffragist, abolitionist, and social reformer who used her fortune to support women’s education, the labor movement, and public access to science, the arts, and education.

Every day of the week in contemporary America (and especially on Sundays) people raise money for their religious enterprises - for clergy, educators, buildings, charity, youth-oriented work, and more. In a fascinating look into the economics of American Protestantism, James Hudnut-Beumler examines how churches have raised and spent money from colonial times to the present and considers what these practices say about both religion and American culture.