Global Finance

What if you could travel forever while radically advancing your career? College. Graduation. Work a nine-to-five job, save up and retire on a pension. This isn’t the correct path for everyone. Nor should it be. Global Career: How to Work Anywhere and Travel Forever is an audiobook for your backpack, a step-by-step blueprint to travel the world, build a successful career others wish they had, and build a life that most people only dream of.

The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. Over the course of four years, Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money.

Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.

The Illicit Global Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® answers the key questions about how illicit global markets are structured and operate, how they intersect with state institutions and practices, how they interact with the legal economy, and how they shape and are shaped by domestic and international politics.

We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms - big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself.

John Perkins has seen the signs of today's economic meltdown before. The subprime mortgage fiascos, the banking industry collapse, the rising tide of unemployment, the shuttering of small businesses across the landscape are all too familiar symptoms of a far greater disease.

Many Americans are finally waking up to the alarming reality of China's stealth war on the United States and puzzling over how to push back against its insidious infiltration. What few realize is that we have one real advantage in this war: the Chinese Communist Party strategy for total war has been written out in Unrestricted Warfare, the Chinese book, well known there, that has become their new Art of War. In War Without Rules, retired Air Force Brigadier General Rob Spalding takes Americans inside Unrestricted Warfare.

Glenn Hopper uses a unique blend of financial leadership and technical expertise to help businesses of all sizes optimize and modernize. Not a software engineer? Neither is Glenn Hopper, but his story shows how any finance leader can embrace the tech innovations shaping our world to revolutionize finance operations.

The subprime mortgage crisis has already wreaked havoc on the lives of millions of people, and now it threatens to derail the U.S. economy and economies around the world. In this trenchant book, best-selling economist Robert Shiller reveals the origins of this crisis and puts forward bold measures to solve it.

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is a critically acclaimed narrative that illuminates the globalization debates and reveals the key factors to success in global business. Tracing a T-shirt's life story from a Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory and back to a US storefront before arriving at the used clothing market in Africa, the book uncovers the political and economic forces at work in the global economy.

In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle to explain the unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets.

What's Wrong with China is the widely anticipated follow-up to Paul Midler's Poorly Made in China, an expose of China manufacturing practices. Applying a wider lens in this account, he reveals many of the deep problems affecting Chinese society as a whole. Once again, Midler delivers the goods by rejecting commonly held notions, breaking down old myths, and providing fresh explanations of lesser-understood cultural phenomena.

Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalization leader with more extensive involvement in economics, politics, and security dynamics beyond its borders than any other world region. Yet Central Asia's international activities are mostly hidden from view, with disturbing implications for world security.

A groundbreaking chronicle of the birth - and death - of a pair of jeans, that exposes the fractures in our global supply chains, and our relationships to each other, ourselves, and the planet.

Coca-Cola and its logo are everywhere. In our homes, our workplaces, and even our schools. It is a company that sponsors the Olympics, backs US presidents and even re-brands Santa Claus. A truly universal product, it has even been served in space. From Istanbul to Mexico City, Mark Thomas travels the globe investigating the stories and people Coca-Cola's iconic advertising campaigns don't mention.

In this landmark work, acclaimed historian Joshua Freeman has created an epic portrait of a nation both galvanized by change and driven by conflict. Beginning in 1945, the economic juggernaut awakened by World War II transformed a country once defined by its regional character into a uniform and cohesive power and set the stage for the United States’ rise to global dominance. Meanwhile, Freeman locates the profound tragedy that has shaped the path of American civic life.

The climate is the fundamental issue of our time, and now we face a critical decision. Whether to be optimistic or fatalistic, whether to profess skepticism or to take action. Yet it seems we can barely agree on what is really going on, let alone what needs to be done. We urgently need facts, not opinions. Insights, not statistics. And a shift from thinking about climate change as a “me” problem to a “we” problem. The Carbon Almanac is a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration that focuses on what we know, what has come before, and what might happen next.

In Capitalism, Alone, leading economist Branko Milanovic explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: What are the prospects for a fairer world now that capitalism is the only game in town? His conclusions are sobering, but not fatalistic. Capitalism gets much wrong, but also much right - and it is not going anywhere. Our task is to improve it.

China's growing role in the global economy is showing no sign of retreat. Indeed, recent events have only increased China's influence - to the point where China is poised to edge out the United States and take the lead. For investors like you, this tectonic shift poses difficult challenges - along with tremendous opportunities. In China's Rise and the New Age of Gold, one of the 21st century's top economic experts, Stephen Leeb, lays out his compelling argument that explosive gains in gold lie ahead.

Today’s investment world has a low cost of entry and is more convenient than at any time in history. Easier access to the marketplace for retail investors has made a dazzling array of financial products available. The huge selection of passively managed funds, such as index funds and exchange-traded funds, keeps costs down and allows beginners to build a diverse portfolio without spending long hours doing research.