Money Finance Economics

Max Weber's best-known and most controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904, remains to this day powerful and fascinating. Weber's highly accessible style is just one of many reasons for his continuing popularity. The book contends that the Protestant ethic made possible and encouraged the development of capitalism in the West.

In For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Rothbard proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the two major political parties, the ideologies they embrace, and their central plans for using state power against people. Libertarianism is Rothbard's radical alternative that says state power is unworkable and immoral, and ought to be curbed and finally overthrown.

In my book, The Layman’s Guide to Understanding Financial Statements, I will teach you all about what you need to know to read, analyze, create, and understand various financial statements. To be a competent and successful business owner, you will need to know what to do with these forms and how best to utilize them for your business’s financial health.

Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as the most influential thinker of our time, but never before has he devoted a major book to one topic: income inequality. Requiem for the American Dream is not an essay collection but an entire work of some 70,000 words, based on four years of interviews with Chomsky by the editors. It is a book that makes Chomsky's breadth and depth accessible and at the same time gives us his most powerful political ideas with unprecedented, breathtaking directness.

Learn about derivatives with iMinds Money's insightful fast-knowledge series. In economics, a derivative is defined as a financial instrument or an “agreement” between two parties that is based on an “underlying” and generally tangible asset, such as a stock or a commodity.

In the midst of one of the most serious financial upheavals since the Great Depression, George Soros writes about the origins of the crisis and proposes a set of policies that should be adopted to confront it. Soros places the current crisis in the context of his decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity.

Soros makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great credit crisis and its implications for our nation and the world.

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A different kind of politics for a new kind of society - beyond work, scarcity, and capitalism.

Learn about the Eurozone with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. The Eurozone, known officially as the Euro-area and sometimes as Euroland, is a collection of countries that have adopted the Euro as their national currency. As of 2010, 16 countries replaced their national currency with the Euro. As members of the European Union and the European Monetary Union, they have ceded control of their monetary systems to Central European Bank.

Learn about Antitrust Laws with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. Competition is an essential part of the free market. The competition between participants in the market promotes efficiency. This occurs as the supply of a product is improved to provide more attractive prices than a competitor can offer. Competition also drives innovation, as producers develop superior products and services to gain the favour of buyers.

Learn about Land Trusts with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. A land trust is an agreement whereby one party, the trustee, agrees to hold ownership of a piece of real property for the benefit of another party, the beneficiary. Corporations set up land trusts as intermediaries that hold and manage property on behalf of investors in return for management fees.

Learn about Monopoly Power with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. Monopoly power is the ability of the dominant participant in a market to control prices. It is a sign of market failure and a major factor in antitrust investigations. Capitalist economic markets rely on competition to operate efficiently and to protect consumer welfare. When a single company controls the prices within a market, the economic welfare of the consumer is often at stake.

Learn about Energy Security with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. Since the industrial revolution the consumption of relatively inexpensive energy has become vital to the functioning of the world economy and modern society. Energy production that is heavily reliant on fossils fuels sourced from an increasingly concentrated number of countries leaves economies highly vulnerable to energy security threats.

Learn about Price Cartels with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. A price cartel is a group of companies that have a formal agreement to fix prices. Companies that form cartels operate within the same industry and, in theory, should be in competition with each other. By forming a cartel, the companies create monopoly power that can be used to increase profits.

Learn about Peak Oil with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. Oil is put to use every day in vehicles, plains, agriculture and many other ways. Developed nations have been built on oil and are still very much reliant on this finite commodity. The vast changes to life brought about by the Industrial Revolution depended on oil as a power source. It is not unexpected then that many people find it difficult to admit the world is changing.

Learn about Leveraged Buyouts with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. Leveraged buyouts originated in the early 1960’s. It is also known as a hostile takeover, a highly-leveraged transaction, or a bootstrap transaction. In effect, it is a tactic through which control of a corporation is acquired by buying up a majority of their stock using borrowed money.

Learn about Market Capitalisation with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. Market capitalisation, or simply market cap, is the total tradable value of a public company, equal to the number of shares outstanding times share price. It is therefore an indicator of public opinion on the total future value or net worth of a business. This also means market capitalisation will fluctuate over time and even within the space of a day.

Learn about Fair Trade with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. The basis of the Fair Trade agenda is using trade as a mechanism for social development. Fair Trade displays a radical shift in trade policy by using morality instead of personal and corporate gain as the motive in the world economy. This turns the nature of Free Trade and classical trade theory on their heads.

Learn about Food Security with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation defines Food Security as a state when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.

Learn about Property Securities with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. Property securities are interests in property trusts that are listed on the stock exchange. These listed property trusts are known globally as Real Estate Investment Funds, or REITs. They hold portfolios of property assets that consist of large properties that, due to their size and value, could not be bought by average private investors.