Money Finance History

Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized", or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions - including the private Federal Reserve.

In this passionate manifesto for Canadian renewal, business leaders Assaf, Hejazi, and Manget draw on interviews with over 100 thought leaders, politicians, CEOs, and union leaders to craft a new way of thinking about our national opportunities. Now that technology has democratized the tools of modern productivity, they argue, we need to shift our focus from tired old industrial strategies and protectionist policies to nurturing individual talent.

In The Futures, Emily Lambert, senior writer at Forbes magazine, tells us the rich and dramatic history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, which together comprised the original, most bustling futures market in the world. She details the emergence of the futures business as a kind of meeting place for gamblers and farmers and its subsequent transformation into a sophisticated electronic market where contracts are traded at lightning-fast speeds.

Milton Friedman on Economics: Selected Papers collects a variety of Friedman's papers on topics in economics that were originally published in the Journal of Political Economy. Opening with Friedman's 1977 Nobel Lecture, the volume spans nearly the whole of his career, incorporating papers from as early as 1948 and as late as 1990. An excellent introduction to Friedman's economic thought, Milton Friedman will be essential for anyone tracing the course of twentieth-century economics and politics.

With record-breaking highs one minute and economy-rocking lows the next, it can seem as if there's no way to feel truly comfortable in the mysterious world of finance. But there is, and it's more accessible than you might think. Financial Literacy: Finding Your Way in the Financial Markets is an essential primer on this domain, from its functions, strengths, and possibilities to its weaknesses and vulnerabilities

The works of the English political economist David Ricardo (1772-1823), and particularly his most important work, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, lie at the heart of the laissez faire school of economics, preceded by Adam Smith and followed by John Stuart Mill. Economic growth, economic freedom - free trade rather than mercantilism, or controlled trade - was the fundamental attitude. Having been disowned by his Sephardic Jewish family for marrying outside the faith at the age of 21, Ricardo went on to make his own fortune.

In 1920-1921, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding met a deep economic slump by seeming to ignore it, implementing policies that most 21st-century economists would call backward. Confronted with plunging prices, wages, and employment, the government balanced the budget and, through the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates. No "stimulus" was administered, and a powerful, job-filled recovery was under way by late 1921. Yet by 1929, the economy spiraled downward as the Hoover administration adopted the policies that Wilson and Harding had declined to put in place.

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty.

Age of Discovery explores a world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks: how do we share more widely the benefits of unprecedented progress? How do we endure the inevitable tumult generated by accelerating change? How do we each thrive through this tangled, uncertain time? From gains in health, education, wealth and technology to crises of conflict, disease and mass migration, the similarities between today's world and that of the 15th century are both striking and prophetic: we have been here before.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton reveals, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman's Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman's Bank collapsed. Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman's Bank and its depositors

New York Times best-selling author and world-class satirist Stanley Bing trains his savvy eye on the world’s first and most famous multinational corporation in this humorous and insightful volume. Here, he chronicles the great city of Rome from its humble beginnings to its monumental collapse due to greed, in-fighting, and general mismanagement. Rome, Inc. then becomes a powerful lesson for business leaders, documenting the many dos and don’ts of a successful corporation.

The definitive history of the effect of the income tax on the economy.

Visions of Inequality takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.

Collaborative Disruption is an insider’s account of the relationship between two of the most successful companies on the planet—Walmart and Procter & Gamble—and the transformative impact their collaborative strategy has had on their business for more than thirty years, particularly in the retail industry. Their innovative partnership produced what has come to be known as the “one-company model,” an approach that has fundamentally changed how suppliers and their retail customers interact with each other.

An expert, story-driven account of how Coinbase won the cryptocurrency game and set itself up to lead the future of banking and blockchain-based trading. This is the story of the people who made Coinbase, per PitchBook, “one of the most valuable startups in the US,” including the stoic, preppy founder and CEO Brian Armstrong and the bitcoin-obsessed former lumberjack Olaf Carlson-Wee, who turned their backs on the first generation of wild-eyed Bitcoin prophets to build something more profound and practical.

In The Chile Project, Sebastian Edwards tells the story of how the neoliberal economic model came to an end in 2021, when Gabriel Boric was elected president, vowing that "If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave." More than a story about one Latin American country, The Chile Project is a behind-the-scenes history of the spread and consequences of the free-market thinking that dominated economic policymaking around the world in the second half of the twentieth century—but is now on the retreat.

Armed with clear and powerful evidence, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi reveal in House of Debt how the Great Recession and Great Depression, as well as the current economic malaise in Europe, were caused by a large run-up in household debt followed by a significantly large drop in household spending. Though the banking crisis captured the public's attention, Mian and Sufi argue strongly with actual data that current policy is too heavily biased toward protecting banks and creditors.

A sweeping history that tracks the development of trade and industry across the world, from Ancient Rome to today. From the development of international trade fairs in the twelfth century to the innovations made in China, India, and the Arab world, it turns out that historical economies were...

Why is it so expensive to be a woman in America? From a rising star in economics comes the first comprehensive look at the costs women face and why the bill runs especially high for women of color—with a foreword by Chelsea Clinton. The “pink tax” has gained widespread recognition in...