Money Finance History

The financial crisis was no doubt a recession, and some would say a depression; everyone wants to sugarcoat it. Academics want to nitpick and perform magic tricks with the numbers and say it was only a recession. The reality is, no one has seen this before. It was clear, the game had changed. The old definition of what a recession was is no longer sufficient to express what happened. But yet, nothing has really changed. Proof of this can be seen in how the financial world has handled the crisis.

Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.

G.C. "Red" Jones' classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of "Bloody Harlan", and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history.

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.

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Angus Deaton - one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty - tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world.

Global trade is of vital interest to citizens as well as policymakers, yet it is widely misunderstood. This compact exposition of the market forces underlying international commerce addresses both of these concerned groups, as well as the needs of students and scholars. Although it contains no equations, it is almost mathematical in its elegance, precision, and power of expression. Understanding Global Trade provides a thorough explanation of what shapes the international organization of production and distribution and the resulting trade flows.

The richest people in the world use inflation investing to protect and grow their wealth during times of currency devaluation. While the average person sees inflation as a financial burden, the smart investor knows how to take advantage of inflation to build generational wealth. Whether you're a seasoned investor or just getting started, this book will show you how to make inflation work in your favor. Inflation Investing is your guide to making money and protecting yourself from economic disaster. Harness the power of inflation and never lose money to inflation ever again.

Like F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises moved beyond economics in his later years to address questions regarding the foundation of all social science. But unlike Hayek's attempts, Mises' writings on these matters have received less attention than they deserve. Theory and History, writes Rothbard in his introduction, "remains by far the most neglected masterwork of Mises". Here Mises defends his all-important idea of methodological dualism: one approach to the hard sciences and another for the social sciences.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

"La crise. On ne parlait que de ça, mais sans savoir réellement qu'en dire, ni comment en prendre la mesure. Tout donnait l'impression d'un monde en train de s'écrouler."

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

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to The Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey's influential explanation of how we got rich.

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.

Like every other prospering democracy, the United States developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism into strong growth and healthy social development. In this bargain, government and business were as much partners as rivals. Public investments in education, science, transportation, and technology laid the foundation for broadly based prosperity.

Economics has the capacity to offer us deep insights into some of the most formidable problems of life and offer solutions to them, too. Combining a global approach with examples from everyday life, Partha Dasgupta describes the lives of two children who live very different lives in different parts of the world: the Midwest USA and in Ethiopia. He compares the obstacles facing them and the processes that shape their lives, their families, and their futures. He shows how economics uncovers these processes, finds explanations for them, and how it forms policies and solutions.

"The History of the Standard Oil Company" is a book written by journalist Ida Tarbell in 1904. It was an exposé of the Standard Oil Company, run at that time by oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller the richest figure in America's history. Originally serialized in 19 parts in McClure's magazine, the book was a seminal example of muckraking, and inspired many other journalists to write about trusts, large businesses that (in the absence of strong antitrust law in the 19th century) attempted to gain monopolies in various industries.

Op zondag 15 augustus 1971 om negen uur 's avonds kondigde de Amerikaanse president Richard Nixon de belangrijkste economische gebeurtenis aan sinds de uitvinding van het geld. De loskoppeling van de dollar aan de goudstandaard werd een keerpunt in onze geschiedenis en veranderde de economie en onze maatschappij voorgoed. Het loslaten van de goudstandaard door Nixon creëerde een nieuw economisch model dat er uiteindelijk voor zorgde dat de vele voordelen van de technologische vooruitgang en globalisering grote groepen mensen in het Westen nauwelijks bereikten.

After two government bailouts of the US economy in less than twenty years, free market ideology is due for serious reappraisal. In Free Market, Jacob Soll details how we got to this current crisis, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. Tracing the intellectual evolution of the free market from Cicero to Milton Friedman, Soll argues that we need to go back to the origins of free market ideology in order to truly understand it—and to develop new economic concepts to face today’s challenges.

Understanding wealth in the United States - who has it, how they acquired it, and how they preserve it - is crucial to addressing the economic and political challenges facing the nation. But until now we have had little reliable information. Edward Wolff, one of the world's great experts on the economics of wealth, offers an authoritative account of patterns in the accumulation and distribution of wealth since 1900. A Century of Wealth in America demonstrates that the most remarkable change has been the growth of per capita household wealth.

Hidden beneath the surface of the internet, a new, stark reality is looming - one that cuts to the very heart of our endless debates about the impact of AI. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this "ghost economy".