Money Finance History

The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans - the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia - before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress.

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.

Through perseverance, solid ingenuity, and unwavering determination, family-run companies - dynasties - have dominated wealth and business throughout the last two centuries. One third of Fortune 500 firms are family owned and, in most cases, the ideal of the family business is one synonymous with continuity, watchful leadership, and dedication to success. But what happens when bad behavior, extravagance, and laziness, all very real enemies of industry, are allowed to proliferate?

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.

Every now and then, a story comes along that absolutely captures your attention. Dubai is one of those for me, but not just me - millions around the world yearn to come to Dubai. This global super city, which just five decades ago was a cholera-plagued backwater, might just be the picture of a dream becoming reality. But how, exactly, did this incredible transformation take place? Leadership! But not your run-of-the-mill government leadership, nor typical corporate leadership....

As we stand on the cusp of a new political reality, the contours of personal freedom and autonomy are becoming increasingly well-defined. The future holds the possibility of an existence where the barriers to living life on one’s own terms are ever-diminishing, where the power of voluntarily connected individuals challenges and reshapes the statist quo. Even though the journey toward this new reality is fraught with trade-offs and challenges, it has the potential for unprecedented freedom and philosophical fulfillment.

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.

The ancient Babylonians were the first people to discover the universal laws of prosperity. In The Richest Man in Babylon, George S. Clason reveals their secrets for creating, growing, and retaining wealth. Through these entertaining tales of merchants, tradesmen, and herdsmen, you'll learn how to save more out what you earn, get out of debt, put your money to work, attract good luck, choose wise investments, and safeguard a lasting fortune.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Shortlisted for the 2018 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A brilliantly reported, global look at universal basic income—a stipend given to every citizen—and why it might be necessary in an age of rising inequality, persistent poverty...

When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country's largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable.

Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.

Over the past four years, world-renowned economist Thomas Piketty documented his close observations on current events through a regular column in the French newspaper Le Monde. His pen captured the rise and fall of Trump, the drama of Brexit, Macron’s ascendance to the French presidency, the unfolding of a global pandemic, and much else besides, always through the lens of Piketty’s fight for a more equitable world. This collection brings together those articles.

Wall Street is an unending source of legend - and nightmares. It is a universal symbol of both the highest aspirations of economic prosperity and the basest impulses of greed and deception. Charles R. Geisst's Wall Street is at once a chronicle of the street itself - from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant - and an engaging economic history of the United States, a tale of profits and losses, enterprising spirits, and key figures that transformed America into the most powerful economy in the world.

The high-stakes battle between two casino titans over the Las Vegas of the East Coast. It's all quiet now on the eastern front of the American gaming industry - Atlantic City, New Jersey - but for five chaotic years, real estate developer Richard "Skip" Bronson was at the white-hot center of a titanic clash of money and power that transformed Atlantic City from a struggling day-tripper place with buses in and out to a born again destination drawing tourists from New York, Philadelphia, and other major cities along the eastern seaboard.

How did India, a newly independent nation in 1947, transform into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies? India’s Economic Odyssey: Post Independence Milestones takes you on a captivating journey through the pivotal moments, policies, and innovations that shaped India’s economic landscape. From the ambitious First Five-Year Plan to the sweeping liberalization of 1991, the rise of the IT and telecom revolutions, and the challenges of globalization and crises, this series explores how India navigated its path to progress.

Alan S. Blinder - esteemed Princeton professor, Wall Street Journal columnist, and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under Alan Greenspan - is one of our wisest and most clear-eyed economic thinkers. In After the Music Stopped, he delivers a masterful narrative of how the worst economic crisis in postwar American history happened, what the government did to fight it, and what we must do to recover from it.

As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore the balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Friedrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous.

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.

Erin Arvedlund, the financial reporter who questioned the amazing returns of Bernie Madoff's hedge funds way back in 2001, traces the life of the infamous swindler and addresses the tough questions surrounding the collapse of his Ponzi scheme.

At the height of the roaring 20s, Swedish émigré Ivar Kreuger made a fortune raising money in America and loaning it to Europe in exchange for matchstick monopolies. His enterprise was a rare success story throughout the Great Depression. Yet after Kreuger's suicide in 1932, the true nature of his empire emerged.