World Finance

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is a success story of the business world. The executive chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, he became the first centibillionaire on the Forbes wealth index and one of the world's most recognizable names in modern history. This book explores his empire of achievement and how his vision and hands-on efforts have led him from a start-up in his garage to his legacy today.

In late 2008, under the long shadow cast by the most severe economic crisis in generations, a revolutionary new form of currency was quietly being shaped. In Crypto Economy, Aries Wanlin Wang provides the definitive blueprint for understanding how Bitcoin, Blockchain, and other digital technologies are disrupting traditional financial institutions and forever changing the world of commerce.

In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of yesterday. James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes listeners on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste.

In most accounts of the origins of money, we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money's origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money's emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war.

Activate Your Money provides the foundational support women need to talk to each other about their money, invest to grow their wealth, and to take the actions required to shift their assets into alignment with their values. Written for smart, savvy women who want to feel financially empowered, Activate Your Money delivers the depth of information you need to make informed decisions across your entire portfolio.

A sweeping case that, in a world of trade disputes, higher tariffs, and broader geopolitical uncertainty, a new age of economic localization will put an end to the last half century of globalization—by one of the preeminent economic journalists writing today.

When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, most experts expected the WTO rules and procedures would liberalize China and make it "a responsible stakeholder in the liberal world order". But the experts made the wrong bet. China today is liberalizing neither economically nor politically but, if anything, becoming more authoritarian and mercantilist. In this book, renowned globalization and Asia expert Clyde Prestowitz describes the key challenges posed by China and the strategies America and the Free World must adopt to meet them.

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.

We're overusing the earth's finite resources, and yet excessive consumption is failing to improve our lives. In Enough Is Enough, Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill lay out a visionary but realistic alternative to the perpetual pursuit of economic growth-an economy where the goal is not more but enough.

A series of shifts are happening in our economy: Millennials are trading in conventional career paths to launch tech start-ups, start small businesses that are rooted in local communities, or freelance their expertise. We are sharing everything, from bikes and cars, to extra rooms in our homes. We now create, buy and sell handcrafted products in our local communities with ease. CEO of Imperative Aaron Hurst argues in his latest book that while these developments seem unrelated at first, taken together they reveal a powerful pattern that points to purpose as the new driver of the American economy.

What if it were easy to end scarcity now and forever? To stop chasing money--stop living for the money without having to give anything up? And if the solution had nothing to do with politics or social issues? During these uncertain times, most are concerned with the growing instability as we are at the threshold of massive disruptions affecting us all.

"This book is in part a detective story. After 9/11 I knew, if I needed further reinforcement, that we are living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-correcting, and fast-changing than it was even a quarter century earlier. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is my attempt to understand the nature of this new world." (Alan Greenspan)

Every minute, someone buys an Art Deco-inspired, amber-hued bottle of Chanel No. 5. Considering that nearly ninety years have passed since No. 5’s creation, this statistic alone makes a compelling case for the perfume’s stature as the world’s most famous. However, its cultural impact might be even more staggering than its business success....

The venture capital playbook is causing unique harms to society. And in World Eaters, Catherine Bracy offers a window into the pernicious aspects of VC and shows us how its bad practices are bleeding into all industries, undermining the labor and housing markets and posing unique dangers to the economy at large. VC’s creates a wide, powerful wake that impacts the average consumer just as much as it does investors and entrepreneurs.

The new world of results-driven aid that could put an end to extreme poverty. Drawing on two decades covering global development as editor in chief of Devex, Raj Kumar explores how nontraditional models of philanthropy and aid are empowering the world’s poorest people to make progress.

In 2007, a stranger-than-fiction multibillion-dollar bidding war for the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) erupted between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and Atlanta’s Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). Zero-Sum Game: The Rise of the World’s Largest Derivatives Exchange takes listeners behind the scenes of this battle to tell the gripping - and often comical - story of how the historic merger between CME and CBOT almost didn’t happen.

Forget the G-7 and the G-20; we are entering a leaderless "G- Zero" era- with profound implications for every country and corporation. The world power structure is facing a vacuum at the top. With the unifying urgency of the financial crisis behind us, the diverse political and economic values of the G-20 are curtailing the world's most powerful governments' ability to mediate growing global challenges. There is no viable alternative group to take its place.

Imagine if every month the government deposited $1,000 into your bank account, with nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy. But it has become one of the most influential and hotly debated policy ideas of our time. Futurists, radicals, libertarians, socialists, union representatives, feminists, conservatives, Bernie supporters, development economists, childcare workers, welfare recipients, and politicians from India to Finland to Canada to Mexico - all are talking about UBI.

From a long-time Alibaba executive and former special assistant to Jack Ma, this is the first book to articulate how Alibaba's unique culture and “tai chi” management principles are providing a business and economic development model for the rest of the world.

Few economists or historians write like McCloskey - her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas. Big books don't come any more ambitious or captivating than Bourgeois Equality.