Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner, John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), a fearless and ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944) confronted the company known simply as “The Trust.” Through her peerless fact gathering and devastating prose, Tarbell, a muckraking reporter at McClure’s magazine, pioneered the new practice of investigative journalism. Her shocking discoveries about Standard Oil and Rockefeller led, inexorably, to a dramatic confrontation during the opening decade of the twentieth century that culminated in the landmark 1911 Supreme Court antitrust decision breaking up the monopolies and forever altering the landscape of modern American industry. Based on extensive research in the Tarbell and Rockefeller archives, Taking on the Trust is a vivid and dramatic history of the Progressive Era with powerful resonance for the first decades of the twenty-first century.

    The reason is Thucydides’s Trap, a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one. This phenomenon is as old as history itself. About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Over the past 500 years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times. War broke out in twelve of them. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immovable America and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promise to make their countries “great again,” the seventeenth case looks grim. Unless China is willing to scale back its ambitions or Washington can accept becoming number two in the Pacific, a trade conflict, cyberattack, or accident at sea could soon escalate into all-out war. In Destined for War, the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains why Thucydides’s Trap is the best lens for understanding U.S.-China relations in the twenty-first century. Through uncanny historical parallels and war scenarios, he shows how close we are to the unthinkable. Yet, stressing that war is not inevitable, Allison also reveals how clashing powers have kept the peace in the past — and what painful steps the United States and China must take to avoid disaster today.

    Their journey to the White House is a story of survival and loss, crime and betrayal, that stretches from the Klondike Gold Rush, through Nazi-occupied Poland and across the American Century, to our new gilded age. In building and maintaining their dynastic wealth, these families came to embody the rising nationalism and inequality that has pushed the United States to the brink of oligarchy.Building on her landmark reporting for the acclaimed podcast Trump, Inc. and The New Yorker, Bernstein’s painstaking detective work brings to light new information about the families’ arrival as immigrants to America, their paths to success, and the business and personal lives of the president and his closest family members.Bernstein traces how the two families ruthlessly harnessed New York and New Jersey machine politics to gain valuable tax breaks and grew rich on federal programs that bolstered the middle class. She shows how the Trump Organization, denied credit by American banks, turned to shady international capital. She reveals astonishing new details about Charles Kushner’s attempts to ensnare his brother-in-law with a prostitute and explores how Jared Kushner and his father used a venerable New York newspaper to bolster their business empire.Drawing on more than two hundred interviews and more than one hundred thousand pages of documents, many previously unseen or long forgotten, Bernstein shows how the Trumps and the Kushners repeatedly broke rules and then leveraged secrecy, intimidation, and prosecutorial and judicial power to avoid legal consequences.The result is a compelling narrative that details how the Trump and Kushner dynasties encouraged and profited from a system of corruption, dark money, and influence trading, and that reveals the historical turning points and decisions—on taxation, regulation, white-collar crime, and campaign finance laws—that have brought us to where we are today.

    Simply put, it ends in disaster. Drawing on stories and examples from throughout modern political history—from Napoleon's invasion of Russia to the impending collapse of the American healthcare system, from the outbreak of WWII and the fall of the Third Reich to the 21st century War on Terror, from the Great Recession to the sovereign debt crisis—Bonner pursues a modest ambition: to understand what goes wrong. History is not a clean yarn spun by its victors. It is a long tale of things that went FUBAR—debacles, disasters, and catastrophes. That each disaster carries with it a warning is what makes it useful to study. For instance, if the architect of a great ship tells you that ‘not even God himself could sink this ship,' you should take the next boat. If the stock market is selling at 20 times earnings and all the expert analysts urge you to ‘get in’ because you ‘can’t lose’—it’s time to get out! Similarly, public policy disasters are what you get when well meaning people with this same Titanic degree of certitude apply rational, small-scale problem-solving logic to inappropriately large scale planning. First, you get a declining rate of return on your investment (of time or resources) until you hit zero. Then, if you keep going through the zero floor—and you always keep going—you get a disaster. The problem is, these disasters cannot be stopped by well-informed smart people with good intentions, because they are the people who cause them in the first place. From the mind of Bill Bonner comes Hormegeddon, a phenomenon that occurs when a small dose of something produces a favorable result, but if you increase the dosage, the results end in disaster. The same applies when the world gets too much of a good thing in public policy, economics, and business. Drawing on examples throughout modern political history, Bonner brings context and understanding to this largely ignored and anonymous phenomenon.

    In the four decades between 1969 and 2008, these economists played a leading role in reshaping taxation and public spending and clearing the way for globalization. They reshaped the government's approach to regulation, assigning a value to human life to determine which rules are worthwhile. Economists even convinced President Nixon to end military conscription.The United States was the epicenter of the intellectual ferment, but the embrace of markets was a global phenomenon, seizing the imagination of politicians in countries including the United Kingdom, Chile and New Zealand.This book is also a reckoning. The revolution failed to deliver on its central promise of increased prosperity. In the United States, growth has slowed in every successive decade since the 1960s. And the cost of the failure was steep. Policymakers traded well-paid jobs for low-cost electronics; the loss of work weakened the fabric of society and of democracy. Soaring inequality extends far beyond incomes: Life expectancy for less affluent Americans has declined in recent years. And the focus on efficiency has come at the expense of the future: Lower taxes instead of education and infrastructure; limited environmental regulation as oceans rise and California burns.

    Writing a full two years before Keynes would revolutionize the economics world with the publication of The General Theory, Woolf nevertheless found herself unable to condense her friend's already-extraordinary life into anything less than twenty-five themes, which she jotted down at the opening of her homage: "Politics. Art. Dancing. Letters. Economics. Youth. The Future. Glands. Genealogies. Atlantis. Mortality. Religion. Cambridge. Eton. The Drama. Society. Truth. Pigs. Sussex. The History of England. America. Optimism. Stammer. Old Books. Hume."Keynes was not only an economist, as he is remembered today, but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, a man who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. A moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes immersed himself in a creative milieu filled with ballerinas and literary icons as he developed his own innovative and at times radical thought, reinventing Enlightenment liberalism for the harrowing crises of his day--which included two world wars and an economic collapse that challenged the legitimacy of democratic government itself. The Price of Peace follows Keynes from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London's riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, through stock market crashes and currency crises to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire and wartime ballet openings at Covent Garden.In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history's most important minds. John Maynard Keynes's vibrant, deeply human vision of democracy, art, and the good life has been obscured by technical debates, but in The Price of Peace, Carter revives a forgotten set of ideas with the power to reinvent national government and reframe the principles of international diplomacy in our own time.

    But company values stay relatively steady. This insight is the basis of value investing, the capital management strategy that performs best over the long term. With Good Stocks Cheap, you can get started in value investing right now. Longtime outperforming value investor, professor, and international speaker Kenneth Jeffrey Marshall provides step-by-step guidance for creating your own value investing success story. You’ll learn how to: •Master any company with fundamental analysis•Distinguish between a company’s stock price from its worth•Measure your own investment performance honestly•Identify the right price at which to buy stock in a winning company•Hold quality stocks fearlessly during market swings•Secure the fortitude necessary to make the right choices and take the right actions Marshall leaves no stone unturned. He covers all the fundamental terms, concepts, and skills that make value investing so effective. He does so in a way that’s modern and engaging, making the strategy accessible to any motivated person regardless of education, experience, or profession. His plain explanations and simple examples welcome both investing newcomers and veterans. Good Stocks Cheap is your way forward because the Value Investing Model turns market gyrations into opportunities. It works in bubbles by showing which companies are likely to excel over time, and in downturns by revealing which of these leading businesses are the most underpriced. Build a powerful portfolio poised to deliver outstanding outcomes over a lifetime. Put the strength of value investing to work for you with Good Stocks Cheap.

    She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment" losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

    Galston, The Brookings InstitutionThe American worker is in crisis. Wages have stagnated for more than a generation. Reliance on welfare programs has surged. Life expectancy is falling as substance abuse and obesity rates climb.These woes are not the inevitable result of irresistible global and technological forces. They are the direct consequence of a decades-long economic consensus that prioritized increasing consumption--regardless of the costs to American workers, their families, and their communities. Donald Trump's rise to the presidency focused attention on the depth of the nation's challenges, yet while everyone agrees something must change, the Left's insistence on still more government spending and the Right's faith in still more economic growth are recipes for repeating the mistakes of the past.In this groundbreaking re-evaluation of American society, economics, and public policy, Oren Cass challenges our basic assumptions about what prosperity means and where it comes from to reveal how we lost our way. The good news is that we can still turn things around--if the nation's proverbial elites are willing to put the American worker's interests first.Which is more important, pristine air quality, or well-paying jobs that support families? Unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world, or renewed investment in the employment of Americans? Smoothing the path through college for the best students, or ensuring that every student acquires the skills to succeed in the modern economy? Cutting taxes, expanding the safety net, or adding money to low-wage paychecks?The renewal of work in America demands new answers to these questions. If we reinforce their vital role, workers supporting strong families and communities can provide the foundation for a thriving, self-sufficient society that offers opportunity to all.

     Because these bonds serve as the foundation of our current financial system, when they are in a bubble, it means that all risk assets (truly EVERYTHING), are in a bubble, hence our title, The Everything Bubble. In this sense, the Everything Bubble represents the proverbial end game for central bank policy: the final speculative frenzy induced by Federal Reserve overreach. The Everything Bubble book is the result of over a decade of research and analysis of the financial markets and economy by noted investment analyst, Graham Summers, MBA. As such, this book is intended for anyone who wants to understand how the US financial system truly operates as well as those interested in the Federal Reserve’s future policy responses when the Everything Bubble bursts. To that end, The Everything Bubble is divided into two sections: How We Got Here and What’s to Come. Combined, these sections represent a blueprint for all things finance and money-related in the United States. This knowledge is now yours.

    It shouldn't take a worldwide pandemic and nationwide protests to bring economic and racial inequality to the forefront of problems we desperately need to solve. But now that the opportunity is here, what should we do? How can we create more equality, opportunity, and growth for everyone? Not someday, but what can government and the private sector do right now to disrupt a status quo that almost everyone wants to change?In Common Sense, the New York Times best-selling author Joel Greenblatt offers an investor's perspective on building an economy that truly works for everyone. With dry wit and engaging storytelling, he makes a lively and provocative case for disruptive new approaches--some drawn from personal experience, some from the outside looking in. How can leading corporations immediately disrupt our education establishment while creating high-paying job opportunities for those currently left behind? If we want a living wage for everyone, how can we afford it while using an existing program to get it done now? If we subsidize banks, what simple changes can we make to the way we capitalize and regulate them to help grow the economy, increase access, and create more jobs (while keeping the risks and benefits where they belong)? Greenblatt also explains how dramatically increasing immigration would be like giving every American a giant bonus and the reason Australia might be the best place to learn about saving for retirement.Not everyone will agree with what Greenblatt has to say--but all of us can benefit from the conversations he aims to start.

    Later this year, the REIT industry will experience a watershed event when Standard & Poors creates a new Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) sector called Real Estate. On September 1st, publicly traded equity REITs will be removed from Financials, where they have been classified since their creation in 1960, and begin trading as their own S&P Sector. This separation from banks and financial institutions already is attracting new investors, but REITs require an industry-specific knowledge that is neither intuitive or readily accessible to newcomers—until now. Using straightforward language and simple example to illustrate important concepts, this book will enable any reader to quickly learn and understand the lexicon and valuation techniques used in REIT investing, providing a wealth of practical resources that streamline the learning process. The discussion explains terminology, metrics, and other key points, while examples illustrate the calculations used to evaluate opportunities. A comprehensive list of publicly-traded REITs provides key reference, giving you access to an important resource most investors and stockbrokers lack. REITs are companies that own or finance commercial rental properties, such as malls and apartment buildings. Despite historically high total returns relative to other investments, such as the Nasdaq or S&P 500 index, most investors are unfamiliar with the REIT industry, and wary of investing without adequate background. This book gets you up to speed on the essentials of REIT investing so you can make more informed—and profitable—decisions. Understand REITs processes, mechanisms, and industry Calculate key metrics to identify suitable companies Access historical performance tables and industry-specific terminology Identify publicly-traded REITs quickly and easily REITs have consistently outperformed many more widely known investments. Over the past 15-year period, for example, REITs returned an average of 11% per year, better than all other asset classes. Since 2009, REITs have enjoyed positive returns; large cap stocks and cash are the only other classes that paralleled that record. Even in 2015, a 'year of fear' related to rising rates, REITs returned 2.4%, beating most all other asset classes. REITs have a long history (over fifty years) of performance, and are about to enter the big leagues. If you feel like you've been missing out, don't keep missing out. Prepare yourself, and your portfolio, to benefit from the demand for REITs that will follow the creation of a Real Estate GICS sector. The Intelligent REIT Investor gives you the information you need to invest wisely and manage your real estate risk effectively. By maintaining a tactical exposure in the brick and mortar asset class, investors should benefit from the information contained in The Intelligent REIT Investor. Join the REIT world and look forward to owning stocks that will help you to sleep well at night.

    But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he found were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims and that society's traditional winners receive even grander prizes. The American Right, which had seemed moribund after the election of 2008, had been reinvigorated by the arrival of hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system but that we reaffirm our commitment to it as Republicans in Congress took the opportunity to dismantle what they could of the remaining liberal state and Glenn Beck demonstrated the commercial potential of fueling the national angst, while each promoted the libertarian/Randian economics which arch Randian, Alan Greenspan, had already admitted produced exactly the opposite results than those expected.In Pity the Billionaire, Frank, the chronicler of American paradox, examines the peculiar mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered the current set of seemingly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he gives us a diagnosis of the cultural malady that has transformed collapse into profit, reconceived the Founding Fathers as heroes from an Ayn Rand novel, and enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous.

    government in letting that greed rule the day. Written by CNBC's David Faber, this book painstakingly details the truth of what really happened with compelling characters who offer their first-hand accounts of what they did and why they did it.Page by page, Faber explains the events of the previous seven years that planted the seeds for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He begins in 2001, when the Federal Reserve embarked on an unprecedented effort to help the economy recover from the attacks of 9/11 by sending interest rates to all time lows. Faber also gives you an up-close look at where the crisis was incubated and unleashed upon the world-Wall Street-and introduces you to insiders from investment banks and mortgage lenders to ratings agencies, that unwittingly conspired to insure lending standards were abandoned in the head long rush for profits.Based on two years of research, this book provides deep background into the current credit crisis Offers the insights of experienced professionals-from Alan Greenspan to prominent bankers and regulators-who were on the front lines Created by David Faber, the face of morning business news on CNBC, and host of the network's award winning documentaries From regulators who tried to stop this problem before it swung out of control to hedge fund managers who correctly foresaw the coming housing crash and profited from it, And Then the Roof Caved In shows you how the crisis we currently face came to be.

    Through the eyes of key people--Jacob Lew, White House director of the Office of Management and Budget; Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office; Blackstone founder and former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson; and more--Wessel gives readers an inside look at the making of our unsustainable budget.