But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalization leader with extensive involvement in economics, politics and security dynamics beyond its borders. Yet Central Asia’s international activities are mostly hidden from view, with disturbing implications for world security.   Based on years of research and involvement in the region, Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw reveal how business networks, elite bank accounts, overseas courts, third-party brokers, and Western lawyers connect Central Asia’s supposedly isolated leaders with global power centers. The authors also uncover widespread Western participation in money laundering, bribery, foreign lobbying by autocratic governments, and the exploiting of legal loopholes within Central Asia. Riveting and important, this book exposes the global connections of a troubled region that must no longer be ignored.

    The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

     “You’re about as useful as a windshield wiper on a goat’s butt.” Keep this book handy, someday you’ll be glad you have it. “Let's play horse. I'll be the front end and you just be yourself.” Pick any of the many jaw-dropping insults then laugh at the look on your adversary’s face when you whip one out and use it on them. You’ll leave no doubt in their mind that you are a master of sarcastic insults! ADDED BONUS: In addition to the fresh and hilarious insults in this book, you’ll also find great sarcastic observations about life hidden inside this book’s pages, like… “I think the reason so many people have smart phones is because opposites attract!” You’re no idiot, so you need this book to start your new life as the master of sarcastic insults and put-downs! “Hey! Who left the Idiot Box open? Now they're everywhere!”

    It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe.Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn’t grow so dramatically because of economic factors: it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity.An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians—a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives.

    First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." --Arthur SchopenhauerThe Ponzi Factor is the most comprehensive research ever compiled on the negative-sum nature of capital gains (non-dividend stocks). The book shows why, as a whole, ALL investors will lose money from buying and selling stocks.Most people don’t realize that profits from buying and selling stocks come from other investors who are also buying and selling stocks. When one investor buys low and sells high, another investor is also buying high and needs to sell for even higher. Companies like Google, Telsa, Facebook never pay their investors. Their investors’ profits are dependent on the inflow of money from new investors, which by definition, is how a Ponzi scheme works.This book is not for everyone. If you are a finance junkie who wants to rationalize why companies don’t have to pay their investors and believe a system that shuffles money between investor can magically create more money than people contribute, then this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you understand why we can’t create money by shuffling it with imaginary paper, and that investors invest because they want money, not value, then you will learn something you will never forget: The mechanics of how the stock market works and what really makes a stock price move.A stock without dividends is a Ponzi asset. It’s not how equity instruments were designed to work historically and not how ownership instruments are supposed to work logically. The Ponzi Factor is not a perspective or an opinion. It is a proof that is based on definition, logic, and it is supported by observable facts and history. This is not a story that will disappear after another market crash. It is an idea that will remain relevant for as long as the stock market exists.Lastly, to critics, the naysayer, and the finance junkies who think the imaginary value = cash. The author will award $20,000 to anyone who can show why non-dividend stocks DO NOT meet the definition of a Ponzi scheme. That’s $20,000 in cash, not value. (Details on this book's website. The Ponzi Factor. Proof by Definition.)

    Denounced by her enemies as divisive and dictatorial, Thatcher was the greatest leader Britain has produced since Winston Churchill. The standard bearer for a decisive economic regime-change, she was also a social revolutionary who shook up the stagnant English class system. Yet she was a foreign policy realist, who restored her country’s standing in the world. And far from being an over-bearing prime minister, she ultimately fell victim to the machinations of Cabinet government. ALWAYS RIGHT is a fittingly frank assessment of a great woman who made history.Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He has published fourteen books, including The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Civilization: The West and the Rest and, most recently, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. An accomplished broadcaster, in 2009 he won the International Emmy for Best Documentary. In 2010 he won the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service and in 2012 the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

    Easternization is the defining trend of our age the growing wealth of Asian nations is transforming the international balance of power. This shift to the East is shaping the lives of people all over the world, the fate of nations, and the great questions of war and peace. A troubled but rising China is now challenging America s supremacy, and the ambitions of other Asian powers including Japan, North Korea, India, and Pakistan have the potential to shake the whole world. Meanwhile the West is struggling with economic malaise and political populism, the Arab world is in turmoil, and Russia longs to reclaim its status as a great power. As it becomes clear that the West s historic power and influence is receding, Gideon Rachman offers a road map to the turbulent process that will define the international politics of the twenty-first century."

    In this magisterial new work, Giovanni Arrighi shows how China’s extraordinary rise invites us to read The Wealth of Nations in a radically different way than is usually done. He examines how the recent US attempt to bring into existence the first truly global empire in world history was conceived in order to counter China’s spectacular economic success of the 1990s, and how the US’s disastrous failure in Iraq has made the People’s Republic of China the true winner of the US War on Terror. In the 21st century, China may well become again the kind of noncapitalist market economy that Smith described, under totally different domestic and world-historical conditions.

    But the full impact of the crises we have recently faced will create far more problems, and unless you're prepared, you'll struggle to regain your financial footing.In The Great Reflation, author Tony Boeckh helps you understand how these crises, and the policies passed to jumpstart the economy, will play out for investments and business, and provides you with the tools to excel in today's rapidly evolving financial landscape. He reveals how similar episodes compare with the current crises and what this could mean for your financial future.Arms you with practical insights that will allow you to evaluate different investment options Explores the implications of the end of the private debt cycle, the possible rise of a new age of thrift, and the new government debt crisis Reveals how you can profit from once-in-a-lifetime opportunities as well as proper portfolio allocation strategies While things may never return to "normal," you can still make choices that will allow you to prosper. This book will show you how.

    Here, a reprinting of the seminal underground essay by Bob Black.

    In some ways it is much worse because it has cartelized the management of European monetary regimes and created a terrible moral hazard. With this book, Professor Bagus brings his scholarship to English readers, explaining the background to the idea of European unity and its heritage of sound money. He explains that the Euro is not what the older classical liberals had hoped for but instead is a politically managed money that is destined for failure. He writes with a keen sense for economic analytics and empirical detail, offering one of the most accessible and yet rigorous accounts of the emergence of the Euro. He predicts its downfall due to political pressures, bad banking practices, and exploding public-sector liabilities. The analogies with the dollar are indeed close, but with welfare states at a more advanced stage, it will be a race to see which paper currency will crumble first. Professor Bagus brings theoretical power to investigating one of the most important topics in economics today. His arguments and evidence convinced even Jesus Huerta de Soto to withdraw support for the Euro.

    For instance, the average mall shopper will spend about $100, then leave when she hits that limit. She'll probably buy shoes rather than clothing, because she doesn't want to think about her dress size. And the store most likely to get her money isn't the one with the nicest display or the deepest discounts-it's the one closest to her parking spot.In his consulting with dozens of leading companies, Michael J. Silverstein has interviewed thousands of customers, extracting fascinating patterns about what really drives their purchase decisions. His first book, the acclaimed bestseller Trading Up, has taught a generation of marketers about the "new luxury" phenomenon, and why consumers will happily pay a steep premium for goods and services that are emotionally satisfying, from golf clubs to bathroom fixtures to beauty products.But Trading Up revealed only part of the story of the new consumer. The same middle-class people who are happily trading up at Victoria's Secret and Panera are going on treasure hunts at Costco and Home Depot. And they are often getting as much emotional satisfaction in the discount stores as in the luxury stores. TREASURE HUNT shows how even the most mundane shopping-for things like paper towels and pet food-has become an adventure rather than a tedious chore.In just about every category, both the high end and the low end are growing and innovation- rich. Many middle-class consumers gladly spend $5 a day for a Starbucks venti latte; others spend forty cents a day on home-brewed coffee, feel good about their frugality, and save up the difference to buy Apple's newest Nano. TREASURE HUNT explains the success of companies as diverse as Dollar General, H. E. Butt, eBay, Commerce Bank, and Tchibo.But beware: in our bifurcated global market, businesses need a clear strategy for aiming high or low, while avoiding the treacherous middle, where so many have recently stumbled. If your offering isn't exciting enough to inspire trading up, but not enough of a bargain to satisfy the treasure hunters, you'll have no emotional connection with your target audience. And then, as many fallen companies have discovered, your tried-and-true marketing strategies will go into a severe stall.TREASURE HUNT takes us into the homes of real people making real decisions, and into the CEO's offices of innovative companies finding new ways to accommodate them. Written with the same flair, empathy, and intelligence that made Trading Up an instant classic, this is an essential guide to the moods and habits of the constantly changing consumer.

    E.P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making & recreates the whole life experience of people who suffered loss of status & freedom, who underwent degradation & who yet created a culture & political consciousness of great vitality. "Thompson's book has been called controversial, but perhaps only because so many have forgotten how explosive England was during the Regency & the early reign of Victoria. Without any reservation, The Making of the English Working Class is the most important study of those days since the classic work of the Hammonds."--Commentary "Mr Thompson's deeply human imagination & controlled passion help us to recapture the agonies, heroisms & illusions of the working class as it made itself. No one interested in the history of the English people should fail to read his book."--Times Literary Supplement

    Downs treats this differently than do other students of politics. His explanations are systematically related to, and deductible from, precisely stated assumptions about the motivations that attend the decisions of voters and parties and the environment in which they act. He is consciously concerned with the economy in explanation, that is, with attempting to account for phenomena in terms of a very limited number of facts and postulates. He is concerned also with the central features of party politics in any democratic state, not with that in the United State or any other single country. I. BASIC STRUCTURE OF THE MODEL. 1. Introduction. 2. Party Motivation and the Function of Government in Society. 3. The Basic Logic of Voting. 4. The Basic Logic of Government Decision-Making. II. THE GENERAL EFFECTS OF UNCERTAINTY. 5. The Meaning of Uncertainty. 6. How Uncertainty Affects Government Decision-Making. 7. The Development of Political Ideologies as Means of Getting Votes. 8. The Statics and Dynamics of Party Ideologies 9. Problems of Rationality Under Coalition Governments. 10. Government Vote-Maximizing and Individual marginal Equilibrium. III. SPECIFIC EFFECTS OF INFORMATION COSTS. 11. The Process of Becoming Informed. 12. How Rational Citizens Reduce Information Costs. 13. The Returns From Information and Their Diminution. 14. The Causes and Effects of Rational Abstention. IV. DERIVATIVE IMPLICATIONS AND HYPOTHESIS. 15. A Comment on Economic Theories of Government Behavior. 16. Testable Prepositions Derived from the Theory.

    These changes are roughly predictable because they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernization theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85% of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernization is a process of human development, in which economic development triggers cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely.