A prominent bank CEO seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown.In Washington D.C., a former Wall Street regulator checks into a hotel using the name of a hedge fund manager for an illicit meeting with a prostitute. In a D.C. suburb, the CFO of a beleaguered mortgage giant chooses a drastic personal end to “relentless pressure”.In a picturesque suburb of Zug, Switzerland, the CFO of a major insurance company decides to end his life. In London, a financier kills himself in a way he once said he never would.In her new memoir, Janet Tavakoli shines a bright light on the money-driven culture of Wall Street and Washington, and the life and death consequences of our decisions that put profit above all.Approximately 16,000 words of text (not including front and back matter and references. 105 total pages)Praise for Decisions"Tavakoli takes us on a scenic tour of the recent lowlights of Wall Street and Washington...demystified and rendered tragically human. It's a compelling tale.” Jake Bernstein, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting "Merrill Debauchery Only Begins This Woman's Tale... 'Neither Bill nor I believed Calvi committed suicide,' Tavakoli writes. 'Bill joked that he'd never hang himself. It was too gruesome.'"Bloomberg News "Janet Tavakoli is a born storyteller with an incredible tale to tell. She takes us on a br /isk journey from the depravity of 1980s Wall Street to the systemic recklessness that crushed the global economy.”Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers “An authority on credit derivatives, has written a reflective memoir about life in the world of finance. Tavakoli is not a woman who employs words carelessly, and when she says fraud she means ... fraud.” All About Alpha Praise for Janet M. Tavakoli“She knows her stuff, has strong opinions, and turns a colourful quote.” Financial Times “Janet Tavakoli knows more about the inside of the financial world than nearly anyone else!”Jim Rogers, Author of Street Smarts - Adventures on the Road and in the Markets“Intelligent analyst whose command of the arcane world...mixed with a brutally honest analytical framework makes it a pleasure to read her work.” Asia Times Online

    This is the gripping tale of Britain's top investor's fall from grace and the shattering consequences. The proud owner of a sprawling £14m estate in the Cotswolds, boasting a stable of eventing horses, a fleet of supercars and neighbouring the royal family, Neil Woodford was the most celebrated and successful British investor of his generation. He spent years beating the market; betting against the dot com bubble in the 1990s and the banks before the financial crash in 2008, making blockbuster returns for his investors and earning himself a reputation of 'the man who made Middle England rich'. As famous for his fleet of fast cars and ostentatious mansions, he was the rockstar fund manager that had the lifestyle to match. But, in 2019, after a stream of poorly-judged investments, Woodford's asset management company collapsed, trapping hundreds of thousands of rainy-day savers in his flagship fund and hanging £3.6bn in the balance. In Built on a Lie, Financial Times reporter Owen Walker reveals the disastrous failings of Woodford, the greed and opulence at the heart of his operation, the flaws of an industry in thrall to its star performers and the dangers of limited regulation. With exclusive access to Woodford's inner circle, Walker will reveal the full, jaw-dropping story of Europe's biggest investment scandal in a decade.

    The authors offer evidence that the plane just simply ran out of fuel short of their Howland destination, and Earhart and Noonan were not captured by Japanese soldiers or islanders. The book covers the flying conditions under which Earhart flew - in an era before radar, with unreliable communications, grass landing strips and poorly mapped islands.

    That is until he discovered the lucrative world of payment processing for online poker companies. Soon the Australian whiz-kid was living the American dream, raking in as much as $3m a week. Revelling in his jet set lifestyle of fast cars, luxury yachts and VIP nightclubs, he embarked on an epic rollercoaster of champagne fuelled excess which mirrored that of the extraordinary world of online poker, where hot shot college students won millions from the confines of their dorms, and fortunes were won or lost in seconds.However, Tzvetkoff’s move to the neon splattered underworld of Las Vegas would soon see him facing the abyss. Owing millions to the poker companies, and with the FBI hot on his trail, the tarnished boy wonder needed to pull an ace from his sleeve to keep from busting out. And when he did, it resulted in a day that sent a seismic shockwave through the world of online poker and saw him take the blame.

    Longtime sports columnist Bryan Burwell has written the first comprehensive biography of this living legend, whose incredible football knowledge, down-home sensibilities, and tireless work ethic made him arguably the most popular sports analyst in any sport. As a coach, he has the highest winning percentage in history, and he led the Oakland Raiders to a 1979 Super Bowl Championship. He followed that up by becoming the most beloved and popular football announcer in the country, and in the third stage of his public life, the Hall of Fame coach became known to new generations of fans through his eponymous line of groundbreaking video games, which are among the bestselling titles of all time."

    . . "Charlie Munger, whose reputation is deep and wide, based on an extraordinary record of brilliantly successful business strategies, sees things that others don't. There is a method to his mastery and, through this book, we get a chance to learn about this rare individual." -MICHAEL EISNER, Chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company "Janet Lowe uncovers the iconoclastic genius and subtle charm behind Charlie Munger's curmudgeonly facade in this richly woven portrait of our era's heir to Ben Franklin. With a biographer's detachment, an historian's thoroughness, and a financial writer's common sense, Lowe produces a riveting account of the family, personal, and business life of the idiosyncratically complex and endlessly fascinating figure." -LAWRENCE CUNNINGHAM, Cardozo Law School, Author of The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America "For years, Berkshire Hathaway shareholders and investors worldwide (me included) have struggled to learn more about Warren Buffett's cerebral sidekick. Now we can rest and enjoy reading Janet Lowe's book about this rare intellectual jewel called Charlie Munger." -ROBERT G. HAGSTROM, Author of The Warren Buffett Way "Charlie has lived by the creed that one should live a life that doesn't need explaining. But his life should be explained. In a city where heroism is too often confused with celebrity, Charlie is a true hero and mentor. He lives the life lessons that he has studiously extracted from other true heroes and mentors, from Ben Franklin to Ben Graham. This book illuminates those life lessons." -RONALD L. OLSON, Munger, Tolles & Olson llp "Janet Lowe's unprecedented access to Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett has resulted in a first-class book that investors, academics, and CEOs will find entertaining and highly useful."-TIMOTHY P. VICK, Money Manager and Author of How to Pick Stocks Like Warren Buffett

     Celebrated historian David Nasaw, whom The New York Times Book Review has called "a meticulous researcher and a cool analyst," brings new life to the story of one of America's most famous and successful businessmen and philanthropists- in what will prove to be the biography of the season. Born of modest origins in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel. His rags to riches story has never been told as dramatically and vividly as in Nasaw's new biography. Carnegie, the son of an impoverished linen weaver, moved to Pittsburgh at the age of thirteen. The embodiment of the American dream, he pulled himself up from bobbin boy in a cotton factory to become the richest man in the world. He spent the rest of his life giving away the fortune he had accumulated and crusading for international peace. For all that he accomplished and came to represent to the American public-a wildly successful businessman and capitalist, a self-educated writer, peace activist, philanthropist, man of letters, lover of culture, and unabashed enthusiast for American democracy and capitalism-Carnegie has remained, to this day, an enigma. Nasaw explains how Carnegie made his early fortune and what prompted him to give it all away, how he was drawn into the campaign first against American involvement in the Spanish-American War and then for international peace, and how he used his friendships with presidents and prime ministers to try to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. With a trove of new material-unpublished chapters of Carnegie's Autobiography; personal letters between Carnegie and his future wife, Louise, and other family members; his prenuptial agreement; diaries of family and close friends; his applications for citizenship; his extensive correspondence with Henry Clay Frick; and dozens of private letters to and from presidents Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and British prime ministers Gladstone and Balfour, as well as friends Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Mark Twain-Nasaw brilliantly plumbs the core of this facinating and complex man, deftly placing his life in cultural and political context as only a master storyteller can.

    In Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider's Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance, he reveals the truth about how the subprime lending business spiraled out of control, pushed home prices to unsustainable levels, and turned unqualified applicants into qualified borrowers through creative financing. Learn about the ways the mortgage industry can be fixed with his twenty suggestions for critical change.

    In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber - Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair. Empires of Light is the gripping history of electricity, the “mysterious fluid,” and how the fateful collision of Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.

    The Asylum is a stunning exposé by a seasoned Wall Street journalist that once and for all reveals the truth behind America’s oil addiction in all its unscripted and dysfunctional glory.In the tradition of Too Big to Fail and Liar’s Poker, author Leah McGrath Goodman tells the amazing-but-true story of a band of struggling, hardscrabble traders who, after enduring decades of scorn from New York’s stuffy financial establishment, overcame more than a century of failure, infighting, and brinksmanship to build the world’s reigning oil empire—entirely by accident.

    30,000 first printing. Tour.

    But by the year 1900, a new type of lawyer was born, one who understood business as well as the law. Working hand in glove with their clients, over the next two decades these New York City "white shoe" lawyers devised and implemented legal strategies that would drive the business world throughout the twentieth century. These lawyers were architects of the monopolistic new corporations so despised by many, and acted as guardians who helped the kings of industry fend off government overreaching. Yet they also quietly steered their robber baron clients away from a "public be damned" attitude toward more enlightened corporate behavior during a period of progressive, turbulent change in America.Author John Oller, himself a former Wall Street lawyer, gives us a richly-written glimpse of turn-of-the-century New York, from the grandeur of private mansions and elegant hotels and the city's early skyscrapers and transportation systems, to the depths of its deplorable tenement housing conditions. Some of the biggest names of the era are featured, including business titans J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, lawyer-statesmen Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes, and presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.Among the colorful, high-powered lawyers vividly portrayed, White Shoe focuses on three: Paul Cravath, who guided his client George Westinghouse in his war against Thomas Edison and launched a new model of law firm management--the "Cravath system"; Frank Stetson, the "attorney general" for financier J. P. Morgan who fiercely defended against government lawsuits to break up Morgan's business empires; and William Nelson Cromwell, the lawyer "who taught the robber barons how to rob," and was best known for his instrumental role in creating the Panama Canal.In White Shoe, the story of this small but influential band of Wall Street lawyers who created Big Business is fully told for the first time.

    He was the embodiment of the Enlightment man, the perfect synthesis of classicist, scientist, and visionary. How can we hope to understand such a towering figure? The Sage of Monticello, deified in American politics, speaks across the ages like a patriotic Moses, or Buddha, or Christ.Or so his disciples would have us believe.The real Thomas Jefferson was an ordinary man, with all the usual failings. Molded by the culture of the Virginia planter class, he fought against tyranny while oppressing his own slaves. He institutionalized racist attitudes, bickered with his rivals, lusted after other men's wives, and kept his own mixed-race children in bondage.Yet his accomplishments are too spectacular to be denied. The Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, he even abolished taxes (for awhile). As a Founding Father, his contributions eclipsed all the rest. Without Jefferson, the American experiment might have ended before it began. So how can we make sense of his personal failings in the context of his great works?Thomas Jefferson: The Failures and Greatness of an Ordinary Man looks at Jefferson from the ground up, finding handholds in his love of Greek literature and fine wine, his affection for friends and family, and the compromises he deemed necessary for the survival of the nation. By exploring his relationships, the reader is invited into Jefferson's sanctum sanctorum, to stare unblinking at his complexity and follow truth where it leads.

    Implementing these Five Secrets in your life could radically change not only your current financial situation, but the financial future of your children and grandchildren.