Who Controls America


Mark Mullen - 2017
    All of the mentioned are just puppets on an invisible string doing the biddings of a few unseen puppeteers. Yes, that’s right. A few elite and undisclosed organizations send our children off to war, restrict the growth of the middle class, and limit educational opportunities for American citizens. The sad truth is this is nothing new. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin warned of the dangers and destructive power of these elites if left unchecked. These few unchosen were able, and continue, to use the Federal Reserve Banking System, universities, and war to create economic recessions and depressions that provide unnoticed benefits to a select group of social manipulators. In this stunning new book, Mark Mullen takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of secret partnerships created by unfamiliar ideologues designed to acquire most of the nation’s wealth and power. In Who Controls America, Mullen shines a light on those few elites who place greed, power, and profits above the interests of the American citizen and the pursuit of the American Dream.

Money & Capital Markets


Peter S. Rose - 1989
    This book discuses various major types of financial institutions and financial instruments present along with how and why the system of money and capital markets is changing. It also provides a descriptive explanation of how interest rates and security values are determined.

Bye Bye Banks?: How Retail Banks are Being Displaced, Diminished and Disintermediated by Tech Startups - and What They Can Do to Survive.


James Haycock - 2015
    Now the retail banking business model looks set to be transformed too. In Bye Bye Banks? James Haycock and Shane Richmond describe these startups, and to which areas of the banking industry they are laying siege. It shows that this assault is already well underway and that many incumbents are poised to be displaced, diminished and disintermediated. It draws on extensive research and on-and-off the record interviews with senior executives in some of the biggest banks. Haycock and Richmond conclude with the recommendation that traditional banks need to reinvent themselves by launching a ‘Beta Bank’: a lean, stand-alone organisation fit for the future for which they provide a ten-point operating model. This short book is a bold, urgent and timely analysis of the forces shaping the future of financial services. Its message to industry leaders in the sector could not be more simple: adapt or prepare to be disrupted. “This work accurately and concisely captures the effects of the disruption brought to the banking industry by the digital revolution. The comments by other banking and innovation professionals about their own experiences are particularly intriguing.” - Alessandro Hatami, former Innovation Executive at Lloyds Banking Group “James Haycock is a key voice for how the banking industry should and will change.” - Tom Hopkins, Product Innovation Director, Experian Consumer Services “If you are an incumbent retail bank, read it, get on with it, make it happen.” - Lee Sankey, former Group Design Director, Barclays

Become Your Own Financial Advisor: The real secrets to becoming financially independent


Warren Ingram - 2013
    This highly accessible book is aimed at anyone who wants to improve their financial situation, from the financial novice who needs clear basic guidelines on how to deal with money to those who are more financially savvy but want to supplement their knowledge. Covering a range of topics, from saving, investing, debt management, buying a house to blunders to avoid, Become Your Own Financial Advisor provides people of all ages and levels of wealth with practical information on how to improve their finances. And, in the process, proves that financial freedom is possible for everyone.

The Weekend That Changed Wall Street: An Eyewitness Account


Maria Bartiromo - 2010
     During a single historic weekend (September 12-14, 2008) the fate of Lehman Brothers was sealed, Merrill Lynch barely survived, and AIG became a ward of the federal government. Top CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo spent the entire weekend taking frantic phone calls from the most powerful players on Wall Street and in Washington, as they toiled to keep the economy from complete collapse. Those CEOs and dozens of other sources gave Bartiromo behind-the-scenes details unavailable to other members of the media, of the crisis and its aftermath. Now she draws on her high-level network to provide an eyewitness account of the biggest events of the financial crisis including at length interviews with former treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former AIG chairman Hank Greenberg, former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, and JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, among many others. Writing with both authority and dramatic flair, Bartiromo weaves a thrilling narrative that will make news. She also tackles the big questions: how did an unmatched period of market euphoria and growth turn sour, catapulting the economy into a dangerous slide? And in the long run, how will the near-catastrophe really change Wall Street?

The Bank Investor's Handbook


Nathan Tobik - 2017
    Perhaps you thought of grocery stores or something sexy like internet retailing, but chances are you didn’t think of banking. Yet, most likely you interact with a bank every time you’re paid and when you pay your bills. Banks facilitate the flow of money through the economy and even if you don’t interact with a bank daily, the businesses you deal with on a daily basis do. For all the interaction people have with banks, few understand how they work or why they work. Even fewer understand why they should consider including bank stocks in their investment portfolio. There are a lot of misconceptions about banks, including understanding what they are and what they do. For many people the word “bank” evokes images of receiving a toaster upon opening an account, or thoughts of security related to the storing of precious items in a safety deposit box. Others might go further and tap their inner Michael Moore and talk about how banks are greedy and evil. It’s our belief that banks aren’t just places to store idle savings (on which you receive virtually nothing in interest) or to cash checks, but that they should be an integral part of an investor’s portfolio. The goal of this book is to provide you with a foundation and framework with which you can both begin to understand banks, but also learn the basic tools used to analyze banks as investments.

WallStreetBets: How Boomers Made the World's Biggest Casino for Millennials


Jaime Rogozinski - 2020
    There was a time when the stock market was a mechanism for growing businesses to raise money, playing a large role in the industrial revolution-boosting America to a global superpower. Today the stock market has morphed into a high-tech system of fluctuating arbitrary numbers which are used by individuals and industries alike to find profit opportunities by placing bets, masqueraded as sophisticated financial maneuvers with fancy labels and acronyms. Nowhere is this more evident than with the tendencies observed today. There is a shocking trend by today's Millennial generation to shamelessly and unapologetically find ways to use the stock market to place very high-risk bets. And unlike formal Wall Street investment institutions, these gamblers, of sorts, don't attempt to disguise the game: they are proud to call Wall Street a casino. Jaime Rogozinski combs through various elements of how reckless investors play Wall Street similar to a casino. He illustrates these often in playful ways, using entertaining and compelling real-world anecdotes. His stories are taken straight from Reddit's r/wallstreetbets community which Jaime founded in 2012, and currently has more than 800,000 followers in addition to 3 million unique visitors a month. WallStreetBets is a forum based gathering where people are notoriously known for taking a brazen and public approach at gambling with the stock market.

Trump: Anatomy of a Monstrosity


Nathan J. Robinson - 2017
    Much more than just a book about Trump himself, it is about the forces that led to his existence, and it is a guide for how to create a Trumpless world. Anatomy of a Monstrosity looks closely at why progressives failed to stop his election, and develops a series of proposals for how ordinary people can fight back against Trumpism and win. Carefully sourced, comprehensive, witty, and biting, Trump: Anatomy of a Monstrosity is the single book everyone opposed to Trump should read.

Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)


Louis D. Brandeis - 1914
    A thorough introduction and questinos for considerations accompany the full text of Louis Brandeis's 1914 work.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century


Thomas Piketty - 2013
    But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power


Joel Bakan - 2003
    Eminent Canadian law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan contends that today's corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies.In this revolutionary assessment of the history, character, and globalization of the modern business corporation, Bakan backs his premise with the following observations:-The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others. -The corporation’s unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal. -Governments have freed the corporation, despite its flawed character, from legal constraints through deregulation and granted it ever greater authority over society through privatization.But Bakan believes change is possible and he outlines a far-reaching program of achievable reforms through legal regulation and democratic control.Featuring in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and cultural critic Noam Chomsky, The Corporation is an extraordinary work that will educate and enlighten students, CEOs, whistle-blowers, power brokers, pawns, pundits, and politicians alike.

Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance


Greta R. Krippner - 2011
    economy has become dependent on financial activities has been made abundantly clear. In "Capitalizing on Crisis," Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation.Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state's attempts to solve other problems. The book focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, encouragement of foreign capital into the U.S. economy in the context of large fiscal imbalances in the early 1980s, and changes in monetary policy following the shift to high interest rates in 1979.Exhaustively researched, the book brings extensive new empirical evidence to bear on debates regarding recent developments in financial markets and the broader turn to the market that has characterized U.S. society over the last several decades.

The Great Hangover: 21 Tales of the New Recession from the Pages of Vanity Fair


Vanity Fair - 2010
    A collection of stories from Vanity Fair magazine about the current financial crisis by some of the country’s best business journalists, including Michael Lewis (Moneyball, Liar’s Poker), Bryan Burrough (Barbarians at the Gate), and Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down), edited by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and with an introduction by Cullen Murphy (Are We Rome?).

Jeff Bezos: The Force Behind the Brand: Insight and Analysis into the Life and Accomplishments of the Richest Man on the Planet (Billionaire Visionaries Book 1)


J.R. MacGregor - 2018
    The innate desire is driven by our deep and underlying need to find better ways for us to achieve our own goals, understand our own dreams, and rise to our unique challenges. This book is about the underlying events in the life of Jeff Bezos and the ways in which it influenced his life, the way he responded to them, and in the way he used them to his advantage. The book doesn’t claim to know the fibers that made the content of his heart - no man can know that. But what it does is string together multiple events and sees the shadows that it casts. All that so that you can find the elements inside you that could be the seed of success, achievement and greatness. The story of Bezos traces a path through his life as a youth and looks at his action and his achievements and deciphers the existence of his greatest achievement – Amazon - in a way that is reflective of his character, his intellect and his upbringing. His story is unlike any of the other successful people in history. His brand of work ethic is familiar but different. What is it about him that makes him a super achiever? What about him makes him drive hard towards his goals? What about him can turn an idea into a startling success? What about him is like you and what isn’t? What can you learn from him? Read, and find out.

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few


Robert B. Reich - 2004
    Reich, and now he reveals the cycles of power and influence that have perpetuated a new American oligarchy, a shrinking middle class, and the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in eighty years. He makes clear how centrally problematic our veneration of the "free market" is, and how it has masked the power of the moneyed interests to tilt the market to their benefit. He exposes the falsehoods that have been bolstered by the corruption of our democracy by big corporations and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street-- that all workers are paid what they're "worth," a higher minimum wage equals fewer jobs, corporations must serve shareholders before employees. Ever the pragmatist, Reich sees hope for reversing our slide toward inequality and diminished opportunity by shoring up the countervailing power of everyone else. Here is a revelatory indictment of our economic status quo and an empowering call to civic action.