The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
James Rickards - 2014
Deciding upon the best course to follow will require comprehending a minefield of risks, while poised at a crossroads, pondering the death of the dollar.”The international monetary system has collapsed three times in the past hundred years, in 1914, 1939, and 1971. Each collapse was followed by a period of tumult: war, civil unrest, or significant damage to the stability of the global economy. Now James Rickards, the acclaimed author of Currency Wars, shows why another collapse is rapidly approaching—and why this time, nothing less than the institution of money itself is at risk. The American dollar has been the global reserve currency since the end of the Second World War. If the dollar fails, the entire international monetary system will fail with it. No other currency has the deep, liquid pools of assets needed to do the job. Optimists have always said, in essence, that there’s nothing to worry about—that confidence in the dollar will never truly be shaken, no matter how high our national debt or how dysfunctional our government. But in the last few years, the risks have become too big to ignore. While Washington is gridlocked and unable to make progress on our long-term problems, our biggest economic competitors—China, Russia, and the oilproducing nations of the Middle East—are doing everything possible to end U.S. monetary hegemony. The potential results: Financial warfare. Deflation. Hyperinflation. Market collapse. Chaos. Rickards offers a bracing analysis of these and other threats to the dollar. The fundamental problem is that money and wealth have become more and more detached. Money is transitory and ephemeral, and it may soon be worthless if central bankers and politicians continue on their current path. But true wealth is permanent and tangible, and it has real value worldwide.The author shows how everyday citizens who save and invest have become guinea pigs in the central bankers’ laboratory. The world’s major financial players — national governments, big banks, multilateral institutions — will always muddle through by patching together new rules of the game. The real victims of the next crisis will be small investors who assumed that what worked for decades will keep working. Fortunately, it’s not too late to prepare for the coming death of money. Rickards explains the power of converting unreliable money into real wealth: gold, land, fine art, and other long-term stores of value. As he writes: “The coming collapse of the dollar and the international monetary system is entirely foreseeable... Only nations and individuals who make provision today will survive the maelstrom to come.”
Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground
Susan McKay - 2021
Based on almost 100 brand-new interviews, and told with McKay’s trademark passion and conviction, this is essential reading.Containing interviews with politicians, former paramilitaries, victims and survivors, business people, religious leaders, community workers, young people, writers and others, it tackles controversial issues, such as Brexit, paramilitary violence, the border, the legacy of the Troubles, same-sex marriage and abortion, RHI, and the possibility of a United Ireland, and explores social justice issues and campaigns, particularly the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights.
Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
Fintan O'Toole - 2018
He also discusses the fatal attraction of what he calls, "heroic failure", once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaste. Now failure is no longer heroic – it is just failure, and the author says, terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit's supporters, and by those who may suffer the consequences of a hard border in Ireland and the breakdown of a fragile peace.
Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History
Catherine Merridale - 2013
Behind its great red walls and towers many of the most startling events in Russia's history have been acted out. It is both a real place and an imaginative idea; a shorthand for a certain kind of secretive power, but also the heart of a specific Russian authenticity.Catherine Merridale's exceptional new book revels in both the drama of the Kremlin and its sheer unexpectedness: an impregnable fortress which has repeatedly been devastated, a symbol of all that is Russian substantially created by Italians. The Kremlin is one of the very few buildings in the world which still keeps its original, late medieval function: as a palace, built to intimidate the ruler's subjects and to frighten foreign emissaries. Red Fortress brilliantly conveys this sense of the Kremlin as a stage set, nearly as potent under Vladimir Putin as it was under earlier, far more baleful inhabitants.
Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Rosemary Sullivan - 2015
Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.As she gradually learned about the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States—leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father’s regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Wisconsin.With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana’s incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it’s a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father’s name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us.Illustrated with photographs.
The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money
Bastian Obermayer - 2016
Through encrypted channels, he then receives documents revealing how the president of Argentina has sequestered millions of dollars of state money for private use. This is just the beginning. Obermayer and fellow Suddeutsche journalist Frederik Obermaier find themselves immersed in the secret world where complex networks of letterbox companies help the super-rich to hide their money. Faced with the contents of the largest data leak in history, they activate an international network of journalists to follow every possible line of inquiry. Operating in the strictest secrecy for over a year, they uncover cases involving European prime ministers and international dictators, emirs and kings, celebrities and aristocrats. The real-life thriller behind the story of the century, The Panama Papers is an intense, unputdownable account that proves, once and for all, that there exists a small elite living by a different set of rules and blows their secret world wide open.
Only In America: Inside The Mind And Under The Skin Of The Nation Everyone Loves To Hate
Matt Frei - 2008
A city so rich that it spends 150 million dollars a year on corporate lunches, dinners and fundraisers and yet so poor that its streets are frequently as potholed as those of any forgotten backwater in the developing world. A city that deploys more armed officers per square mile than any other in the world but has earned the title of being its country's murder capital. A city where 565 elected Congressmen and Senators are chased, charmed, cajoled and sometimes bribed by 35,000 registered lobbyists; where the most illustrious resident travels with a fleet of planes and a small army of body guards but where the mayor for twelve years was a convicted crack addict who believed that every law in his own country was racist, 'including the law of gravity'. A city that plays host to seventeen different spying agencies, employing 23,000 agents, none of whom were able to discover a plot that involved flying civilian airliners into buildings, even though the plotters had littered their path with clues. Hard to imagine? Welcome to Washington DC: the Rome of the 21st century.Matt Frei was the BBC’s Washington correspondent from 2002. ‘Only in America’ is a surprising and brilliant dissection of the most powerful nation on earth from its capital out.
The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
Javier Blas - 2020
But we should.In The World for Sale, two leading journalists lift the lid on one of the least scrutinised corners of the economy: the workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard and sell the earth's resources.It is the story of how a handful of swashbuckling businessmen became indispensable cogs in global markets: enabling an enormous expansion in international trade, and connecting resource-rich countries - no matter how corrupt or war-torn - with the world's financial centres.And it is the story of how some traders acquired untold political power, right under the noses of Western regulators and politicians - helping Saddam Hussein to sell his oil, fuelling the Libyan rebel army during the Arab Spring, and funnelling cash to Vladimir Putin's Kremlin in spite of strict sanctions.The result is an eye-opening tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.__________________________'This jaw-dropping study shows how much money and global influence is concentrated in the hands of a tiny group . . . A remarkable book . . . As the authors roam from oilfield to wheatfield, they reveal information so staggering you almost gasp.'
SUNDAY TIMES
'Rollicking yarns from the biggest ever commodity boom . . . The high level narrative is gripping enough. But it is the details of what these freewheeling companies actually got up to that give the book a thriller-like quality . . . Educational and entertaining.'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'A fascinating and revealing story . . . There are tales in the book of breathtaking trades, such as shipments of rebel oil from war-torn Libya or deals bartered amid the brutal "aluminium wars" in the Russia of the 1990s.'
ECONOMIST
'A globe-spanning corporate thriller, full of intrigue and double dealing . . . Changes how we see the world, often in horrifying ways . . . New insights and reporting mean that even seasoned observers will be amazed.'
SPECTATOR
'Javier Blas and Jack Farchy should be awaiting the call from Hollywood. The World for Sale contains at least half a dozen narrative threads that would form the basis of a good thriller. But the authors' main achievement is to subject the biggest commodity players, and their impact on the real world, to proper critical scrutiny.'
REUTERS
'Blas and Farchy shine light on what's long been the financial markets' darkest corner - the crucial, yet underappreciated, role commodity traders play in global finance and geopolitics . . . The World For Sale is a fascinating, eye-opening read.' GREGORY ZUCKERMAN, author of The Man Who Solved the Market'The definitive, eye-opening story of the most powerful and secretive traders in the world.' BRADLEY HOPE, co-author of Billion Dollar Whale'If you have the slightest interest in how the modern world was made, by whom, at what price, and at what profit, this is the book for you . . . Superbly researched.'
FOREIGN POLICY
'Javier Blas and Jack Farchy deftly peel back the curtain on the amoral swashbucklers of capitalism who trade in commodities . . . The World for Sale is a gripping account of how they achieved their stranglehold over the world economy, and their troubling influence on global politics.' BRAD STONE, author of The Everything Store'Some of the stories could be straight out of John Le Carré. The difference is they're true . . . Fascinating.' ANDREW NEIL
Bush at War
Bob Woodward - 2002
Bush. Before the acts of terrorism on 11 September, George W. Bush's presidency had been beset by numerous problems. Not only was it in many peoples eyes invalid, very few people took him seriously as a world statesman. Then following one violent mindless act of terrorism, George W. Bush became a president that his country could rely on, one they felt they could trust to lead them through these difficult times. And the world saw a man who was decisive and resolute, a president who was seemingly determined to route out the people who had carried out the heinous acts. But one year after the attacks how has the 44th President of the United States fared? And what were the actual behind the scenes discussions that took place whilst the country was rocked by the crisis? Bob Woodward has been shadowing the President since those fateful events, he was allowed unprecedented access to closed-door meetings and briefings and this masterful book is a look at what really happened.
Fire in Babylon: How the West Indies Cricket Team Brought a People to its Feet
Simon Lister - 2015
Cricket had never meant so much. The West Indies had always had brilliant cricketers; it hadn’t always had brilliant cricket teams. But in 1974, a man called Clive Lloyd began to lead a side which would at last throw off the shackles that had hindered the region for centuries. Nowhere else had a game been so closely connected to a people’s past and their future hopes; nowhere else did cricket liberate a people like it did in the Caribbean.For almost two decades, Clive Lloyd and then Vivian Richards led the batsmen and bowlers who changed the way cricket was played and changed the way a whole nation – which existed only on a cricket pitch - saw itself. With their pace like fire and their scorching batting, these sons of cane-cutters and fishermen brought pride to a people which had been stifled by 300 years of slavery, empire and colonialism. Their cricket roused the Caribbean and antagonised the game’s traditionalists. Told by the men who made it happen and the people who watched it unfold, Fire in Babylon is the definitive story of the greatest team that sport has known.
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump
Michael Isikoff - 2018
election and help Donald Trump gain the presidency.Russian Roulette is a story of political skullduggery unprecedented in American history. It weaves together tales of international intrigue, cyber espionage, and superpower rivalry. After U.S.-Russia relations soured, as Vladimir Putin moved to reassert Russian strength on the global stage, Moscow trained its best hackers and trolls on U.S. political targets and exploited WikiLeaks to disseminate information that could affect the 2016 election.The Russians were wildly successful and the great break-in of 2016 was no "third-rate burglary." It was far more sophisticated and sinister — a brazen act of political espionage designed to interfere with American democracy. At the end of the day, Trump, the candidate who pursued business deals in Russia, won. And millions of Americans were left wondering, what the hell happened? This story of high-tech spying and multiple political feuds is told against the backdrop of Trump's strange relationship with Putin and the curious ties between members of his inner circle — including Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn — and Russia.Russian Roulette chronicles and explores this bizarre scandal, explains the stakes, and answers one of the biggest questions in American politics: How and why did a foreign government infiltrate the country's political process and gain influence in Washington?
The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture
James H. Billington - 1966
"A rich and readable introduction to the whole sweep of Russian cultural and intellectual history from Kievan times to the post-Khruschev era." --Library Journal.Complete with Illustrations, references and 32 pages of index, this is an exhaustive history of Russia and its peoples.
Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary
Dick Morris - 2016
Already President Obama has moved America far down this path, and a President Clinton will act as his "third term," institutionalizing the excesses of the past eight years. In Armageddon, bestselling author and political strategist Dick Morris provides a winning game plan to take back the White House, and America. Because this is our last chance:• Our last chance to stop socialist uniformity, corruption and executive usurpation• Our last chance to curb welfare programs that are destroying the economic and social fabric of the nation• Our last chance to secure our border and keep our sovereignty• Our last chance to stand up against ISIS and terrorism• Our last chance to protect the Second AmendmentWe can do it. We must. It's our last chance. Read Armageddon, or risk losing the battle to save America!On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, American voters will make a momentous decision.They will decide whether or not this great country will remain a free market, constitutional democracy. The stakes could not be higher.If Hillary Clinton is elected president, it will mean the end of the America we know and love.Armageddon, by New York Times bestselling authors Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, is a call to arms, a call to join that ultimate battle.Few know Hillary Clinton better than Dick Morris. For almost two decades he served as a special adviser to both her and her husband, Bill Clinton. He knows their strengths, their vulnerabilities, and even their deepest secrets.In Armageddon, Morris offers a manual on how to win this battle and defeat Hillary once and for all. He argues that a typical Republican campaign won’t work—and that Hillary’s opponent must strike her in a very unorthodox and powerful way.Morris says it’s a winning strategy and voters play a critical role.A noted political strategist, Dick Morris has created winning strategies for numerous presidential campaigns in the U.S. and abroad. In this book he lays out a war plan, one the Republican nominee must use to prevent her victory:• Throw a surprising right jab: terrorism and healthcare• Throw the left hook: jobs, immigration, Wall Street• Play her game on class warfare: women, Latinos, and young votersRepublicans need to stop playing by the old rules of the game. Those rules don’t work—they elected Barack Obama twice. Obama has changed America in fundamental ways and Morris posits that Hillary’s opponents need to grasp this and implement a strategy that can finally defeat her.
God, Trump, and the 2020 Election: Why He Must Win and What's at Stake for Christians if He Loses
Stephen E. Strang - 2020
Evangelicals who recognized this backed him more than any other presidential candidate in history. Heading into 2020, the stakes in his reelection are even higher. This election, nine months after this book releases, is a new fight for the soul of America. Stephen E. Strang makes the case that God wants America to be great because God has raised up America—beginning with our Founding Fathers—to be a beacon of light and hope for the world. We’ve been the nation with religious liberty that has supported those who have spread the gospel around the world.In this book Strang looks at the election, Trump, and America from a spiritual perspective and helps Christians (and others) see God’s hand at work. This book is as much about God and His purposes as about Donald Trump. But it is also an articulate, impassioned apologetic about why all Christians must support this imperfect president, because he has God’s blessing and because the destiny of America is riding on his reelection. This book also explores why he might lose, if his base is overconfident and doesn’t vote or if his opponents are dishonest enough to steal the election.God, Trump, and the 2020 Election is an inside look at how the political climate is affected by spiritual warfare—an important subject for Bible-believing Christians. The satanic schemes are so brazen on key issues that the book was written to explain what’s at stake. Strang believes that the intersection of faith and politics needs to be part of the national discussion about the division in our country.Other Books By Stephen E. Strang:God and Donald Trump (2017) ISBN-13: 978-1629994864Trump Aftershock (2018)ISBN-13: 978-1629995557
Trump Saves America: Our Last Hope to Be Great Again
Charles Hurt - 2019
They are people who love their country, trust their higher God, obey laws and will do anything for their family and neighbors. They are the very people the Founders envisioned when they hatched the radical idea of self-governance. This is the story of a Leviathan government - the most powerful political force in the history of mankind - that has become dangerously unmoored from the people it represents. It is the story of how elites and the politically comfortable controlling both parties in Washington have utterly lost touch. They don't even realize how much the people they represent despise the uncontrollable Leviathan.The establishment has tried their best to ignore Donald Trump-except to brand him as a racist, a xenophobe, an isolationist, and a dangerous, violence-inciting war monger. All standards of reporting vanished. In the era of Trump, no sort of criticism was off-limits. They openly mocked his looks, ridiculed his private business accomplishments, pilloried his family and children and made fun of his foreign-born wife for her accent!The Leviathan has grown untamable. Democrats and Republicans run for office year after year on promises they have no intention of keeping. Neither side wants to fix a single problem. The whole thing has become one giant ungovernable, corrupt Ponzi scheme that - one day - will come crashing down.Charles Hurt advocates for the "Nuclear Option" for dealing with this mess: just blow the whole damned thing up. Whatever is presidential or diplomatic, let's try the opposite. Whatever these people in Washington find most horrifying, let's try that. Finally, the multi-headed Leviathan swamp monster has met the perfect dragon slayer in Donald Trump. Trump Saves America examines each corrupt head of this Leviathan, and why Donald Trump is the only good answer to fixing it.