We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his ten years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking, the keys to modern finance.The Industrial Revolution built the foundation of our modern capitalist age. Yet the flowering of technological innovations during that dynamic period relied on the widespread adoption of two much older ideas: the creation of paper money and the invention of banks that issued credit. We take these systems for granted today, yet at their core both ideas were revolutionary and almost magical. Common paper became as precious as gold, and risky long-term loans were transformed into safe short-term bank deposits. As King argues, this is financial alchemy—the creation of extraordinary financial powers that defy reality and common sense. Faith in these powers has led to huge benefits; the liquidity they create has fueled economic growth for two centuries now. However, they have also produced an unending string of economic disasters, from hyperinflations to banking collapses to the recent global recession and current stagnation.How do we reconcile the potent strengths of these ideas with their inherent weaknesses? King draws on his unique experience to present fresh interpretations of these economic forces and to point the way forward for the global economy. His bold solutions cut through current overstuffed and needlessly complex legislation to provide a clear path to durable prosperity and the end of overreliance on the alchemy of our financial ancestors.

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

    The success of Starbucks Coffee Company is one of the most amazing business stories in decades. What started as a single store on Seattle's waterfront has grown into a company with over sixteen hundred stores worldwide and a new one opening every single business day. Just as remarkable as this incredible growth is the fact that Starbucks has managed to maintain its renowned commitment to product excellence and employee satisfaction. Marketers, managers, and aspiring entrepreneurs will discover how to turn passion into profit in this definitive chronicle of the company that "has changed everything... from our tastes to our language to the face of Main Street" (Fortune).

    Author Steven Drobny demystifies how these star traders make billions for well-heeled investors, revealing their theories, strategies and approaches to markets. Drobny, cofounder of Drobny Global Advisors, an international macroeconomic research and advisory firm, has tapped into his network and beyond in order assemble this collection of thirteen interviews with the industry's best minds. Along the way, you'll get an inside look at firsthand trading experiences through some of the major world financial crises of the last few decades. Whether Russian bonds, Pakistani stocks, Southeast Asian currencies or stakes in African brewing companies, no market or instrument is out of bounds for these elite global macro hedge fund managers. Highly accessible and filled with in-depth expert opinion, Inside the House of Money is a must-read for financial professionals and anyone else interested in understanding the complexities at stake in world financial markets. "The ruminations of supposedly hush-hush hedge fund operators are richly illuminating." --New York Times

    In the span of five minutes, a trillion dollars of valuation was lost. The Flash Crash, as it became known, represented the fastest drop in market history. When share values rebounded less than half an hour later, experts around the globe were left perplexed. What had they just witnessed?Navinder Singh Sarao hardly seemed like a man who would shake the world's financial markets to their core. Raised in a working-class neighborhood in West London, Nav was a preternaturally gifted trader who played the markets like a computer game. By the age of thirty, he had left behind London's "trading arcades," working instead out of his childhood home. For years the money poured in. But when lightning-fast electronic traders infiltrated markets and started eating into his profits, Nav built a system of his own to fight back. It worked--until 2015, when the FBI arrived at his door. Depending on whom you ask, Sarao was a scourge, a symbol of a financial system run horribly amok, or a folk hero who took on the tyranny of Wall Street and the high-frequency traders.A real-life financial thriller, Flash Crash uncovers the remarkable, behind-the-scenes narrative of a mystifying market crash, a globe-spanning investigation into international fraud, and the man at the center of them both.

    dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon.Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they offer the sorry spectacle of countries' stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation, and sometimes actual violence. Left unchecked, the next currency war could lead to a crisis worse than the panic of 2008.Currency wars have happened before-twice in the last century alone-and they always end badly. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated, and capital controls have been imposed. And the next crash is overdue. Recent headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Greece and Ireland, and Chinese currency manipulation are all indicators of the growing conflict.As James Rickards argues in Currency Wars, this is more than just a concern for economists and investors. The United States is facing serious threats to its national security, from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds. Greater than any single threat is the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself.Baffling to many observers is the rank failure of economists to foresee or prevent the economic catastrophes of recent years. Not only have their theories failed to prevent calamity, they are making the currency wars worse. The U. S. Federal Reserve has engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance, a sustained effort to stimulate the economy by printing money on a trillion-dollar scale. Its solutions present hidden new dangers while resolving none of the current dilemmas.While the outcome of the new currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rickards untangles the web of failed paradigms, wishful thinking, and arrogance driving current public policy and points the way toward a more informed and effective course of action.

    Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece, continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking.

    Rajan took charge as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in September 2013, the rupee was in free fall, inflation was high, India had a large current account deficit and India’s exchange reserves were falling. As measure after measure failed to stabilize markets, speculators sensed a full-blown crisis and labelled India one of the Fragile Five economies. Rajan’s response was to go all out, not just to tackle the crisis of confidence, but also to send a strong message about the strength of India’s institutions and the country’s ongoing programme of reform. He outlined a vision that went beyond the immediate crisis to focus on long-term growth and stability, thus restoring investor confidence. Boldness and farsightedness would be characteristic of the decisions he took in the ensuing three years.Rajan’s commentary and speeches in I Do What I Do convey what it was like to be at the helm of the central bank in those turbulent but exciting times. Whether on dosanomics or on debt relief, Rajan explains economic concepts in a readily accessible way. Equally, he addresses key issues that are not in any banking manual but essential to growth: the need for tolerance and respect to assure India’s economic progress, for instance, or the connection between political freedom and prosperity. I Do What I Do offers a front-row view into the thinking of one of the world’s most respected economists, one whose commitment to India’s progress shines through in the essays and speeches here. It also brings home what every RBI Governor discovers for himself when he sits down at his desk on the 18th floor: the rupee stops here. Right here!

    The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile,and The Bed of Procrustes.

    A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day.Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed--and not changed--over the last five hundred years? In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to "stockjobbing" in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the "assurance of female chastity"; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton.From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.

    At a time of frightening volatility, what is the average investor to do?The answer: turn to Burton G. Malkiel’s advice in his reassuring, authoritative, gimmick-free, and perennially best-selling guide to investing. Long established as the first book to purchase before starting a portfolio or 401(k), A Random Walk Down Wall Street now features new material on “tax-loss harvesting,” the crown jewel of tax management; the current bitcoin bubble; and automated investment advisers; as well as a brand-new chapter on factor investing and risk parity. And as always, Malkiel’s core insights—on stocks and bonds, as well as real estate investment trusts, home ownership, and tangible assets like gold and collectibles— along with the book’s classic life-cycle guide to investing, will help restore confidence and composure to anyone seeking a calm route through today’s financial markets.

    Lots of entrepreneurs who make money write books. Few of those books make you glad they did. This one does." --The New York Times Book Review "A classic tale of a nimble, customer-focused, entrepreneurial David outsmarting bureaucratic, ossified, corporate Goliaths." --Business Week "Entertaining, engaging, and informative, Bloomberg by Bloomberg is packed with great advice about how to start a lean, hungry company-and how to keep it that way." --Bryan Burrough, coauthor, Barbarians at the GateBrash, aggressive, and supremely self-confident, Michael Bloomberg, the visionary leader of the world's fastest-growing media empire, has been hailed as the new standard for what it takes to win in the Information Age. Dismissed from Salomon Brothers in 1981, Bloomberg immediately took his money and acerbic personality and started Bloomberg L.P. Bolstered by a $30 million investment from Merrill Lynch, the company and the man have been sprinting ahead of the pack ever since. Only twenty years after founding, he's at the top of his industry. And on June 5, 2001, he added mayoral candidate for New York City to his list of accomplishments and aspirations. If elected, powerhouse Michael Bloomberg will bring his own brand of leadership-and personal style-to the city that never sleeps.

    His quest for wisdom originated partly from making mistakes himself and observing those of others but also from the philosophy of super-investor and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger. A man whose simplicity and clarity of thought was unequal to anything Bevelin had seen. In addition to naturalist Charles Darwin and Munger, Bevelin cites an encyclopedic range of thinkers: from first-century BCE Roman poet Publius Terentius to Mark Twainfrom Albert Einstein to Richard Feynmanfrom 16th Century French essayist Michel de Montaigne to Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett. In the book, he describes ideas and research findings from many different fields. This book is for those who love the constant search for knowledge. It is in the spirit of Charles Munger, who says, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there." There are roads that lead to unhappiness. An understanding of how and why we can "die" should help us avoid them. We can't eliminate mistakes, but we can prevent those that can really hurt us. Using exemplars of clear thinking and attained wisdom, Bevelin focuses on how our thoughts are influenced, why we make misjudgments and tools to improve our thinking. Bevelin tackles such eternal questions as: Why do we behave like we do? What do we want out of life? What interferes with our goals? Read and study this wonderful multidisciplinary exploration of wisdom. It may change the way you think and act in business and in life.

    And it's a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don't, and about sticking to your guns." It's the story of how Walton parlayed a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king of the late twentieth century, he never lost the common touch. Here Walton tells his extraordinary story in his own inimitable words. Genuinely modest, but always sure of his ambitions and achievements, Walton shares his thinking in a candid, straight-from-the-shoulder style."Here is an extraordinary success story about a man whose empire was built not with smoke and mirrors, but with good old-fashioned elbow grease."

    In the most candid and outrageous look at Wall Street since Liar's Poker, Cramer, co-founder of TheStreet.com, radio and television commentator, and for years a premier money manager, takes readers on the wild ride that is Wall Street -- revealing how the game is played, who breaks the rules, and who gets hurt. Confessions of a Street Addict takes us from Cramer's roots in the middle-class Philadelphia suburbs to Harvard, where he began managing money, and then to Goldman Sachs, where he went into business with his wife -- Karen, the "Trading Goddess" -- as his partner. He brilliantly describes the life of a money manager: the frenetic pace, the constant pressure to outperform the market and other fund managers, and the sharklike attacks fund managers make as they circle a fund perceived to be in trouble. Throughout the book Cramer is characteristically outspoken, offering his hard-won insights about the market and everyone in it, himself included. There has never been a more eloquent market insider than Cramer, nor a more high-octane book about Wall Street.