Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and the Government Bailout Will Make Things Worse


Thomas E. Woods Jr. - 2009
    In clear, no-nonsense terms, Woods explains what led up to this economic crisis, who's really to blame, and why government bailouts won't work. Woods will reveal:* Which brave few economists predicted the economic fallout--and why nobody listened* What really caused the collapse* Why the Fed--not taxpayers--should have to answer for the current economic crisis* Why bailouts are band-aids that will only provide temporary relief and ultimately make things worse* What we should do instead, to put our economy on a healthy path to recoveryWith a foreword from Ron Paul, Meltdown is the free-market answer to the Fed-created economic crisis. As the new Obama administration inevitably calls for more regulations, Woods argues that the only way to rebuild our economy is by returning to the fundamentals of capitalism and letting the free market work

Stocks for the Long Run


Jeremy J. Siegel - 1994
    Provides a portrait of the stock market with the strategies, tools, and techniques investors need to maintain their focus and achieve meaningful stock returns over time.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street


Jeff John Roberts - 2020
    He turned to the audience and shared his idea with the simple slogan: "Coinbase, the easiest way to get started with Bitcoin."For a moment late in 2018, one Bitcoin, which physically amounts to a few electrons blipping on a tiny bit of silicon, was worth $20,000—the same as a pound of gold. Libertarian technologists who believed Bitcoin would be the foundation of a new world order saw the moment as an apotheosis. Everyone else saw a bubble. Everyone else was right, and the bubble burst. But Bitcoin survived, and the battle for its soul rages on. True believers view it as the foundation for a future economy freed from the vicissitudes of Wall Street and government control of currency. Pragmatists believe that bringing Bitcoin into the mainstream will, as the Silicon Valley cliche goes, make the world a better place. But they need buy-in from traditional institutional systems that can prevent the crypto world from devolving into the lawless criminal bazaar it was becoming during the bubble.Journalist Jeff John Roberts drops us into the unfolding drama as he follows the rise, fall, and rebirth of cryptocurrency through the experiences of major players across the globe. We follow Silicon Valley entrepreneur Brian Armstrong and his company, Coinbase, as it tries to make Bitcoin easy to use and available to all while fighting off hackers, thieves, and zealots. Roberts keenly observes the importance of leadership and strategy in the developing field of virtual currencies and what happens when these guardrails are missing. His ability to explain crypto technology clearly and lay out the ramifications of its infiltration into the global financial system makes this book a must-read for leaders in every industry. The amazing story—full of startup hijinks, shady investors, billionaire bros and their Lambos, closed-door meetings with Jamie Dimon, hacking (so much hacking!), Libertarian free-state utopias in New Hampshire, and the Winklevoss twins—make this a page turner that readers will love.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust


John Coates - 2012
    In a series of startling experiments, Canadian scientist Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk in men, especially young men; he has vividly dubbed the moment when traders transform into exuberant high flyers "the hour between dog and wolf." Similarly, intense failure leads to a rise in levels of cortisol, which dramatically lowers the appetite for risk. His book expands on his seminal research to offer lessons from the exploding new field studying the biology of risk. Coates's conclusions shed light on all types of high-pressure decision-making, from the sports field to the battlefield, and leaves us with a powerful recognition: to handle risk isn't a matter of mind over body, it's a matter of mind and body working together. We all have it in us to be transformed from dog to wolf; the only question is whether we can understand the causes and the consequences.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt


Louis Hyman - 2012
     Borrow examines how the rise of consumer borrowing—virtually unknown before the twentieth century—has altered our culture and economy. Starting in the years before the Great Depression, increased access to money raised living standards but also introduced unforeseen risks. As lending grew more and more profitable, it displaced funds available for business borrowing, setting our economy on an unsustainable course. Told through the vivid stories of individuals and institutions affected by these changes, Borrow charts the collision of commerce and culture in twentieth-century America, giving an historical perspective on what is new—and what is not—in today’s economic turmoil.A Paperback Original

The Cult of We: Wework, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion


Eliot Brown - 2021
    Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion--at least on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the 6-foot-five Neumann, who grew up in part on a kibbutz, looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation, with its fluid jobs and lax office culture. He called it WeWork. Though the company was merely subleasing amenity-filled office space to freelancers and small startups, Neumann marketed it like a revolutionary product--and investors swooned.As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann's ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn't just an office space provider, he boasted. It would build schools, create WeWork cities, even colonize Mars. Could he, Neumann wondered from the ice bath he'd installed in his office, become the first trillionaire or a world leader? In pursuit of its founder's grandiose vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital. In late 2019, just weeks before WeWork's highly publicized IPO, a Hail Mary effort to raise cash, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company--but still was poised to walk away a billionaire.Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork's extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks, from a Japanese billionaire with designs on becoming the Warren Buffet of tech, to leaders at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs who seemed intoxicated by a Silicon Valley culture where sensible business models lost out to youthful CEOs who promised disruption. Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley unicorns? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive account of WeWork's unraveling.

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge-Fund Manager


Lars Kroijer - 2010
    They can sink whole economies, and have the potential to crash the entire global financial system. Yet they are beyond regulation. We should be very afraid.' New Statesman, 2006 What is a hedge fund and what do hedgies actually do? How are the staggering fees in the hedge industry calculated? And are the managers and the funds worth it? A true entrepreneur, Lars Kroijer was a leading hedge fund manager and founded his own hedge fund, Holte Capital in 2002. In 2008, just before the crash he shut down the fund and returned the external capital to the remaining investors. This is the story of the life of a hedge fund. It charts the interminable rise of Holte Capital from 2002 to 2008, explaining what it was like to run a hedge fund in a period where the industry went from relative obscurity to become something everyone wanted to discuss. Detailing the practices, excesses, tricks and tenacity of the hedge fund industry, Money Mavericks shines the light on the incredible inside workings of hedge funds. This book will appeal to those who are familiar with the hedge fund industry, but also for those who want to know what the fuss is about.

American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company


Bryce G. Hoffman - 2012
    With the auto industry careening toward ruin, Congress offered all three Detroit automakers a bailout. General Motors and Chrysler grabbed the taxpayer lifeline, but Ford decided to save itself. Under the leadership of charismatic CEO Alan Mulally, Ford had already put together a bold plan to unify its divided global operations, transform its lackluster product lineup, and overcome a dys­functional culture of infighting, backstabbing, and excuses. It was an extraordinary risk, but it was the only way the Ford family—America’s last great industrial dynasty—could hold on to their company. Mulally and his team pulled off one of the great­est comebacks in business history. As the rest of Detroit collapsed, Ford went from the brink of bankruptcy to being the most profitable automaker in the world. American Icon is the compelling, behind-the-scenes account of that epic turnaround. On the verge of collapse, Ford went outside the auto industry and recruited Mulally—the man who had already saved Boeing from the deathblow of 9/11—to lead a sweeping restructuring of a company that had been unable to overcome decades of mismanage­ment and denial. Mulally applied the principles he developed at Boeing to streamline Ford’s inefficient operations, force its fractious executives to work together as a team, and spark a product renaissance in Dearborn. He also convinced the United Auto Workers to join his fight for the soul of American manufacturing. Bryce Hoffman reveals the untold story of the covert meetings with UAW leaders that led to a game-changing contract, Bill Ford’s battle to hold the Ford family together when many were ready to cash in their stock and write off the company, and the secret alliance with Toyota and Honda that helped prop up the Amer­ican automotive supply base. In one of the great management narratives of our time, Hoffman puts the reader inside the boardroom as Mulally uses his celebrated Business Plan Review meet­ings to drive change and force Ford to deal with the painful realities of the American auto industry.  Hoffman was granted unprecedented access to Ford’s top executives and top-secret company documents. He spent countless hours with Alan Mulally, Bill Ford, the Ford family, former executives, labor leaders, and company directors. In the bestselling tradition of Too Big to Fail and The Big Short, American Icon is narrative nonfiction at its vivid and colorful best.

The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders


Jack D. Schwager - 1992
    Asking questions that readers with an interest or involvement in the financial markets would love to pose to the financial superstars, Jack D. Schwager encourages these financial wizards to share their insights. Entertaining, informative, and invaluable, The New Market Wizards is destined to become another Schwager classic.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us


Tim O'Reilly - 2017
    In today’s economy, we have far too much dismay along with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame. In this combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action, Tim O'Reilly, Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and the founder of O’Reilly Media, explores the upside and the potential downsides of today's WTF? technologies. What is the future when an increasing number of jobs can be performed by intelligent machines instead of people, or done only by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to our consumer based societies—to workers and to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? Is income inequality and unemployment an inevitable consequence of technological advancement, or are there paths to a better future? What will happen to business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? How should companies organize themselves to take advantage of these new tools? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional institutions? How can individuals continue to adapt and retrain? Will the fundamental social safety nets of the developed world survive the transition, and if not, what will replace them? O'Reilly is "the man who can really can make a whole industry happen," according to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet (Google.) His genius over the past four decades has been to identify and to help shape our response to emerging technologies with world shaking potential—the World Wide Web, Open Source Software, Web 2.0, Open Government data, the Maker Movement, Big Data, and now AI. O’Reilly shares the techniques he's used at O’Reilly Media  to make sense of and predict past innovation waves and applies those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how today’s world-spanning platforms and networks, on-demand services, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. He provides tools for understanding how all the parts of modern digital businesses work together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem succeeds along with them.The core of the book's call to action is an exhortation to businesses to DO MORE with technology rather than just using it to cut costs and enrich their shareholders. Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. O'Reilly replies, “Only if that’s what we ask them to do! Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won’t run out of work till we run out of problems." Entrepreneurs need to set their sights on how they can use big data, sensors, and AI to create amazing human experiences and the economy of the future, making us all richer in the same way the tools of the first industrial revolution did. Yes, technology can eliminate labor and make things cheaper, but at its best, we use it to do things that were previously unimaginable! What is our poverty of imagination? What are the entrepreneurial leaps that will allow us to use the technology of today to build a better future, not just a more efficient one? Whether technology brings the WTF? of wonder or the WTF? of dismay isn't inevitable. It's up to us!

A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett


Peter Bevelin - 2012
    It tells in a short-easy-to-read way about what managers and investors can learn from Buffett. This is a selection of useful and timeless wisdom where Warren Buffett in his own words tells us how to think about business valuation, what is a good and bad business, acquisitions and their traps, yardsticks, compensation issues, how to reduce risk, corporate governance, the importance of trust and the right culture, learning from mistakes, and more.

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World


Tom Wright - 2018
    The dust had yet to settle on the global financial crisis in 2009 when an unlikely Wharton grad was setting in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. Billion Dollar Whale will become a classic, harrowing parable about the financial world in the twenty-first century.

The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess


Turney Duff - 2013
    After trying – and failing – to land a job as a journalist, he secured a trainee position at Morgan Stanley and got his first feel for the pecking order that exists in the trading pits.  Those on the “buy side,” the traders who make large bets on whether a stock will rise or fall, are the “alphas” and those on the “sell side,” the brokers who handle their business, are eager to please. How eager to please was brought home stunningly to Turney in 1999 when he arrived at the Galleon Group, a colossal hedge-fund management firm run by secretive founder Raj Rajaratnam.  Finally in a position to trade on his own, Turney was encouraged to socialize with the sell side and siphon from his new broker friends as much information as possible.  Soon he was not just vacuuming up valuable tips but also being lured into a variety of hedonistic pursuits.  Naïve enough to believe he could keep up the lifestyle without paying a price, he managed to keep an eye on his buy-and-sell charts and, meanwhile, pondered the strange goings on at Galleon, where tens of millions were being made each week in sometimes mysterious ways.  At his next positions, at Argus Partners and J.L. Berkowitz, Turney climbed to even higher heights – and, as it turned out, plummeted to even lower depths – as, by day, he solidified his reputation one of the Street’s most powerful healthcare traders, and by night, he blazed a path through the city’s nightclubs, showing off his social genius and voraciously inhaling any drug that would fill the void he felt inside. A mesmerizingly immersive journey through Wall Street’s first millennial decade, and a poignant self portrait by a young man who surely would have destroyed himself were it not for his decision to walk away from a seven-figure annual income, The Buy Side is one of the best coming-of-age-on-the-Street books ever written.

Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile


Geraint Anderson - 2008
    In this no-holds barred, warts and all account of life in London's financial heartland, Anderson breaks the Square Mile's code of silence, revealing explosive secrets, tricks of the trade and the corrupt, murky underbelly at the heart of life in the City.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy


Stephanie Kelton - 2020
    Any ambitious proposal, however, inevitably runs into the buzz saw of how to find the money to pay for it, rooted in myths about deficits that are hobbling us as a country.Kelton busts through the myths that prevent us from taking action: that the federal government should budget like a household, that deficits will harm the next generation, crowd out private investment, and undermine long-term growth, and that entitlements are propelling us toward a grave fiscal crisis.MMT, as Kelton shows, shifts the terrain from narrow budgetary questions to one of broader economic and social benefits. With its important new ways of understanding money, taxes, and the critical role of deficit spending, MMT redefines how to responsibly use our resources so that we can maximize our potential as a society. MMT gives us the power to imagine a new politics and a new economy and move from a narrative of scarcity to one of opportunity.