But the speculative frenzy of the eighties didn't just happen. It was the culmination of a long cycle of slow relaxation of credit practices--the subject of James Grant's brilliant, clear-eyed history of American finance. Two long-running trends converged in the 1980s to create one of our greatest speculative booms: the democratization of credit and the socialization of risk. At the turn of the century, it was almost impossible for the average working person to get a loan. In the 1980s, it was almost impossible to refuse one. As the pace of lending grew, the government undertook to bear more and more of the creditors' risk--a pattern, begun in the Progressive era, which reached full flower in the "conservative" administration of Ronald Reagan. Based on original scholarship as well as firsthand observation, Grant's book puts our recent love affair with debt in an entirely fresh, often chilling, perspective. The result is required--and wickedly entertaining--reading for everyone who wants or needs to understand how the world really works."A brilliantly eccentric, kaleidoscopic tour of our credit lunacy. . . . A splendid, tooth-gnashing saga that should be savored for its ghoulish humor and passionately debated for its iconoclastic analysis. It is a fitting epitaph to the credit binge of the '80s."--Ron Chernow, The Wall Street Journal.

    Probably even before 2020, the world’s financial system will need to find a different anchor. The dollar has been at the center of the monetary system since the Second World War, but decades of money printing have caused a gradual but relentless dollar devaluation. In a desperate attempt to maintain this dollar system, the United States has waged a secret war on gold since the 1960s. China and Russia have pierced through the American smokescreen around gold and the dollar and are no longer willing to continue lending to the United States. Both countries have been accumulating enormous amounts of gold, positioning themselves for the next phase of the global financial system. There are only two options: a financial reset planned well in advance, or a hastily implemented one on the back of a dollar crisis. The United States, realizing the dollar will lose its prominent role, seems to be planning a monetary reset that will surprise many. It will be designed to keep the United States in the driving seat, but will include strong roles for the Euro and China’s Renminbi. And it is likely gold will be reintroduced as one of the pillars of this next phase of the global financial system. Insiders claim gold could be revalued up to $7,000 per troy ounce during this process.

    Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, offers an engrossing look at the new international system that is transforming world affairs today. Globalization has replaced the Cold War system with the integration of capital, technology, and information across national borders—uniting Brazilian peasants, Indonesian entrepreneurs, Chinese villagers, and Silicon Valley technocrats in a single global village. You cannot understand the morning news, know where to invest your money, or think about the future unless you understand this new system, which is profoundly influencing virtually every country in the world today. Friedman tells you what this electronic global economy is all about and what it will take to live within it.With vivid stories drawn from his extensive travels, he dramatizes the conflict of “the Lexus and the olive tree”—the tension between the globalization system and the ancient forces of culture, geography, tradition, and community. He also details the powerful backlash that globalization produces among those who feel brutalized by it, and he spells out what we all need to do to keep the Lexus and the olive tree in balance. For this new paperback edition, Friedman has substantially expanded and updated his provocative analysis, making it essential reading for all who care about how the world works now.

    With all the emphasis on the rich and famous in America, we would think we know everything about them. In reality, very few of us truly understand those who make up the very wealthiest Americans--those with liquid assets of $5 million or more. What is this new class of people and how did they get that way?In The New Elite, the authors reveal what motivates our country's most powerful and influential class, what they want, where they shop, and how they really spend their money. With candor and unique insight, they reveal that the people who drive our economy are not Ivy league-educated, luxury-seeking socialites. While they include luminaries like Bill Gates, David Geffen, Ralph Lauren, and Donald Trump, they also include the small business owner next door. Based on unprecedented research with hundreds of interviews with members of this unique group, The New Elite uncovers the five classes of America's newly wealthy--including those who struggle with its implications, those who refuse to let it change them, and those who give it away, and how each of them is changing our culture and economy. This is an entertaining and enlightening look at America's ruling class, the profound ways they have redefined what it means to be rich, and how we court them.

    Across the globe, it has become increasingly accepted dogma that economic activities should be dominated by market forces, not political concerns. With chapters on Europe, the US, Britain, the Third World, the Arab States, Asia, China, India, Latin America, and the former communist countries, Yergin and Stanislaw provide an incisive overview of the state of the economy, and of the battles between governments and markets in each region. Now updated throughout and with two new chapters, The Commanding Heights explains a revolution which is unfolding before our very eyes.

    The Sovereign Individual details strategies necessary for adapting financially to the next phase of Western civilization. Few observers of the late twentieth century have their fingers so presciently on the pulse of the global political and economic realignment ushering in the new millennium as do James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. Their bold prediction of disaster on Wall Street in Blood in the Streets was borne out by Black Tuesday. In their ensuing bestseller, The Great Reckoning, published just weeks before the coup attempt against Gorbachev, they analyzed the pending collapse of the Soviet Union and foretold the civil war in Yugoslavia and other events that have proved to be among the most searing developments of the past few years. In The Sovereign Individual, Davidson and Rees-Mogg explore the greatest economic and political transition in centuries—the shift from an industrial to an information-based society. This transition, which they have termed "the fourth stage of human society," will liberate individuals as never before, irrevocably altering the power of government. This outstanding book will replace false hopes and fictions with new understanding and clarified values.

    Now, he faces his most important—and difficult—audience yet. Using clear language and vivid examples, Varoufakis offers a series of letters to his young daughter about the economy: how it operates, where it came from, how it benefits some while impoverishing others. Taking bankers and politicians to task, he explains the historical origins of inequality among and within nations, questions the pervasive notion that everything has its price, and shows why economic instability is a chronic risk. Finally, he discusses the inability of market-driven policies to address the rapidly declining health of the planet his daughter’s generation stands to inherit.Throughout, Varoufakis wears his expertise lightly. He writes as a parent whose aim is to instruct his daughter on the fundamental questions of our age—and through that knowledge, to equip her against the failures and obfuscations of our current system and point the way toward a more democratic alternative.

    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.

    No book could be more important." --George A. Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in EconomicsCritics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets--among economists as well as many ordinary citizens--is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea.Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin M. Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset. Friedman makes clear how the foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the eighteenth century, was decisively shaped by the hotly contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Beliefs about God-given human character, about the after-life, and about the purpose of our existence, were all under scrutiny in the world in which Adam Smith and his contemporaries lived.Friedman explores how those debates go far in explaining the puzzling behavior of so many of our fellow citizens whose views about economic policies--and whose voting behavior--seems sharply at odds with what would be to their own economic benefit. Illuminating the origins of the relationship between religious thinking and economic thinking, together with its ongoing consequences, Friedman provides invaluable insights into our current economic policy debates and demonstrates ways to shape more functional policies for all citizens.

    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.

    Whether you're a beginner, and avid student, or an armchair expert, you'll find plenty to stimulate you within this book.--book jacket

    Originally published in England in the spring of 1944—when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program—The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would inevitably lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of nazi Germany and fascist Italy.First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate attention from the public, politicians, and scholars alike. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 were sold. In April of 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this condensation to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best-seller, the book has sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States, not including the British edition or the nearly twenty translations into such languages as German, French, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese, and not to mention the many underground editions produced in Eastern Europe before the fall of the iron curtain.After thirty-two printings in the United States, The Road to Serfdom has established itself alongside the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell for its timeless meditation on the relation between individual liberty and government authority. This fiftieth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Milton Friedman, commemorates the enduring influence of The Road to Serfdom on the ever-changing political and social climates of the twentieth century, from the rise of socialism after World War II to the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" in the 1980s and the transitions in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism in the 1990s.F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of libertarianism in the twentieth century.On the first American edition of The Road to Serfdom:"One of the most important books of our generation. . . . It restates for our time the issue between liberty and authority with the power and rigor of reasoning with which John Stuart Mill stated the issue for his own generation in his great essay On Liberty. . . . It is an arresting call to all well-intentioned planners and socialists, to all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen."—Henry Hazlitt, New York Times Book Review, September 1944"In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often—at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of."—George Orwell, Collected Essays

    Cussed and discussed by all from notable politicians to academicians to laypersons. Do you want to know the truth about money? Creature from Jekyll Island will give you the answers to these, and other, questions: Where does money come from? Where does it go? Who makes it? The money magicians' secrets are unveiled. We get a close look at their mirrors and smoke machines, their pulleys, cogs, and wheels that create the grand illusion called money. A dry and boring subject? Just wait! You'll be hooked in five minutes. Creature from Jekyll Island Reads like a detective story which it really is. But it's all true. This book is about the most blatant scam of all history. It's all here: the cause of wars, boom-bust cycles, inflation, depression, prosperity. Creature from Jekyll Island is a "must read." Your world view will definitely change. You'll never trust a politician again or a banker.

    Now, with global markets in constant flux, balancing risk and reward is more critical than ever.Self-taught investor William Bernstein offers no gimmicks, inside secrets, or magic solutions--just the facts about investing and calm, smart advice on how to build and manage a portfolio designed for the long run. This is all you need, despite claims of the advisors and pundits looking to profit from your hard-earned money. This easy-to-understand guide provides everything you need, including:* The basics of finance--historical, psychological, and institutional* Time-tested strategies for improving the risk/reward ratio* Ways to sharpen your focus to improve portfolio managementBernstein walks you through the fundamentals of important topics like multiple-asset portfolios, optimal asset allocations, market efficiency, and strategy implementation.No one knows the future of markets. Your forecast is as good as that of the last financial pundit you saw on TV. Trust your instincts, trust your research, and trust the proven-effect approach of The Intelligent Asset Allocator, and your portfolio will deliver returns through the blue skies and storms of financial markets.

    Published in 1879, it was admired and advocated by great minds such as Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy and Sun Yat-sen in China.