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    As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering & achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists & engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes & high adventure, with narratives from the CIA & from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the 20th century.

    What separates the world's top traders from the vast majority of unsuccessful investors? Jack Schwager sets out to answer tis question in his interviews with superstar money-makers including Bruce Kovner, Richard Dennis, Paul Tudor Jones, Michel Steinhardt, Ed Seykota, Marty Schwartz, Tom Baldwin, and more in "Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders," now in paperback and ebook.This classic interview-style investment text from a financial expert is a must-read for traders and professional financiers alike, as well as anyone interested in gaining insight into how the world of finance really works.Filled with anecdotes about market experiences, including the story of a trader who after wiping out several times, turned $30,000 into $80 million and an electrical engineer from MIT whose computerized trading has earned returns of 250,000 percent over sixteen yearsIdentifies the factors that define a successful traderNow availabe as in digital formats.One of the most insightful, bestselling trading books of all time.

    The discoveries made, however, are so far-reaching that a large portion of economics literature will have to be modified to accommodate another half to the macro economic spectrum of possibilities that conventional theorists have overlooked. In particular, Japan's Great Recession showed that when faced with a massive fall in asset prices, companies typically jettison the conventional goal of profit maximization and move to minimize debt in order to restore their credit ratings. This shift in corporate priority, however, has huge theoretical as well as practical implications and opens up a whole new field of study. For example, the new insight can explain fully the precise mechanism of prolonged depression and liquidity trap which conventional economics - based on corporate profit maximization - has so far failed to offer as a convincing explanation. The author developed the idea of yin and yang business cycles where the conventional world of profit maximization is the yang and the world of balance sheet recession, where companies are minimizing debt, is the yin. Once so divided, many varied theories developed in macro economics since the 1930s can be nicely categorized into a single comprehensive theory, i.e., the Holy Grail of macro economics The policy implication of this new discovery is immense in that the conventional aversion to fiscal policy in favor of monetary policy will have to be completely reversed when the economy is in the yin phase. The theoretical implications are also immense in the sense that the economics profession will no longer have to rely so much on various rigidities to explain recessions that have become the standard practice within the so-called New Keynesian economics of the last twenty years.

    Despite having amassed a fortune of $100 million by1929, Livermore was back where he started at 16. He did not seem to learn from his mistakes."--Victor Niederhoffer "That was the call of a lifetime, everyone was blind and deep into the crisis and Jesse Livermore made $100 million going short when almost everyone else was bullish and then almost everyone else lost their shirts."--John Paulson "His stories of making millions, were the financial equivalent of "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" to a young man at the advent of his financial career."--Paul Tudor Jones "It was an amazing day on 24th October 1929 when Jesse came home and his wife thought they were ruined and instead he had the second best trading day of anyone in history."--John Templeton Who was Jesse Livermore? Jesse Livermore, was the most successful stock and commodities trader that ever operated on the stock markets. He was both the man who made the most money in a single day and the man who lost the most money in a single day. In fact he made and lost three great fortunes between 1900 and 1940. Singlehandedly he caused the two great Wall Street crashes of 1907 and 1929, making millions from both. When he speculated he speculated big and was known on Wall Street as the Boy Plunger. For a brief period in the early 1930s he was one of the world's richest men with a personal fortune believed to be worth over $150 million, $100 million of that earned in just a few days from the Wall Street crash of 1929. In the end it was too extreme a change of fortunes for any man to cope with and Livermore shot himself in a New York hotel lobby in 1940 aged just 63. His legacy continued and his son, Jesse jr later also committed suicide as did his grandson, Jesse III. In the summer of 1929 most people believed that the stock market would continue to rise forever. Wall Street was enjoying a eight-year winning run that had seen the Dow Jones increase 1,000 per cent from the start of the decade - an unprecedented rise. The Dow peaked at 381 on 3rd September and later that day the most respected economist of the day, Irving Fisher, declared that the rise was "permanent." One man vigorously disagreed and sold $300 million worth of shares short. Two weeks later the market began falling and rising again on successive days for no apparent reason. This situation endured for a month until what became famously known as the three 'black' days: On Black Thursday 24th October the Dow fell 11% at the opening bell, prompting absolute chaos. The fall was stalled when leading financiers of the day clubbed together to buy huge quantities of shares. But it was short-lived succor and over that weekend blanket negative newspaper commentary caused the second of the 'black' days on Black Monday 26th October when the market dropped another 13%. The third 'black' day, Black Tuesday 29th October saw the market drop a further 12%. When the dust had settled, between the 24th and 29th October, Wall Street had lost $30 billion. Only much later did it became known that the man who had sold short $300 million worth of shares was Jesse Livermore. Livermore had made $100 million and overnight became one of the richest men in the world. It remains, adjusted for inflation, the most money ever made by any individual in a period of seven days. This is the story of that man.

    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.

    Russ Roberts argues that the true underlying cause of the mess was the past bailouts of large financial institutions that allowed these institutions to gamble carelessly because they were effectively using other people’s money. The author warns that despite the passage of Dodd-Frank, it is widely believed that we have done nothing to eliminate ‘Too Big to Fail.’ That perception allows the largest financial institutions to continue to gamble with taxpayer money.

    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.

    From the airline business (Virgin Atlantic Airways), to music (Virgin Records and V2), to cola (Virgin Cola), to retail (Virgin Megastores), and nearly a hundred others, ranging from financial services to bridal wear, Branson has a track record second to none.Losing My Virginity is the unusual, frequently outrageous autobiography of one of the great business geniuses of our time. When Richard Branson started his first business, he and his friends decided that "since we're complete virgins at business, let's call it just that: Virgin." Since then, Branson has written his own "rules" for success, creating a group of companies with a global presence, but no central headquarters, no management hierarchy, and minimal bureaucracy.Many of Richard Branson's companies--airlines, retailing, and cola are good examples--were started in the face of entrenched competition. The experts said, "Don't do it." But Branson found golden opportunities in markets in which customers have been ripped off or underserved, where confusion reigns, and the competition is complacent. And in this stressed-out, overworked age, Richard Branson gives us a new model: a dynamic, hardworking, successful entrepreneur who lives life to the fullest. Family, friends, fun, and adventure are equally important as business in Branson's life. Losing My Virginity is a portrait of a productive, sane, balanced life, filled with rich and colorful stories: Crash-landing his hot-air balloon in the Algerian desert, yet remaining determined to have another go at being the first to circle the globeSigning the Sex Pistols, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Boy George, and Phil CollinsFighting back when British Airways took on Virgin Atlantic and successfully suing this pillar of the British business establishmentSwimming two miles to safety during a violent storm off the coast of MexicoSelling Virgin Records to save Virgin AtlanticStaging a rescue flight into Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War . . .And much more. Losing My Virginity is the ultimate tale of personal and business survival from a man who combines the business prowess of Bill Gates and the promotional instincts of P. T. Barnum.

    Full of real-world examples and step-by-step explanations, this title demonstrates exactly how you can participate in the opportunities that exist in high-priced stocks for a fraction of the usual cost.

    The result is an accessible text that has sold well over half a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and shows every sign of becoming more and more influential as time goes on.

    Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. A near instant “unicorn,” Uber seemed poised to take its place next to Amazon, Apple, and Google as a technology giant.What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong. Isaac recounts Uber’s pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. With billions of dollars at stake, Isaac shows how venture capitalists asserted their power and seized control of the startup as it fought its way toward its fateful IPO.Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.

    It’s about how people, organizations and societies can and must hit refresh—transform—in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, relevance and renewal. At the core, it’s about us humans and our unique qualities, like empathy, which will become ever more valuable in a world where the torrent of technology will disrupt like never before. As much a humanist as a technologist, Nadella defines his mission and that of the company he leads as empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

    But it is also much more, having become a fundamental influence on modern “libertarian” economics of the type espoused by Ron Paul and others.Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication.  Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy.Many current economic commentators across the political spectrum have credited Hazlitt with foreseeing the collapse of the global economy which occurred more than 50 years after the initial publication of Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson, every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication.

    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.