Petrocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend resource money on weapons and oppression; militants in Iraq and in the Congo spend resource money on radicalization and ammunition. Resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists present endless crises to the West-and the source of their resource power is ultimately ordinary consumers, doing their everyday shopping at the gas station and the mall.In this sweeping new book, one of today's leading political philosophers, Leif Wenar, goes behind the headlines in search of the hidden global rule that thwarts democracy and development-and that puts shoppers into business with some of today's most dangerous men. Wenar discovers a rule that once licensed the slave trade and apartheid and genocide, a rule whose abolition has marked some of humanity's greatest triumphs-yet a rule that still enflames tyranny and war and terrorism through today's multi-trillion dollar resource trade.Blood Oil shows how the West can now lead a peaceful revolution by ending its dependence on authoritarian oil, and by getting consumers out of business with the men of blood. The book describes practical strategies for upgrading world trade: for choosing new rules that will make us more secure at home, more trusted abroad, and better able to solve pressing global problems like climate change. Blood Oil shows citizens, consumers and leaders how we can act together today to create a more united human future.

    Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance explores Black's intellectual journey from Harvard to the offices of ADL, from the University of Chicago to MIT, and then to Goldman Sachs. This poignant book tells the story of one man's intellectual adventure at the very center of modern finance, fully describing the birth of quantitative finance and financial engineering along the way.Years of research and interviews with Black's business and academic associates, as well as family and friends, are distilled into a scholarly yet personal story of the formation and development of the extraordinary mind and unique character of this unassuming renegade Black deciphered the universe of modern finance in ways that went underappreciated for many years and would have won the Nobel Prize in Economics, if not for his untimely death in 1995 Author Perry Mehrling weaves Black's personal story with the birth of modern finance into a vignette-based business biography that captures the essence of this extraordinary man, explaining, for the first time, the ground-breaking impact Fischer Black had on the worlds of money and finance as well as world markets This compelling biography of the "Einstein of Finance" follows Fischer Black through his incredible career, from his transition from academia to one of the most elite of firms on Wall Street--Goldman Sachs--where he developed quantitative models that tens of thousands of professionals still use today. Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance demystifies this genius of finance and provides an engaging and entertaining look at a man whose life's work encapsulates modern financial theory.

    The party out of power used to be “the loyal opposition.” No longer. Now it’s “the Resistance.” The left, abandoning any pretense of fairness and decency, has declared political war on President Trump. Waged by a stunningly broad array of militants—the Democratic Party, countless left-wing interest groups, radical academics, the liberal mainstream media, Antifa shock troops, Hollywood, and the tech oligarchs—this political war is aimed not only at conservative ideas but also at Trump supporters, even teenagers wearing MAGA hats. In his shocking new book,  Guilty by Reason of Insanity , national #1 bestselling author David Limbaugh explains how the left lost its mind—and the threat it now poses to us all. No book you read this year could be more important.

    This urgent report is required reading, from defense expert P.W. Singer and Council on Foreign Relations fellow Emerson Brooking.

    The Heart of the story Fiasco has to tell, which has never been told before, is that of a Military occupation whose leaders failed to see a blooming insurgency for what it was and as a result lead their soldiers in such a way that the insurgency became inevitable.

    A few weeks later it had completely collapsed. The disaster was mostly the responsibility of a 32-year-old trader named Brian Hunter, whose high-risk bets on natural gas prices bankrupted his firm and destroyed his career. Meanwhile, his rival at competitor fund Centaurus, John Arnold, emerged as the highest-paid trader on Wall Street and America's youngest billionaire. Meticulously researched and character driven, Hedge Hogs is a riveting, fly-on-the-wall account of the largest hedge-fund collapse in history: a blistering tale of the recent past that explains our precarious present and may predict our future.Through emails, instant messages, court testimony, and exclusive interviews, Hedge Hogs charts the colliding paths of two charismatic traders who dominated the speculative energy trading market. It follows Hunter, the Canadian farm boy and elbows-out high school basketball star, as he achieved phenomenal early success, only to see his ambition, greed, and hubris precipitate his downfall. At the center of Hunter's misfortune is Arnold, whose mild manner, sophisticated tastes, and low profile belie his own ferocious competitive streak. As the two clash, billions of dollars -- much of it in the form of pension and endowment money -- vanished.Hedge Hogs takes you behind closed doors into the shadowy world of hedge funds, the wild, unregulated frontier of finance, complete with lavish perks and over-the-top parties, where a tiny elite controls trillions of dollars of other people's money. The book traces the rise of this freewheeling industry while detailing the decades of deregulation -- of banks, of investment funds and of commodity trading -- that turned Wall Street into a casino for speculators.A gripping saga peppered with tales of fast money, vivid characters, and high drama, Hedge Hogs is also a cautionary tale that describes a financial system jeopardized by reckless practices, watered-down regulation, and regulatory loopholes, just waiting for the next bust.

    Since David Horowitz wrote “The Shadow Party” in 2007, there has been a major breakthrough in the progression of Soros’ plan to racially change American institutions – he has succeeded in subverting and taking over the Democratic Party itself. Though Soros has carefully hidden his goals under the cloak of his philanthropy, Horowitz and John Perazzo expose Soros’ radical agenda in this booklet and show how his philanthropies actually work to advance his leftwing causes. Understanding the Soros agenda is critical for understanding and defeating the Obama agenda, because they have, in effect, become one in the same.

    It's a modern state driven by contemporary technology & possessed of vast oil deposits, yet its powerful religious establishment would have its customs & practices rolled back 1000 years to match those of the prophet Muhammad. With Inside the Kingdom, journalist & bestselling author Robert Lacey has given us one of the most penetrating & insightful looks at Saudi Arabia ever produced. While living for years among the nation's princes & paupers, its clerics & progressives, Lacey endeavored to find out how the consequences of the 1970s oil boom produced a society at war with itself. Filled with stories that trace a path thru the Persian Gulf War & the events of 9/11 to the oilmarket convulsions of today, Inside the Kingdom gives a modern history of the Saudis in their own words, revealing a people attempting to reconcile life under religious law with the demands of a rapidly changing world. Their struggle will have powerful reverberations around the globe. This rich work provides a penetrating look at a country no one can afford to ignore.

    One of the most controversial figures on the intellectual scene, Ayn Rand was the proponent of a moral philosophy - an ethic of rational self-interest - that stands in sharp opposition of the ethics of altruism and self-sacrifice. The fundamentals of this morality - "a philosophy for living on earth" - are here vibrantly set forth by the spokesman for a new class, "For the New Intellectual."

      In December 2009, a group of the CIA’s top terrorist hunters gathered at a secret base in Khost, Afghanistan, to greet a rising superspy: Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a Jordanian double-agent who infiltrated the upper ranks of al-Qaeda. For months, he had sent shocking revelations from inside the terrorist network and now promised to help the CIA assassinate Osama bin Laden’s top deputy. Instead, as he stepped from his car, he detonated a thirty-pound bomb strapped to his chest, instantly killing seven CIA operatives, the agency’s worst loss of life in decades.   In The Triple Agent, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Joby Warrick takes us deep inside the CIA’s secret war against al-Qaeda, a war that pits robotic planes and laser-guided missiles against a cunning enemy intent on unleashing carnage in American cities. Flitting precariously between the two sides was Balawi, a young man with extraordinary gifts who managed to win the confidence of hardened terrorists as well as veteran spymasters. With his breathtaking accounts from inside al-Qaeda’s lair, Balawi appeared poised to become America’s greatest double-agent in half a century—but he was not at all what he seemed. Combining the powerful momentum of Black Hawk Down with the institutional insight of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, Warrick takes the readers on a harrowing journey from the slums of Amman to the inner chambers of the White House in an untold true story of miscalculation, deception, and revenge.

    Yet, as has become all too evident through the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the impending threat of the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, that power isnot enough to solve global problems--like terrorism, environmental degradation, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction--without involving other nations. Here Joseph S. Nye, Jr. focuses on the rise of these and other new challenges and explains clearly why America must adopt a morecooperative engagement with the rest of the world.

    Is this the fulcrum we want the global economy to balance on?”In his explosive New York Times bestseller, See No Evil, former CIA operative Robert Baer exposed how Washington politics drastically compromised the CIA’s efforts to fight global terrorism. Now in his powerful new book, Sleeping with the Devil, Baer turns his attention to Saudi Arabia, revealing how our government’s cynical relationship with our Middle Eastern ally and America’ s dependence on Saudi oil make us increasingly vulnerable to economic disaster and put us at risk for further acts of terrorism.For decades, the United States and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a “harmony of interests.” America counted on the Saudis for cheap oil, political stability in the Middle East, and lucrative business relationships for the United States, while providing a voracious market for the kingdom’ s vast oil reserves. With money and oil flowing freely between Washington and Riyadh, the United States has felt secure in its relationship with the Saudis and the ruling Al Sa’ud family. But the rot at the core of our “friendship” with the Saudis was dramatically revealed when it became apparent that fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers proved to be Saudi citizens.In Sleeping with the Devil, Baer documents with chilling clarity how our addiction to cheap oil and Saudi petrodollars caused us to turn a blind eye to the Al Sa’ud’s culture of bribery, its abysmal human rights record, and its financial support of fundamentalist Islamic groups that have been directly linked to international acts of terror, including those against the United States. Drawing on his experience as a field operative who was on the ground in the Middle East for much of his twenty years with the agency, as well as the large network of sources he has cultivated in the region and in the U.S. intelligence community, Baer vividly portrays our decades-old relationship with the increasingly dysfunctional and corrupt Al Sa’ud family, the fierce anti-Western sentiment that is sweeping the kingdom, and the desperate link between the two. In hopes of saving its own neck, the royal family has been shoveling money as fast as it can to mosque schools that preach hatred of America and to militant fundamentalist groups—an end game just waiting to play out.Baer not only reveals the outrageous excesses of a Saudi royal family completely out of touch with the people of its kingdom, he also takes readers on a highly personal search for the deeper roots of modern terrorism, a journey that returns time again and again to Saudi Arabia: to the Wahhabis, the powerful Islamic sect that rules the Saudi street; to the Taliban and al Qaeda, both of which Saudi Arabia helped to underwrite; and to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most active and effective terrorist groups in existence, which the Al Sa’ud have sheltered and funded. The money and arms that we send to Saudi Arabia are, in effect, being used to cut our own throat, Baer writes, but America might have only itself to blame. So long as we continue to encourage the highly volatile Saudi state to bank our oil under its sand—and so long as we continue to grab at the Al Sa’ud’s money—we are laying the groundwork for a potential global economic catastrophe.From the Hardcover edition.

    That source turned out to be the twenty-nine-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency's widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security and information privacy.Now Greenwald fits all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity eleven-day trip to Hong Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his reporting for The Guardian, and revealing fresh information on the NSA's unprecedented abuse of power with documents from the Snowden archive. Fearless and incisive, No Place to Hide has already sparked outrage around the globe and been hailed by voices across the political spectrum as an essential contribution to our understanding of the U.S. surveillance state.

    In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades. In Lords of Finance, we meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, the xenophobic and suspicious Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose façade of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man. After the First World War, these central bankers attempted to reconstruct the world of international finance. Despite their differences, they were united by a common fear—that the greatest threat to capitalism was inflation— and by a common vision that the solution was to turn back the clock and return the world to the gold standard. For a brief period in the mid-1920s they appeared to have succeeded. The world’s currencies were stabilized and capital began flowing freely across the globe. But beneath the veneer of boom-town prosperity, cracks started to appear in the financial system. The gold standard that all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability proved to be a straitjacket, and the world economy began that terrible downward spiral known as the Great Depression. As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, of their fallibility, and of the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.

                 A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting—conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among other languages—French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the  ordinary men and women navigating the street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice, corruption, and opportunity forged by this seismic geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the human face of China’s economic, political, and human presence across the African continent—and in doing so reveals what is at stake for everyone involved.             We meet a broad spectrum of China’s dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, and even environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia’s now-booming copper trade; a timber entrepreneur determined to harvest the entirety of Liberia’s old-growth redwoods), to those just barely scraping by (a sibling pair running small businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke bar owner–cum–brothel madam), still convinced that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an equally panoramic array of African responses: a citizens’ backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese construction project (a tower complex to be built over a beloved soccer field, which locals thought would lead to overbearing Chinese pressure on their economy); a Zambian political candidate who, having protested China’s intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle class of an industrial boomtown; African mine workers bitterly condemning their foreign employers, citing inadequate safety precautions and wages a fraction of their immigrant counterparts’. French’s nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition—exploitation of resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure projects; dubious treaties—to new frontiers of cultural and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in dynamic flux.             Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part industrial and political exposé, French’s keenly observed account ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: why China is making the incursions it is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa’s role in the equation is, and just what the ramifications for both parties—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future.