It was a time of economic miracles, an era when steady jobs were easy to find and families could see their living standards improving year after year. And then, around 1973, the good times vanished. The world economy slumped badly, then settled into the slow, erratic growth that had been the norm before the war. The result was an era of anxiety, uncertainty, and political extremism that we are still grappling with today. In An Extraordinary Time, acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson describes how the end of the postwar boom reverberated throughout the global economy, bringing energy shortages, financial crises, soaring unemployment, and a gnawing sense of insecurity. Politicians, suddenly unable to deliver the prosperity of years past, railed haplessly against currency speculators, oil sheikhs, and other forces they could not control. From Sweden to Southern California, citizens grew suspicious of their newly ineffective governments and rebelled against the high taxes needed to support social welfare programs enacted when coffers were flush. Almost everywhere, the pendulum swung to the right, bringing politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power. But their promise that deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, and smaller government would restore economic security and robust growth proved unfounded. Although the guiding hand of the state could no longer deliver the steady economic performance the public had come to expect, free-market policies were equally unable to do so. The golden age would not come back again. A sweeping reappraisal of the last sixty years of world history, An Extraordinary Time forces us to come to terms with how little control we actually have over the economy.

    His specially embroidered jacket, laden with medals, made him the most decorated dog in history.Extracted from the bestselling title Beyond The Call Of Duty, the story of the unofficial mascot for the 26th ‘Yankee’ Division and his rescuer Private Robert J Conroy takes us on a journey through the build up to WWI and beyond."

    Sadly, evidence does exist for negligence, corruption, and methods that border on extortion. Part exposé, part memoir, and part financial detective story, this is the account of a one-time true believer whose decade in the industry turned him into a heretic.Hugh Sinclair worked with several microfinance institutions around the world. He couldn’t help but notice that even with a booming $70 billion industry on their side, the poor didn’t seem any better off. Exorbitant interest rates led borrowers into never-ending debt spirals, and aggressive collection practices resulted in cases of forced prostitution, child labor, suicide, and nationwide revolts against the microfinance community.Sinclair weaves a shocking tale of a system increasingly focused on maximizing profits—particularly once large banks got involved. He details his discovery of several scandals, one of the most disturbing involving a large African microfinance institution of questionable legality that charged interest rates in excess of 100 percent per year, and whose investors and supporters included some of the most celebrated leaders of the microfinance sector. Sinclair’s objections were first met with silence, then threats, attempted bribery, and a court case, and eventually led him to become a principle whistleblower in a sector that had lost its soul.Microfinance can work—Sinclair describes moving experiences with several ethical and effective organizations and explains what made them different. But without the fundamental reforms that Sinclair recommends here, microfinance will remain an “investment opportunity” that will leave the poor with hollow promises and empty pockets.

    Robbie, aka the Naked Trader, is an expert and highly entertaining guide to the sometimes baffling world of the stock market. In between cups of tea, rounds of toast and the occasional 'cuddle' with Mrs Naked Trader, he describes the straightforward techniques that have enabled him to succeed in the markets and escape the rat race. The book kicks off with the basics such as: the best websites, magazines and newspapers to look at; the kit you need to get cracking; and some key tips for choosing a broker. Robbie then gives you the essential techniques for picking the good shares and, just as importantly, avoiding the bad ones, and finishes up with some more advanced topics like how to make money even when shares fall. Along the way you also get the chance to spend a day with the

    

    This book provides an account of the life of LTTE chief Prabhakaran, who led an armed struggle against the Sri Lankan state to create Eelam, a separate nation for the Sri Lankan Tamils.The book begins from Prabhakaran’s childhood days in the aftermath of India’s and Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain. The Sri Lankan Tamils were following Gandhi’s non-violent methods to fight for their rights as citizens of Sri Lanka. Prabhakaran, an ardent fan of Bhagat Singh and Subhash Chandra Bose, felt that non-violence would not work against a Sinhala dominated government and began experimenting with violent acts against the Government to send a message. His initial success became the nucleus for the formation of LTTE, which became the quintessential guerrilla organization fighting the State.The book details various incidents of Prabhakaran’s life including terror attacks, assassination of politicians, heads of States and militant leaders; India’s role in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict; Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka; the Eelam wars, negotiations, betrayals and elections; through to his killing in May 2009.

    A magisterial account of the money and violence behind the world’s most powerful dictatorships.” –Washington PostIn this shocking, meticulously reported work of narrative nonfiction, an award-winning investigative journalist exposes “capitalism’s monster”—global kleptocracy—and reveals how it is corrupting the world around us.They are everywhere, the thieves and their people. Masters of secrecy. Until now we have detected their presence only by what they leave behind. A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh Desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silenced and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London.They have amassed more money than most countries. But what they are really stealing is power.In this real-life thriller packed with jaw-dropping revelations, award-winning investigative journalist Tom Burgis weaves together four stories that reveal a terrifying global web of corruption: the troublemaker from Basingstoke who stumbles on the secrets of a Swiss bank, the ex-Soviet billionaire constructing a private empire, the righteous Canadian lawyer with a mysterious client, and the Brooklyn crook protected by the CIA.Glimpses of this shadowy world have emerged over the years. In Kleptopia, Burgis connects the dots. He follows the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators, and poisoning democracies. From the Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, Paris to the White House, the trail shows something even more sinister: the thieves are uniting. And the human cost will be great.

    There was a time when the stock market was a mechanism for growing businesses to raise money, playing a large role in the industrial revolution-boosting America to a global superpower. Today the stock market has morphed into a high-tech system of fluctuating arbitrary numbers which are used by individuals and industries alike to find profit opportunities by placing bets, masqueraded as sophisticated financial maneuvers with fancy labels and acronyms. Nowhere is this more evident than with the tendencies observed today. There is a shocking trend by today's Millennial generation to shamelessly and unapologetically find ways to use the stock market to place very high-risk bets. And unlike formal Wall Street investment institutions, these gamblers, of sorts, don't attempt to disguise the game: they are proud to call Wall Street a casino. Jaime Rogozinski combs through various elements of how reckless investors play Wall Street similar to a casino. He illustrates these often in playful ways, using entertaining and compelling real-world anecdotes. His stories are taken straight from Reddit's r/wallstreetbets community which Jaime founded in 2012, and currently has more than 800,000 followers in addition to 3 million unique visitors a month. WallStreetBets is a forum based gathering where people are notoriously known for taking a brazen and public approach at gambling with the stock market.

    Now he gathers the best of his best, updated and expanded upon, to guide readers on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier, and how these advances are radically transforming our lives. From the ways science and technology are fundamentally altering our bodies and our world (the world’s first bionic soldier, the future of evolution) to those explosive collisions between science and culture (life extension and bioweapons), we’re crossing moral and ethical lines we’ve never faced before.As Kotler writes, “Life is tricky sport—and that's the emotional core of this story, the real reason we can’t put Pandora back in the box. When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It’s the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?”Join Kotler in this fascinating exploration of our incredible next: a deep dive into those future technologies happening now—and what it means to be a part of this brave new world.

    Yet in the harsh light of a new day, attacks against government intervention and the global drive for austerity are as strong as ever. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste is the definitive account of the wreckage of what passes for economic thought, and how neoliberal ideas were used to solve the very crisis they had created. Now updated with a new afterword, Philip Mirowski’s sharp and witty work provides a roadmap for those looking to escape today’s misguided economic dogma.

    She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment" losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

    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.

    Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection--a world without mind. In order to restore our inner lives, we must avoid being coopted by these gigantic companies, and understand the ideas that underpin their success.Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science--from Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stuart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley--Foer exposes the dark underpinnings of our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy. This is a nascent stage in the total automation and homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life. By reclaiming our private authority over how we intellectually engage with the world, we have the power to stem the tide.At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They're monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat. Foer explains not just the looming existential crisis but the imperative of resistance.

    In The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber discusses why the human condition and the radical uncertainty of our world renders the standard economic model--and the theory behind it--useless for dealing with financial crises. What model should replace it? None. At least not any version we've been using for the past two hundred years. Instead, Bookstaber argues for a new approach called agent-based economics, one that takes as a starting point the fact that we are humans, not the optimizing automatons that standard economics assumes we are.Bookstaber's groundbreaking paradigm promises to do a far better job at preventing crises and managing those that break out. As he explains, our varied memories and imaginations color our economic behavior in unexpected hues. Agent-based modeling embraces these nuances by avoiding the mechanistic, unrealistic structure of our current economic approach. Bookstaber tackles issues such as radical uncertainty, when circumstances take place beyond our anticipation, and emergence, when innocent, everyday interactions combine to create sudden chaos. Starting with the realization that future crises cannot be predicted by the past, he proposes an approach that recognizes the human narrative while addressing market realities.Sweeping aside the historic failure of twentieth-century economics, The End of Theory offers a novel and innovative perspective, along with a more realistic and human framework, to help prevent today's financial system from blowing up again.

    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.