Showing titles in Economic History

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production.

In The Chile Project, Sebastian Edwards tells the story of how the neoliberal economic model came to an end in 2021, when Gabriel Boric was elected president, vowing that "If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave." More than a story about one Latin American country, The Chile Project is a behind-the-scenes history of the spread and consequences of the free-market thinking that dominated economic policymaking around the world in the second half of the twentieth century—but is now on the retreat.

Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents due to unforeseen circumstances. Rather, these fluctuations result from the complex bargains made between politicians, bankers, bank shareholders, depositors, debtors, and taxpayers.

Brought to you by Penguin. Why are all my clothes made in Asia? How come I'm so much richer than my great-great grandma? And what even is money? Whether you're buying lunch, looking for a job, or applying for a mortgage, the thing we call 'the economy' is going to set the terms. A pity, then...

Money issues dominate the news, but economic jargon and the complexity of it all can be bamboozling for regular folks. Paul Sheard, a leading economist and research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, is known for his ability to see the forest and the trees and demystify complex economic phenomena. With The Power of Money, Sheard empowers listeners to become better-informed economic citizens by providing context for some of the biggest questions surrounding money.

The crisis in Europe is not over, it's getting worse. In this dramatic narrative of Europe’s economic rise and spectacular fall, Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, ‘the emerging rock star of Europe’s anti-austerity uprising’ (Telegraph), shows that the origins of the...

The 2012 presidential campaign will, above all else, be a referendum on the Obama administration’s handling of the financial crisis, recalling the period when Obama’s “audacity of hope” met the austerity of reality. Central to this is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - the largest economic recovery plan in American history. Senator Mitch McConnell gave a taste of the enormity of the money committed: if you had spent $1 million a day since Jesus was born, it still would not add up to the price tag of the stimulus package.

In Killing the Planet: How A Financial Cartel Doomed Mankind, best-selling authors Rodney Howard-Browne and Paul L. Williams investigate the true motives and consequences of the Pilgrim Society. Early members of the Society included J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Paul Warburg, Mortimer I. Schiff, Otto Kahn, and John D. Rockefeller.

Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It's happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of this century.

In the twelfth-century, Pisa was a thriving metropolis, a powerhouse of global trade, and a city that stood at the centre of Mediaeval Europe. But Pisa had a problem. It was running out of coins. In the face of financial crisis, it was here that the foundations of modern banking were born. In Money and Promises, the distinguished financier, entrepreneur and historian Paolo Zannoni examines the fascinating, complex relationship between states and banks.

Warren Buffett has repeatedly acknowledged Benjamin Graham, a man he personally studied and worked under, as the primary influence on his investment approach. Indeed, there is a direct line between the record-shattering investing performance of Buffett (and other value investors) and Graham's life. In six books and dozens of papers, Graham—widely known as the "Dean of Wall Street"—left an extensive account of an investing system that, as Buffett can attest to, actually works!

Economist Richard Holden examines the virtues and risks of low interest rates, mobile money, and cryptocurrencies and explains how these three elemental forces will continue to play out—in our wallets, on the blockchain, and throughout major economies—in the decades to come. Holden weaves in the stories of three people who have exerted massive influence over the future of modern money: US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin, and Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

This fascinating three-thousand-year history of the census traces the making of the modern survey and explores its political power in the age of big data and surveillance. In April 2020, the United States will embark on what has been called "the largest peacetime mobilization in American...

Who’s really to blame for America’s catastrophic financial meltdown and devastating national recession? Contrary to what the “Occupy Movement” might tell you, it’s not greedy Wall Street executives. No, as one of America’s top financial professionals reveals in this shocking book, the real culprit is economic warfare, with our foreign enemies exploiting our lurking financial weaknesses. In Secret Weapon, Kevin Freeman unveils how all the evidence - including motive, means, and opportunity - points to America’s foreign enemies deliberately pushing our economy over the brink.

“Whatever it takes” That was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s vow as the worst financial panic in more than fifty years gripped the world and he struggled to avoid the once unthinkable: a repeat of the Great Depression. Brilliant but temperamentally cautious, Bernanke researched and...

Did Wall Street cause the mess we are in? Should Washington place stronger regulations on the financial industry? Can we lower unemployment rates by controlling the free market? Answer: no. Not only is free-market capitalism good for the economy, it is our only hope for recovery. As the nation’s longest-serving CEO of one of the top 25 financial institutions, John Allison has had a unique inside view of the events leading up to the financial crisis.

Immigration is a fraught and misunderstood topic in America’s social discourse, with much of what we believe based largely on myth. Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan have spent the last decade searching for the facts. Their pioneering research digs deep into the data on immigration, linking the experiences of immigrants from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to those of immigrants today. Using powerful storytelling alongside big data, they provide new evidence about the past and present of the American Dream that will change our thinking and policies.

The index fund was just one innovation fueled by The Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle's radical idea in 1975 to make investors the actual owners of his new fund company. The end result was powerful: a fund company for the people and by the people. But Bogle's impact and this "great cost migration" reaches well beyond index funds into many other areas, such as active management, ETFs, the advisory world, quantitative investing, ESG, behavioral finance, and even trading platforms. 

This audiobook tells the story of the euro crisis in Cyprus from the inside. Written by the former Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus, Panicos Demetriades, who was in office during this turbulent period, this audiobook shows how the crisis unravelled through a series of key events that occurred during his tenure. Written in chronological order and broadly based on the author’s personal diary, starting from his first day in office, this volume brings together economics, banking, regulation, governance, history, politics and international relations.