84 results for "Banking"

The house of Morgan

Chernow, Ron
The winner of the National Book Award and now considered a classic, The House of Morgan is the most ambitious history ever written about an American banking dynasty. Acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal as "brilliantly researched and written", the book tells the rich, panoramic story of four generations of Morgans and the powerful, secretive firms they spawned. It is the definitive account of the rise of the modern financial world. A gripping history of banking and the booms and busts that shaped the world on both sides of the Atlantic, The House of Morgan traces the trajectory of the J. P. Morgan empire from its obscure beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Ron Chernow paints a fascinating portrait of the private saga of the Morgans and the rarefied world of the American and British elite in which they moved. Based on extensive interviews and access to the family and business archives, The House of Morgan is an investigative masterpiece, a compelling account of a remarkable institution and the men who ran it, and an essential book for understanding the money and power behind the major historical events of the last 150 years.
Simon & Schuster 1990-01 812 pages

A Perfect Stranger A Novel

Danielle Steel
The only daughter of a European banking dynasty, Raphaella had always been sheltered from the world. Married to a much older American, she was kept in the privacy of great luxury, tended to by servants, watched over by bodyguards. She was the beautiful dark-eyed woman the young lawyer from San Francisco, Alexander Hale, saw sitting alone one misty evening. Before he could approach her, she rushed away into the garden. She was the "perfect stranger" he couldn't forget. When they met again their lives would change forever.
Random House Publishing Group 1985-07-01 400 pages

The courage to act: a memoir of a crisis and its aftermath

Bernanke, Ben
In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however -- the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown. Here, Ben Bernanke pulls back the curtain on the tireless and ultimately successful efforts to prevent a mass economic failure. Working with two U.S. presidents and two Treasury secretaries, Dr. Bernanke and his colleagues used every Fed capability, no matter how arcane, to keep the U.S. economy afloat. From his arrival in Washington in 2002 and his experiences before the crisis, to the intense days and weeks of the crisis itself, and through the Great Recession that followed, Dr. Bernanke gives readers a unique perspective on the American economy.
W.W. Norton & Company 2015-10-06 610 pages

The Warburgs: the twentieth-century odyssey of a remarkable Jewish family

Chernow, Ron
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning bestselling author of Alexander Hamilton , the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical, comes this definitive biography of the Warburgs, one of the great German-Jewish banking families of the twentieth century. Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, of German-American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy. Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century.
Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC 2016-11-15 820 pages

The Theory of Money and Credit

Ludwig von Mises,Ludwig Von Mises
This must-read classic on currency and credit covers the three areas of key interest -- the nature of money, the value of money, and money and banking. Economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises presents his "Theory of Money and Credit" by first looking at the nature and value of money, why there is a demand for money, and how it is used as currency. He goes on to explain the purchasing power of money and how it determines economic and monetary policy, often in a way that results in financial melt-downs. Never in modern history has there been a greater need for this book and others like it. All of its ideas and principles are coming true right before our eyes in today's economy and its problems.
Must Have Books 2021-03-08 166 pages

The hidden wealth of nations: the scourge of tax havens

Zucman, Gabriel
We are well aware of the rise of the 1% as the rapid growth of economic inequality has put the majority of the world's wealth in the pockets of fewer and fewer. One much-discussed solution to this imbalance is to significantly increase the rate at which we tax the wealthy. But with an enormous amount of the world's wealth hidden in tax havens--in countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands--this wealth cannot be fully accounted for and taxed fairly. No one, from economists to bankers to politicians, has been able to quantify exactly how much of the world's assets are currently hidden--until now. Gabriel Zucman is the first economist to offer reliable insight into the actual extent of the world's money held in tax havens. And it's staggering. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman offers an inventive and sophisticated approach to quantifying how big the problem is, how tax havens work and are organized, and how we can begin to approach a solution. His reasearch reveals that tax havens are a quickly growing danger to the world economy. In the past five years, the amount of wealth in tax havens has increased over 25%--there has never been as much money held offshore as there is today. This hidden wealth accounts for at least $7.6 trillion, equivalent to 8% of the global financial assets of households. Fighting the notion that any attempts to vanquish tax havens are futile, since some countries will always offer more advantageous tax rates than others, as well as the counterargument that since the financial crisis tax havens have disappeared, Zucman shows how both sides are actually very wrong. In [this book], he offers an ambitious agenda for reform, focused on ways in which countries can change the incentives of tax havens. Only by first understanding the enormity of the secret wealth can we begin to estimate the kind of actions that would force tax havens to give up their practices. Zucman's work has quickly become the gold standard for quantifying the amount of the world's assets held in havens. In this concise book, he lays out in approachable language how the international banking system works and the dangerous extent to which the large-scale evasion of taxes is undermining the global market as a whole. -- Inside jacket flaps.
The University of Chicago Press 2015 129 pages

Family Properties Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black America (10th Anniversary Edition)

Beryl Satter
“Beryl Satter's Family Properties is really an incredible book. It is, by far, the best book I've ever read on the relationship between blacks and Jews. That's because it hones in on the relationship between one specific black community and one specific Jewish community and thus revels in the particular humanity of all its actors.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago -- and cities across the nation The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is a monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America. "Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North."—David Garrow, The Washington Post
Picador 2021-04-27 544 pages

Firefighting: the financial crisis and its lessons

Bernanke, Ben,Geithner, Timothy F.,Paulson, Henry M.
"From the three primary architects of the American policy response to the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, a magnificent big-picture synthesis--from why it happened to where we are now In 2018, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Hank Paulson came together to reflect on the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis ten years on. Recognizing that, as Ben put it, "the enemy is forgetting," they examine the causes of the crisis, why it was so damaging, and what it ultimately took to prevent a second Great Depression. And they provide to their successors in the United States and the finance ministers and central bank governors of other countries a valuable playbook for reducing the damage from future financial crises. Firefighting provides a candid and powerful account of the choices they and their teams made during the crisis, working under two presidents and with the leaders of Congress"--
Profile Books 2019 230 pages

The Federal Reserve and the financial crisis

Bernanke, Ben
Ben Bernanke's history of the Federal Reserve and its response to the 2008 financial crisis In 2012, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, gave a series of lectures about the Federal Reserve and the 2008 financial crisis, as part of a course at George Washington University on the role of the Federal Reserve in the economy. In this unusual event, Bernanke revealed important background and insights into the central bank's crucial actions during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Taken directly from these historic talks, The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis offers insight into the guiding principles behind the Fed's activities and the lessons to be learned from its handling of recent economic challenges. Bernanke traces the origins of the Federal Reserve, from its inception in 1914 through the Second World War, and he looks at the Fed post-1945, when it began operating independently from other governmental departments such as the Treasury. During this time the Fed grappled with episodes of high inflation, finally tamed by then-chairman Paul Volcker. Bernanke also explores the period under his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, known as the Great Moderation. Bernanke then delves into the Fed's reaction to the recent financial crisis, focusing on the central bank's role as the lender of last resort and discussing efforts that injected liquidity into the banking system. Bernanke points out that monetary policies alone cannot revive the economy, and he describes ongoing structural and regulatory problems that need to be addressed. Providing first-hand knowledge of how problems in the financial system were handled, The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis will long be studied by those interested in this critical moment in history.
Princeton University Press 2013-02-24 134 pages

The Laundromat (Previously published as SECRECY WORLD) Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite

Jake Bernstein
* * * Previously published as Secrecy World * * * The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture from Director Steven Soderbergh, Starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, and Antonio Banderas Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter takes us inside the world revealed by the Panama Papers, a landscape of illicit money, political corruption, and fraud on a global scale. A hidden circulatory system flows beneath the surface of global finance, carrying trillions of dollars from drug trafficking, tax evasion, bribery, and other illegal enterprises. This network masks the identities of the individuals who benefit from these activities, aided by bankers, lawyers, and auditors who get paid to look the other way. In The Laundromat , two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Jake Bernstein explores this shadow economy and how it evolved, drawing on millions of leaked documents from the files of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca—a trove now known as the Panama Papers—as well as other journalistic and government investigations. Bernstein shows how shell companies operate, how they allow the superwealthy and celebrities to escape taxes, and how they provide cover for illicit activities on a massive scale by crime bosses and corrupt politicians across the globe. Bernstein traveled to the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and within the United States to uncover how these strands fit together—who is involved, how they operate, and the real-world impact. He recounts how Mossack Fonseca was exposed and what lies ahead for the corporations, banks, law firms, individuals, and governments that are implicated. The Laundromat offers a disturbing and sobering view of how the world really works and raises critical questions about financial and legal institutions we may once have trusted.
Picador 2019-10-15 368 pages

The death of the banker: the decline and fall of the great financial dynasties and the triumph of the small investor

Chernow, Ron
"For anyone interested in the world behind the business-page headlines, this is the book to read." --Publishers Weekly With the same breadth of vision and narrative élan he brought to his monumental biographies of the great financiers, Ron Chernow examines the forces that made dynasties like the Morgans, the Warburgs, and the Rothschilds the financial arbiters of the early twentieth century and then rendered them virtually obsolete by the century's end. As he traces the shifting balance of power among investors, borrowers, and bankers, Chernow evokes both the grand theater of capital and the personal dramas of its most fascinating protagonists. Here is Siegmund Warburg, who dropped a client in the heat of a takeover deal because the man wore monogrammed shirt cuffs, as well as the imperious J. P. Morgan, who, when faced with a federal antitrust suit, admonished Theodore Roosevelt to "send your man to my man and they can fix it up." And here are the men who usurped their power, from the go-getters of the 1920s to the masters of the universe of the 1980s. Glittering with perception and anecdote, The Death of the Banker is at once a panorama of twentieth-century finance and a guide to the new era of giant mutual funds on Wall Street. "Chernow . . . delivers a sound, accessible account of the forces shaping capital, credit, currency, and securities markets on the eve of a new millennium. " --Kirkus Reviews
Vintage Books 1997 130 pages

The death of the banker: the decline and fall of the great financial dynasties and the triumph of the small investor

Chernow, Ron
National Book Award winner Ron Chernow expertly traces the decline of the big bankers and the rise of small investors. The reader is taken on a fascinating tour of Anglo-American high finance over the past two centuries, with detours into Canadian, German and Japanese finance. As the point of departure for his colourful, panoramic survey, Mr. Chernow poses a historic riddle: Why did the great financial dynasties - the Rothschilds, Barings, Morgans and Warburgs - flare so brilliantly in the 19th and 20th centuries and then enter into a precipitous decline? Why did such heavyweights give way to more anonymous financial conglomerates? And, most curious of all, why have small investors, banded together in mutual funds, suddenly inherited the financial earth? The Death of the Banker shows how American reformers mounted a spirited campaign to pry captive companies loose from their traditional bankers and restored competition to financial markets. In a world criss-crossed by capital flows, the banker will never again exercise such spectacular but arbitrary rule over clients.
Vintage Canada 1997 147 pages

Taxes and business strategy

Scholes, Myron S.
For MBA students and graduates embarking on careers in investment banking, corporate finance, strategy consulting, money management, or venture capital Through integration with traditional MBA topics, Taxes and Business Strategy, Fifth Edition provides a framework for understanding how taxes affect decision-making, asset prices, equilibrium returns, and the financial and operational structure of firms. Teaching and Learning Experience This program presents a better teaching and learning experience-for you : Use a text from an active author team: All 5 authors actively teach the tax and business strategy course and provide you with relevant examples from both classroom and real-world consulting experience. Learn the practical uses for business strategy: Learn important concepts that can be applied to your life. Reinforce learning by using in-depth analysis: Analysis and explanatory material help you understand, think about, and retain information.
Prentice Hall 2014 510 pages

Mastering 'metrics: the path from cause to effect

Angrist, Joshua David
"Applied econometrics, known to aficionados as 'metrics, is the original data science. 'Metrics encompasses the statistical methods economists use to untangle cause and effect in human affairs. Through accessible discussion and with a dose of kung fu-themed humor, Mastering 'Metrics presents the essential tools of econometric research and demonstrates why econometrics is exciting and useful.The five most valuable econometric methods, or what the authors call the Furious Five--random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences in differences--are illustrated through well-crafted real-world examples (vetted for awesomeness by Kung Fu Panda's Jade Palace). Does health insurance make you healthier? Randomized experiments provide answers. Are expensive private colleges and selective public high schools better than more pedestrian institutions? Regression analysis and a regression discontinuity design reveal the surprising truth. When private banks teeter, and depositors take their money and run, should central banks step in to save them? Differences-in-differences analysis of a Depression-era banking crisis offers a response. Could arresting O. J. Simpson have saved his ex-wife's life? Instrumental variables methods instruct law enforcement authorities in how best to respond to domestic abuse.Wielding econometric tools with skill and confidence, Mastering 'Metrics uses data and statistics to illuminate the path from cause to effect. Shows why econometrics is important Explains econometric research through humorous and accessible discussion Outlines empirical methods central to modern econometric practice Works through interesting and relevant real-world examples "--
Princeton University Press 2015 282 pages

Hall of mirrors: the Great Depression, the great recession, and the uses-and misuses-of history

Eichengreen, Barry J.
"There have been two global financial crises in the past century: the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession that began in 2008. Both featured loose credit, precarious real estate and stock market bubbles, suspicious banking practices, an inflexible monetary system, and global imbalances; both had devastating economic consequences. In both cases, people in the prosperous decade preceding the crash believed they were living in a post-volatility economy, one that had tamed the cycle of boom and bust. When the global financial system began to totter in 2008, policymakers were able to draw on the lessons of the Great Depression in order to prevent a repeat, but their response was still inadequate to prevent massive economic turmoil on a global scale. In Hall of Mirrors, renowned economist Barry Eichengreen provides the first book-length analysis of the two crises and their aftermaths. Weaving together the narratives of the 30s and recent years, he shows how fear of another Depression greatly informed the policy response after the Lehman Brothers collapse, with both positive and negative results. On the positive side, institutions took the opposite paths that they had during the Depression; government increased spending and cut taxes, and central banks reduced interest rates, flooded the market with liquidity, and coordinated international cooperation. This in large part prevented the bank failures, 25% unemployment rate, and other disasters that characterized the Great Depression. But they all too often hewed too closely and too literally to the lessons of the Depression, seeing it as a mirror rather than focusing on the core differences. Moreover, in their haste to differentiate themselves from their forbears, today's policymakers neglected the constructive but ultimately futile steps that the Federal Reserve took in the 1930s. While the rapidly constructed policies of late 2008 did succeed in staving off catastrophe in the years after, policymakers, institutions, and society as a whole were too eager to get back to normal, even when that meant stunting the recovery via harsh austerity policies and eschewing necessary long-term reforms. The result was a grindingly slow recovery in the US and a devastating recession in Europe. Hall of Mirrors is not only a monumental work of economic history, but an essential exploration of how we avoided making only some of the same mistakes twice--and why our partial remedy makes us highly susceptible to making other, equally important mistakes yet again"--
Oxford University Press 2015 512 pages

Vultures' picnic: a Greg Palast investigation

Palast, Greg
The New York Times bestselling author of Armed Madhouse offers a globetrotting, Sam Spade-style investigation that blows the lid off the oil industry, the banking industry, and the governmental agencies that aren't regulating either. This is the story of the corporate vultures that feed on the weak and ruin our planet in the process-a story that spans the globe and decades. For Vultures' Picnic , investigative journalist Greg Palast has spent his career uncovering the connection between the world of energy (read: oil) and finance. He's built a team that reads like a casting call for a Hollywood thriller-a Swiss multilingual investigator, a punk journalist, and a gonzo cameraman-to reveal how environmental disasters like the Gulf oil spill, the Exxon Valdez, and lesser-known tragedies such as Tatitlek and Torrey Canyon are caused by corporate corruption, failed legislation, and, most interestingly, veiled connections between the financial industry and energy titans. Palast shows how the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, and Central Banks act as puppets for Big Oil. With Palast at the center of an investigation that takes us from the Arctic to Africa to the Amazon, Vultures' Picnic shows how the big powers in the money and oil game slip the bonds of regulation over and over again, and simply destroy the rules that they themselves can't write-and take advantage of nations and everyday people in the process.
Dutton 2011 404 pages

Slow days, fast company: the world, the flesh, and L.A.

Babitz, Eve
"There was a time when no one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. But there was one man who proved elusive, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. She also pulled off a remarkable sleight of hand: Slow Days, Fast Company far exceeds its mash-note premise. It is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind-swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success; socialites on three-day drug binges, evading their East Coast banking husbands; soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow's script will kill them off; Italian femme fatales even more fatal than she is. And she even leaves L.A. sometimes, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn't matter if Babitz ever gets the guy--she seduces us"--
New York Review Books 2016 162 pages

Other People's Money and How The Bankers Use It

Louis D. Brandeis
Louis D. Brandeis was a Supreme Court Justice and a patriot. He wrote "Other People's Money and How Bankers Use It" to warn the American people about the greedy bankers that control the United States and drive us into financial ruin. The book attacked the use of investment funds to promote the consolidation of various industries under the control of a small number of corporations, which Brandeis alleged were working in concert to prevent competition. Brandeis harshly criticized investment bankers who controlled large amounts of money deposited in their banks by middle-class people. The heads of these banks, Brandeis pointed out, routinely sat on the boards of railroad companies and large industrial manufacturers of various products, and routinely directed the resources of their banks to promote the interests of their own companies. These companies, in turn, sought to maintain control of their industries by crushing small businesses and stamping out innovators who developed better products to compete against them. Brandeis supported his contentions with a discussion of the actual dollar amounts--in millions of dollars--controlled by specific banks, industries, and industrialists such as J. P. Morgan, noting that these interests had recently acquired a far larger proportion of American wealth than corporate entities had ever had before. He extensively cited testimony from a Congressional investigation performed by the Pujo Committee, named after Louisiana Representative Arsène Pujo, into self-serving and monopolistic business dealing. Chapter V of the book ("What Publicity Can Do") contains in its opening section a well-known line that has frequently been cited in support of regulation through disclosure obligations: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."
Brian Westland 1914 108 pages

The regulatory response to the financial crisis

Goodhart, C. A. E.
There are already many papers and books on the causes and course of the current financial crisis, but this is the first and, for the moment, only such book to focus on the regulatory response to it. There are two main attributes that a bank needs to remain in business during a period of turmoil, liquidity to enable it to pay its debts when due, and capital, to absorb losses. Both have been insufficient. Charles Goodhart describes what went wrong and what needs to be done, alongside discussions of deposit insurance, credit rating agencies, prompt corrective action, etc. Charles Goodhart is the senior British economist specialising in financial stability issues. As the turmoil began, continued and exploded into crisis, he has kept up a series of commentaries, all since September 2007. These have been brought together, plus some new and additional material, to provide the reader with an overview of what went wrong in the regulatory framework for the financial system, and what now needs to be done to put that right. This will be required reading for financial regulators, practitioners in banking and finance, academics and students of finance, and those just wanting to know what went wrong and what to do now.
Edward Elgar 2010 151 pages