The first real look inside Team Obama—due just before the 2010 elections—mixes political warfare and big business shakeups in equal proportions, and comes from a uniquely informed source. Steve Rattner is not just the man brought in by the president to save the auto industry, he is a former New York Times financial reporter who also earned a place among the top tier of Wall Street’s most informed investment bankers and corporate experts. Now, from his vantage point at the helm of the historic auto-industry intervention, Rattner crafts a tightly plotted narrative of political brinkmanship, corporate mismanagement, and personalities under pressure in a high-stakes clash between Washington and Detroit. He also explains the tough choices he and his team made, working against a ticking clock and facing vocal opposition from free market champions, to keep Chrysler and General Motors in operation. As the economy faced free fall, Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and economic advisor Larry Summers—all revealingly described—faced the possibility of more than a million lost jobs and the astonishing wreckage of GM (a nightmare of huge proportions, caused by terrible management) and Chrysler (a company so close to death it was nearly sacrificed). Rattner’s book—which will take the story up to the fall of 2010—is a gripping account of one of the severest crises of President Obama’s first year in office, with lessons relevant for all managers and executives.

This book will become the bible of regulatory reform. No broad, authoritative treatment of the subject has been available for many years except for Alfred Kahn’s Economics of Regulation (1970). And Stephen Breyer’s book is not merely a utilitarian analysis or a legal discussion of procedures; it employs the widest possible perspective to survey the full implications of government regulation—economic, legal, administrative, political—while addressing the complex problems of administering regulatory agencies. Only a scholar with Judge Breyer’s practical experience as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee could have accomplished this task. He develops an ingenious original system for classifying regulatory activities according to the kinds of problems that have called for, or have seemed to call for, regulation; he then examines how well or poorly various regulatory regimes remedy these market defects. This enables him to organize an enormous amount of material in a coherent way, and to make significant and useful generalizations about real-world problems. Among the regulatory areas he considers are health and safety; environmental pollution, trucking, airlines, natural gas, public utilities, and telecommunications. He further gives attention to related topics such as cost-of-service ratemaking, safety standards, antitrust, and property rights. Clearly this is a book whose time is here—a veritable how-to-do-it book for administration deregulators, legislators, and the judiciary; and because it is comprehensive and superbly organized, with a wealth of highly detailed examples, it is practical for use in law schools and in courses on economics and political science.

Chronicles the Chrysler loan-guarantee negotiations in an examination of the problems of bankruptcy and reorganization

On its Surface, this book is aimed at the topical issue of regulatory reform. But underneath it strives to go beyond the topical, seeking to analyze regulation as a distinct discipline and to help teach it as a separate subject.

"Entrepreneurs have long been drivers of innovation in developed countries. They start companies and create new industries that keep economies strong and prosperous. Today, however, in developing nations such as China, state-controlled economies are building robust industries at stunning speed and siphoning off jobs from the West. How can entrepreneurs function in the face of this challenge? Can they continue to create economic value in a globalized business environment? This book addresses the crucial issue of state planning vs. free enterprise and examines specific problems surrounding entrepreneurship in the global economy through nine case histories of entrepreneurial companies. It also looks at how and why government gets involved in economic growth and how entrepreneurs contribute to economic value. Based on this analysis, the authors argue that companies can succeed, even in controlled economies, by understanding the customs and policies of countries where they do business"--