From America's liveliest writer on mathematics, a witty andinsightful book on the stock market and the irrepressibility of ourdreams of wealth. In A Mathematician Plays the Stock Marketbest-selling author John Allen Paulos demonstrates what the toolsof mathematics can tell us about the vagaries of the stock market.Employing his trademark stories, vignettes, paradoxes, and puzzles(and even a film treatment), Paulos addresses every thinkingreader's curiosity about the market: Is it efficient? Is itrational? Is there anything to technical analysis, fundamentalanalysis, and other supposedly time-tested methods of pickingstocks? How can one quantify risk? What are the most common scams?What light do fractals, network theory, and common psychologicalfoibles shed on investor behavior? Are there any approaches toinvesting that truly outperform the major indexes? Can a deeperknowledge of mathematics help beat the odds? All of these questionsare explored with the engaging erudition that made Paulos's AMathematic

The international bestseller on the extent to which personalfreedom has been eroded by government regulations and agencieswhile personal prosperity has been undermined by governmentspending and economic controls. New Foreword by the Authors;Index.

This book was written to offer encouragement and basicinformation to the individual investor. Who knew it would gothrough thirty printings and sell more than one million copies? Asthis latest edition appears eleven years beyond the first, I'mconvinced that the same principles that helped me perform well atthe Fidelity Magellan Fund still apply to investing in stockstoday. It's been a remarkable stretch since One Up on Wall Street hit thebookstores in 1989. I left Magellan in May, 1990, and pundits saidit was a brilliant move. They congratulated me for getting out atthe right time -- just before the collapse of the great bullmarket. For the moment, the pessimists looked smart. The country'smajor banks flirted with insolvency, and a few went belly up. Byearly fall, war was brewing in Iraq. Stocks suffered one of theirworst declines in recent memory. But then the war was won, thebanking system survived, and stocks rebounded. Some rebound! The Dow is up more than fourfold since October, 1990,from the 2,400 lev

Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil,extracting it hadnt seemed worth the effort and risk untilrecently. But with the price of Middle Eastern crude oilskyrocketing and advancing technology making reserves easier totap, the region has become the scene of a competition between majorpowers that recalls the nineteenth-century scramble forcolonization there. But what does this giddy new oil boom meanforAmerica, for the world, for Africans themselves? John Ghazviniantraveled through twelve African countriesfrom Sudan to Congo toAngolatalking to warlords, industry executives, bandits, activists,priests, missionaries, oil-rig workers, scientists, and ordinarypeople whose lives have been transformednot necessarily for thebetterby the riches beneath their feet. The result is a high-octanenarrative that reveals the challenges, obstacles, reasons fordespair, and reasons for hope emerging from the worlds newestenergy hot spot.

Updated for paperback publication, Aftershock is a brilliantreading of the causes of our current economic crisis, with a planfor dealing with its challenging aftermath. When the nation’s economy foundered in 2008, blame was directedalmost universally at Wall Street bankers. But Robert B. Reich, oneof our most experienced and trusted voices on public policy,suggests another reason for the meltdown. Our real problem, heargues, lies in the increasing concentration of wealth in the handsof the richest Americans, while stagnant wages and rising costshave forced the middle class to go deep into debt. Reich’sthoughtful and detailed account of where we are headed over thenext decades—and how we can fix our economic system—is a practical,humane, and much-needed blueprint for restoring America’s economyand rebuilding our society.

For more than thirty years, The Only InvestmentGuide You’ll Ever Need has been a favorite finance guide,earning the allegiance of more than a million readers across theUnited States. Now even more indispensable, this completely revisedand updated edition will show readers how to use money to theirbest advantage in the wake of epochal change on Wall Street, nomatter how much or how little they may have.

In this fully updated edition of Portfolio Management for NewProducts, the authors present a rigorous and practical approach tomanaging a company's product portfolio as you would a financialportfolio-investing for maximum long-term growth. With itsfield-tested, step-by-step framework, the book providescorporations and managers with the strategies they need to assessand realign their current R D operations; determine whichproducts are most worthy of resource allocation; design andimplement a portfolio management process; maximize the value oftheir portfolios; and recognize and solve challenges as they arise.This book will be an essential resource for any company whoseprofitability, and very existence, relies on the products itchooses to develop and the speed with which it brings them to themarket.

THE ESSENTIAL GALBRAITH includes key selections from the mostimportant works of John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the mostdistinguished writers of our time - from THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY, thegroundbreaking book in which he conined the tern "conventionalwisdom," to THE GREAT CRASH, an unsurpassed account of the eventsthat triggered America's worst economic crisis. Galbraith's newintroductions place the works in their historical moment and makeclear their enduring relevance for the new century. THE ESSENTIALGALBRAITH will delight old admirers and introduce one of our mostbeloved writers to a new generation of readers. It is also anindispensable resource for scholars and students of economics,history, and politics, offering unparalleled access to the seminalwritings of an extraordinary thinker.

John Kenneth Galbraith has long been at the center of Americaneconomics, in key positions of responsibility during the New Deal,World War II, and since, guiding policy and debate. His trenchantnew book distills this lifetime of experience in the public andprivate sectors; it is a scathing critique of matters as they standtoday. Sounding the alarm about the increasing gap between realityand "conventional wisdom" -- a phrase he coined -- Galbraith tells,along with much else, how we have reached a point where the privatesector has unprecedented control over the public sector. We havegiven ourselves over to self-serving belief and "contrivednonsense" or, more simply, fraud. This has come at the expense ofthe economy, effective government, and the business world.Particularly noted is the central power of the corporation and theshift in authority from shareholders and board members tomanagement. In an intense exercise of fraud, the pretense ofshareholder power is still maintained, even with the immediatepart