Even after the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, America isstill beset by the depredations of an oligarchy that is now bigger,more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever.Anchored by six megabanks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase,Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—whichtogether control assets amounting, astonishingly, to more than 60percent of the country’s gross domestic product, these financialinstitutions (now more emphatically “too big to fail”) continue tohold the global economy hostage, threatening yet another financialmeltdown with their excessive risk-taking and toxic “business asusual” practices. How did this come to be—and what is to be done?These are the central concerns of 13 Bankers, a brilliant,historically informed account of our troubled politicaleconomy. In 13 Bankers, Simon Johnson—one of the most prominent andfrequently cited economists in America (former chief economist ofthe International Monetary Fund, Professor of Entre

From Rin Tin Tin to Casablanca to HarryPotter , the Warner Bros. story is the history of Hollywood.Eighty-five years of screen icons, legendary films, andhistory-making achievements are detailed in this comprehensive,photo-filled treasure trove, fully authorized by the studio. No production company has had more legendary films, stars, orinfluence on the course of Hollywood than Warner Bros. Among thesuperstars who worked for the studio are Bette Davis, HumphreyBogart, Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford, Marlon Brando, James Dean,and John Wayne. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrickmade history for the studio, and it has been home to blockbusterfranchises like Superman , Batman , LethalWeapon , and Harry Potter . Produced in conjunction with Warner Bros., this volume is theultimate guide to the greatest movie studio in history. You MustRemember This: The Warner Bros. Story is also the companion toa five part documentary in the PBS American Masters series byauthor Richard Schickel that will

You know what happened during the financial crisis … now it istime to understand why the financial system came so close tofalling over the edge of the abyss and why it could happen again.Wall Street has been saved, but it hasn’t been reformed. What isthe problem? Suzanne McGee provides a penetrating look at the forces thattransformed Wall Street from its traditional role as acapital-generating and economy-boosting engine into a behemothoperating with only its own short-term interests in mind and withreckless disregard for the broader financial system and those whorelied on that system for their well being and prosperity. Primary among these influences was “Goldman Sachs envy”: theself-delusion on the part of Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers,Stanley O’Neil of Merrill Lynch, and other power brokers (egged onby their shareholders) that taking more risk would enable theircompanies to make even more money than Goldman Sachs. Thathubris—and that narrow-minded focus on maximizing their

The Devil's Derivatives charts the untold story of modernfinancial innovation--how investment banks invented new financialproducts, how investors across the world were wooed into buyingthem, how regulators were seduced by the political rewards of easycredit, and how speculators made a killing from the near-meltdownof the financial system. Author Nicholas Dunbar demystifies the revolution that brieflygave finance the same intellectual respectability as theoreticalphysics. He explains how bankers created a secret trillion-dollarmachine that delivered cheap mortgages to the masses and richesbeyond dreams to the financial innovators. Fundamental to this saga is how "the people who hated to lose"were persuaded to accept risk by "the people who loved to win." Whydid people come to trust and respect arcane financial tools? Whowere the bankers competing to assemble the basic components intoincreasingly intricate machines? How did this process achieve itsown unstoppable momentum, ending in collapse,

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

Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball.Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-lifegeneral manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateurbaseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "thesingle most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) butalso what "may be the best book ever written on business" (WeeklyStandard). I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story.The story concerned a small group of undervalued professionalbaseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected asunfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one ofthe most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But theidea for the book came well before I had good reason to writeit-before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really,with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams inbaseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? With thesewords Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, andm

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 acclaimed New York Times bestseller-updated for the secondanniversary of the collapse of Bear Stearns The fall of Bear Stearns in March 2008 set off a wave of globalfinancial turmoil that continues to ripple. How could one of theoldest, most resilient firms on Wall Street go so far astray thatit had to be sold at a fire sale price? How could the streetfighters who ran Bear so aggressively miscalculate socompletely? Expanding with fresh detail from her acclaimed front-page seriesin The Wall Street Journal, Kate Kelly captures every sight, sound,and smell of Bear's three final days. She also shows how Bear's topexecutives descended into civil war as the mortgage crisis began tobrew.

Jim Rogers, whose entertaining accounts of his travels around the world -- studying the markets from Russia to Singapore from the ground up-- has enthralled readers, investors and Wall Street aficionados for two decades in such books as Investment Biker, Adventure Capitalist, Hot Commodities and A Bull In China . In his engaging memoir Street Smarts, Rogers offers pithy commentary from a lifetime of adventure, from his early years growing up a na?ve kid in Demopolis, Alabama, to his fledgling career on Wall Street, to his cofounding the wildly successful Quantum Fund. Rogers always had a restless curiosity to experience and understand the world around him. In Street Smarts, he takes us through the highlights of his life in the financial markets, from his school days at Yale and Oxford -- where despite the fact that he didn’t have enough money to afford the appropriate pair of shoes, he coxed the crew and helped to win the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race as well as the Thames Cup, the first of h

The time was the1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’sPoker. Michael Lewis wasfresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when helanded a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premierinvestment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose fromcallow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firmand cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is theculmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes lookat a unique and turbulent time in American business. From thefrat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to thekiller instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything ona high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is MichaelLewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedentedera of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.