In the tradition of Mark Kurlanskyas "Cod" and "Salt," this endlessly revealing book reminds us that the fiber we think of as ordinary is the worldas most powerful cash crop, and that it has shaped the destiny of nations. Ranging from its domestication 5,500 years ago to its influence in creating Calvin Kleinas empire and the Gap, Stephen Yafaas "Cotton" gives us an intimate look at the plant that fooled Columbus into thinking head reached India, that helped start the Industrial Revolution as well as the American Civil War, and that made at least one bugathe boll weevilaworld famous. A sweeping chronicle of ingenuity, greed, conflict, and opportunism, "Cotton" offers aa barrage of fascinating informationa ("Los Angeles Times").

Since 2010 Greece has been experiencing the longest period of austerity and economic downturn in its recent history. Economic changes may be happening more rapidly and be more visible than the cultural effects of the crisis which are likely to take longer to become visible, however in recent times, both at home and abroad, the Greek arts scene has been discussed mainly in terms of the crisis. While there is no shortage of accounts of Greece's economic crisis by financial and political analysts, the cultural impact of austerity has yet to be properly addressed. This book analyses hitherto uncharted cultural aspects of the Greek economic crisis by exploring the connections between austerity and culture. Covering literary, artistic and visual representations of the crisis, it includes a range of chapters focusing on different aspects of the cultural politics of austerity such as the uses of history and archaeology, the brain drain and the Greek diaspora, Greek cinema, museums, music festivals, street art and literature as well as manifestations of how the crisis has led Greeks to rethink or question cultural discourses and conceptions of identity.

Photographer and master printer Brian Young first arrived in New York City in 1984. He witnessed all the well-known ills of '70s and early '80s New York, finding the city slowly, haltingly recovering from an economic depression. Industry and manufacturing jobs had left the city, and the population continued to drain out to the suburbs. The "crack epidemic" was on the front pages and on the streets. Abandoned shells of burnt-out cars littered the roads and muggings were simply a fact of daily life. Young found his camera increasingly drawn to the subway system--one of the great social levelers of life in New York City and, increasingly, the canvas for an explosive profusion of graffiti. Brian Young: The Train NYC 1984 collects the photographer's quiet, black-and-white shots of the subway from 1984, bringing a vanished New York evocatively back to life.

In contrast to the USA, Europe has struggled to return to the growth path it was on prior to the financial crisis of 2007-11. Not only has the recovery been slow, it has also been variable with Europe's core countries recovering more quickly than those on the periphery. It is widely believed that the best way to address this slow recovery is through structural reform programmes whereby changes in government policy, regulatory frameworks, investment incentives and labour markets are used to encourage more efficient markets and higher economic growth. This book is the first to provide a critical assessment of these reforms, with a new theoretical framework, new data and new empirical methodologies. It includes several case studies of countries such as Greece, Portugal and France that introduced significant reforms, revealing that such programmes have very divergent, and not always positive, effects on economic growth, employment and income inequality.

The crisis of global capitalism that has unfolded since 2008 is more than an economic crisis. It is structural and multidimensional. The sequence of events that have taken place in its aftermath show that we are entering a world that is very different from the social and economic conditions that characterized the rise of global, informational capitalism in the preceding three decades. The policies and strategies that were intended to manage the crisis-with mixed results depending on the country-may usher in a distinctly different economic and institutional system, as the New Deal, the construction of the European Welfare State, and the Bretton Woods global financial architecture all gave rise to a new form of capitalism in the aftermath of the 1930s Depression, and World War II. This volume examines the cultures and institutions at the root of the crisis, as well as the conflicts and debates that may lead to a new social landscape, including the rise of alternative economic cultures in the social movements that have sprung up around the world. This collection of essays presents the results of a shared project of reflection by a group of international sociologists and social scientists, led by Manuel Castells. They conclude that to address life beyond the crisis, we need nothing less than a complete transformation of the mind-set that led to bankruptcy and despair, and to economies and societies based on an unsustainable model of speculative finance and political irresponsibility.

Risk management solutions for today's high-speed investing environment Real-Time Risk is the first book to show regular, institutional, and quantitative investors how to navigate intraday threats and stay on-course. The FinTech revolution has brought massive changes to the way investing is done. Trading happens in microsecond time frames, and while risks are emerging faster and in greater volume than ever before, traditional risk management approaches are too slow to be relevant. This book describes market microstructure and modern risks, and presents a new way of thinking about risk management in today's high-speed world. Accessible, straightforward explanations shed light on little-understood topics, and expert guidance helps investors protect themselves from new threats. The discussion dissects FinTech innovation to highlight the ongoing disruption, and to establish a toolkit of approaches for analyzing flash crashes, aggressive high frequency trading, and other specific aspects of the market. Today's investors face an environment in which computers and infrastructure merge, regulations allow dozens of exchanges to coexist, and globalized business facilitates round-the-clock deals. This book shows you how to navigate today's investing environment safely and profitably, with the latest in risk-management thinking. * Discover risk management that works within micro-second trading * Understand the nature and impact of real-time risk, and how to protect yourself * Learn why flash crashes happen, and how to mitigate damage in advance * Examine the FinTech disruption to established business models and practices When technology collided with investing, the boom created stratospheric amounts of data that allows us to plumb untapped depths and discover solutions that were unimaginable 20 years ago. Real-Time Risk describes these solutions, and provides practical guidance for today's savvy investor.

This myth shattering book reveals the methods Nouriel Roubini used to foretell the current crisis before other economists saw it coming and shows how those methods can help us make sense of the present and prepare for the future.
Renowned economist Nouriel Roubini electrified his profession and the larger financial community by predicting the current crisis well in advance of anyone else. Unlike most in his profession who treat economic disasters as freakish once-in?a-lifetime events without clear cause, Roubini, after decades of careful research around the world, realized that they were both probable and predictable. Armed with an unconventional blend of historical analysis and global economics, Roubini has forced politicians, policy makers, investors, and market watchers to face a long-neglected truth: financial systems are inherently fragile and prone to collapse.
Drawing on the parallels from many countries and centuries, Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, a professor of economic history and a "New York Times Magazine" writer, show that financial cataclysms are as old and as ubiquitous as capitalism itself. The last two decades alone have witnessed comparable crises in countries as diverse as Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, Pakistan, and Argentina. All of these crises-not to mention the more sweeping cataclysms such as the Great Depression-have much in common with the current downturn. Bringing lessons of earlier episodes to bear on our present predicament, Roubini and Mihm show how we can recognize and grapple with the inherent instability of the global financial system, understand its pressure points, learn from previous episodes of "irrational exuberance," pinpoint the course of global contagion, and plan for our immediate future. Perhaps most important, the authors-considering theories, statistics, and mathematical models with the skepticism that recent history warrants- explain how the world's economy can get out of the mess we're in, and stay out.
In Roubini's shadow, economists and investors are increasingly realizing that they can no longer afford to consider crises the black swans of financial history. A vital and timeless book, "Crisis Economics" proves calamities to be not only predictable but also preventable and, with the right medicine, curable.

How did we get to where we are? John Cassidy shows that the roots of our most recent financial failure lie not with individuals, but with an idea - the idea that markets are inherently rational. He gives us the big picture behind the financial headlines, tracing the rise and fall of free market ideology from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. Full of wit, sense and, above all, a deeper understanding, How Markets Fail argues for the end of 'utopian' economics, and the beginning of a pragmatic, reality-based way of thinking.

On the 25th January 2015 the Greek people voted in an election of historic importance-not just for Greece but potentially all of Europe. The radical party Syriza was elected and austerity and the neoliberal agenda is being challenged. Suddenly it seems as if there is an alternative. But what? The Eurozone is in a deep and prolonged crisis. It is now clear that monetary union is a historic failure, beyond repair-and certainly not in the interests of Europe's working people. Building on the economic analysis of two of Europe's leading thinkers, Heiner Flassbeck and Costas Lapavitsas (a candidate standing for election on Syriza's list), Against the Troika is the first book to propose a strategic left-wing plan for how peripheral countries could exit the euro. With a change in government in Greece, and looming political transformations in countries such as Spain, this major intervention lays out a radical, anti-capitalist programme at a critical juncture for Europe. The final three chapters offer a detailed postmortem of the Greek catastrophe, explain what can be learned from it-and provide a possible alternative. Against the Troika is a practical blueprint for real change in a continent wracked by crisis and austerity.

Since 2010 Greece's social and economic conditions have been irreversibly transformed, as a result of austerity measures imposed by the European troika and successive Greek governments. These stringent restructuring programmes were intended to make it possible for Greece to avoid default and improve its debt position, and to reconfigure its economy to escape forever the burden of past structural deficiencies. Eight years later, none of these targets have been met. If the programmes were doomed to fail from the start, as many claim, what were the real objectives of such devastating austerity? Pavlos Roufos answers this key question by setting the story in its historical context. Analysing the creation of the Eurozone, its `glorious' years, and today's threat to its existence, he locates the development and management of the Greek crisis in terms of both the particularities of Greek society and economy and the overall architecture of the monetary union. He also illuminates the social movements that emerged in Greece in response to the crisis, focusing on what both the crisis managers and many of their critics presented as a given: that a happy future is a thing of the past.

In August of 2007, the debt-fuelled bubble that had created an illusion of prosperity across the western world burst, leading to an international financial crisis of unprecedented scale and duration. Michael Nevin analyses the causes of the crisis in clear and understandable terms, and explains why successive attempts to tackle it by bank bailouts, quantitative easing and other piecemeal responses have failed. He predicts that the Euro cannot survive in its present form, while dollar instability and the inexorable rise in sovereign debt will continue to hamper economic growth worldwide. Unless a radically different approach is taken, an increasingly virulent economic nationalism could threaten the living standards of all of us and lead to a lost generation of young people with no prospect of work. This book sets out an alternative strategy for sustained recovery,including the orderly dismantling of the Euro, the end of the dollar's privileged status as an international reserve currency, and the restoration of sound money, founded on a new international currency that cannot be manipulated by bankers or politicians - The Golden Guinea. Michael Nevin's analysis of the credit crisis draws on his extensive experience of investment banking, project finance and economics, to explain what has gone wrong and why, what needs to be done now and what steps need to be taken to ensure it ever happens again.

"The best book yet about the financial crises that have swept the world in recent years. Desai offers a comprehensive, critical survey that will unsettle ideologues right and left. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the global economy."--Paul Krugman, Princeton University

"Padma Desai attacks head-on fundamental questions about the compatibility of small emerging country economies with inherently volatile global financial markets--questions that have too often been ignored or glossed over in the policy debate."--Paul Volcker, Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve

"Padma Desai's thorough and insightful analysis of the financial crises that have devastated many emerging market economies over the past several years is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the downside of the global financial system. Her forceful policy recommendations deserve to be considered at the highest level."--George Soros

"Padma Desai's stimulating and path-breaking comparative analysis of the pace and sequencing of financial liberalization processes has profound implications for the planning of national policies and the structure of international financial cooperation. The book makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of these complex issues, and to the designing of sensible proposals for rebuilding the international financial architecture."--Manmohan Singh, Former Finance Minister of India

"Professor Padma Desai has long stood as a voice for caution, pragmatism, and common sense against those who would impose untested economic models on economies in transition. In this book, she turns her attention to the central asymmetry of the world financial system: rich countries retain the privilege of managing their economies, while poor countries, having liberalized their financial markets prematurely, remain hostage to volatile capital flows, and when the inevitable crisis strikes, have to succumb to ill-fitting arrangements designed for them by the International Monetary Fund. This is a book that should be read widely."--Dani Rodrik, Harvard University

"This fascinating book presents an impressive epic on the financial crises that have afflicted a large portion of the world. While comparing alternative views for the remedy, it presents truly provocative criticisms on the IMF's former policy of trying to sustain free capital mobility for countries facing crisis. Based on the most informed knowledge of this subject but presented in a nontechnical form, with lucid descriptions of familiar crises, it will be appreciated by students and scholars as well as a broader intellectual audience."--Koichi Hamada, President, Economic and Social Research Institute, Cabinet Office of the Japanese Government

Beneath Venezuelan soil lies an ocean of crude-the world's largest reserves-an oil patch that shaped the nature of the global energy business. Unfortunately, a dysfunctional anti-American, leftist government controls this vast resource and has used its wealth to foster voter support, ultimately wreaking economic havoc. Crude Nation reveals the ways in which this mismanagement has led to Venezuela's economic ruin and turned the country into a cautionary tale for the world. Raul Gallegos, a former Caracas-based oil correspondent, paints a picture both vivid and analytical of the country's economic decline, the government's foolhardy economic policies, and the wrecked lives of Venezuelans. Without transparency, the Venezuelan government uses oil money to subsidize life for its citizens in myriad unsustainable ways, while regulating nearly every aspect of day-to-day existence in Venezuela. This has created a paradox in which citizens can fill up the tanks of their SUVs for less than one American dollar while simultaneously enduring nationwide shortages of staples such as milk, sugar, and toilet paper. Gallegos's insightful analysis shows how mismanagement has ruined Venezuela again and again over the past century and lays out how Venezuelans can begin to fix their country, a nation that can play an important role in the global energy industry.

This is a book that none of us can afford to ignore – an agenda-setting, campaigning investigation that shows how global finance works for the few and not the many.

** A Financial Times Book of the Year **

‘Essential reading’ YANIS VAROUFAKIS

We need finance – but when finance grows too big it becomes a curse.

The City of London is the single biggest drain on our resources, sucking talent out of every sphere, siphoning wealth and hoovering up government time. Yet to be ‘competitive’, we’re told we must turn a blind eye to money laundering and appease big business with tax cuts.

Tracing the curse back through economic history, Nicholas Shaxson uncovers how we got to this point. Moving from offshore tax havens to the bizarre industry of wealth management, he tells the explosive story of how finance established a stranglehold on society – and reveals how we can begin to break free.

The ongoing Greek crisis has been the subject of immense scholarly interest and debate since it erupted in 2009. Vast amounts of research from a number of disciplines have attempted to explain the causes of the crisis, with a great variety of approaches adopted in doing so. Unfortunately, there has been little effort to develop a comprehensive cross-disciplinary framework for understanding how the crisis came about. This study has bridged the divide by developing such a cross-disciplinary conceptual model for the causes of the Greek crisis. The literature review process revealed that studies from the political science, public administration, economics, financial economics and monetary economics disciplines contained a range of explanations for the occurrence of the Greek crisis. Qualitative content analysis techniques were used to synthesise the findings from these five fields into a cross-disciplinary conceptual model. By integrating the findings from the five disciplines above, a number of new insights were generated. Firstly, it was found that the crisis manifested primarily as a collapse of confidence in the ability of the Greek state to pay its debts. Secondly, that high sovereign debt levels, internal political opposition to reform, a deterioration of competitiveness of the Greek economy, the existence of destructive political institutions and the possibility of an exit from the European Monetary Union acted as key causes (amongst others) for the collapse of confidence in Greek sovereign bonds. Finally, a number of implications for policy makers in Greece and elsewhere were found and elaborated upon.

Over the past thirty years, the issue of economic inequality has emerged from the backwaters of economics to claim center stage in the political discourse of America and beyond a change prompted by a troubling fact: numerous measures of income inequality, especially in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century, have risen sharply in recent years. Even so, many people remain confused about what, exactly, politicians and media persons mean when they discuss inequality. What does "economic inequality " mean? How is it measured? Why should we care? Why did inequality rise in the United States? Is rising inequality an inevitable feature of capitalism? What should we do about it? Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know takes up these questions and more in plain and clear language, bringing to life one of the great economic and political debates of our age. Inequality expert James K. Galbraith has compiled the latest economic research on inequality and explains his findings in a way that everyone can understand. He offers a comprehensive introduction to the study of economic inequality, including its philosophical and theoretical origins, the variety of concepts in wide use, empirical measures and their advantages and disadvantages, competing modern theories of the causes and effects of rising inequality in the United States and worldwide, and a range of policy measures. This latest addition to the popular What Everyone Needs to Know series from Oxford University Press will tell you everything you need to know to make informed opinions on this significant issue.

In August 2007, asset-backed securities (ABS), particularly those backed by subprime mortgages, suddenly became illiquid and fell sharply in value as an unprecedented housing boom turned into a housing bust. Losses on the many ABS held by financial firms depleted their capital. Uncertainty about future losses on illiquid and complex assets led to firms having reduced access to private liquidity, sometimes catastrophically. In September 2008, the financial crisis reached panic proportions, with some large financial firms failing or having the government step in to prevent their failure. Initially, the government approach was largely ad hoc, addressing the problems at individual institutions on a case-by-case basis. The panic in September 2008 convinced policy makers that a system-wide approach was needed, and Congress created the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in October 2008. In addition to TARP, the Treasury, Federal Reserve (Fed) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) implemented broad lending and guarantee programs. The primary goal of the various interventions was to end the financial panic and restore normalcy to financial markets, rather than to make a profit for taxpayers. This book presents how much the programs ultimately cost (or benefited) the taxpayers based on straightforward cash accounting as reported by the various agencies. This book describes the various actions by the Federal Reserve to stabilise the financial markets and how those actions are likely to affect the federal budget in coming years. The book also presents estimates of the risk-adjusted (or fair-value) subsidies that the Federal Reserve provided to financial institutions through its emergency programs.

In The Shifts and the Shocks, Martin Wolf - one of the world's most influential economic commentators and author of Why Globalization Works - presents his controversial and highly original analysis of the economic course of the last seven years There have been many books that have sought to explain the causes and courses of the financial and economic crisis which began in 2007-8. The Shifts and the Shocks is not another detailed history of the crisis, but the most persuasive and complete account yet published of what the crisis should teach us us about modern economies and economics. The book identifies the origin of the crisis in the complex interaction between globalization, hugely destabilizing global imbalances and our dangerously fragile financial system. In the eurozone, these sources of instability were multiplied by the tragically defective architecture of the monetary union. It also shows how much of the orthodoxy that shaped monetary and financial policy before the crisis occurred was complacent and wrong. In doing so, it mercilessly reveals the failures of the financial, political and intellectual elites who ran the system. The book also examines what has been done to reform the financial and monetary systems since the worst of the crisis passed. 'Are we now on a sustainable course?' Wolf asks. 'The answer is no.' He explains with great clarity why 'further crises seem certain' and why the management of the eurozone in particular 'guarantees a huge political crisis at some point in the future.' Wolf provides far more ambitious and comprehensive plans for reform than any currently being implemented. Written with all the intellectual command and trenchant judgement that have made Martin Wolf one of the world's most influential economic commentators, The Shifts and the Shocks matches impressive analysis with no-holds-barred criticism and persuasive prescription for a more stable future. It is a book no-one with an interest in global affairs will want to neglect. "We have been inundated with books about the 'financial' aspects of the crisis. There have also been many books about specific institutions or memoirs by retired policy-makers. We need something different. There are two dimensions of the crisis that have received surprisingly little treatment. One is the link between developments in the macro-economy and the behaviour of the financial sector. The other is the global dimension of the crisis. Both these lie at the heart of Martin Wolf's analysis of the causes of the crisis and of his proposals to reduce the risk of another crisis. For these two reasons this is an important book that will be influential. Most important of all, it is in my view the right analysis and remedy" Mervyn King "To think straight about the causes and solutions of the financial crisis we must reject orthodox assumptions that more finance and global financial integration are limitlessly beneficial. The Shifts and the Shocks does just that, providing an intellectually sparkling and vital account of why the crisis occurred, and of the radical reforms needed if we are to avoid a future repeat" Adair Turner "Martin Wolf is unsurpassed in the world of economic journalists. His superb book may be the best of all those spawned by the Great Recession. It is analytical and rigorous without ever succumbing to fatalism or complacency" Lawrence Summers

The contemporary economic crisis is one of the biggest in the global economy and has been forcefully applied to the real economy, revolting in a deep recession. Globalisation has in turn contributed to the faster transmission of the problem from country to country. This crisis disproportionally affects countries with small and medium development but also the medium and low social layers and small and medium entrepreneurship within countries. The stability of employment has fallen apart. The consequences of the economic crisis has brought out systemic problems and distortions in different sectors of productive activity; local communities and prefectures are examples of places in which, experience these consequences. The power of brands of significant value, and businesses at the global level, have also collapsed. The economic crisis also creates huge problems for the tourism sector which mainly consists of small and medium enterprises in southern European countries. This resulted in the tourist agents becoming unable to accommodate their customers' needs. This monograph consists of a useful tool for other and future researchers but also for the local communities of various regions in order to be able to design a real exit from the crisis.

Between January 2008 and December 2011, a period of economic downturn in the United States, 414 insured U.S. banks failed. Of these, 85 percent or 353 had less than $1 billion in assets. These small banks often specialise in small business lending and are associated with local community development and philanthropy. These small bank failures have raised questions about the contributing factors in the states with the most failures, including the possible role of local market conditions and the application of fair value accounting under U.S accounting standards. This book discusses the factors that contributed to the bank failures in states with the most failed institutions between 2008 and 2011 and what role, if any, fair value accounting played in these failures; the use of shared loss agreements in resolving troubled banks; and the effect of recent bank failures on local communities.

The 2007-2009 recession was long and deep, and according to several indicators was the most severe economic contraction since the 1930s (but still much less severe than the Great Depression). The slowdown of economic activity was moderate through the first half of 2008, but at that point the weakening economy was overtaken by a major financial crisis that would exacerbate the economic weakness and accelerate the decline. Economic recovery began in mid-2009. Real gross domestic product (GDP) has been on a positive track since then, although the pace has been uneven and slowed significantly in 2011. The stock market has recovered from its lows, and employment has increased moderately. On the other hand, significant economic weakness remains evident, particularly in the balance sheet of households, the labour market, and the housing sector. This book provides select research and analyses pertaining to the economic recovery and sustaining U.S. economic growth in a post-crisis economy.

This is a darkly humorous guide to the three great crises plaguing today's world: environmental degradation, social conflict in the age of austerity and financial instability. Rob Larson holds mainstream economic theory up against the grim reality of a planet in meltdown. He looks at scientists' conclusions about climate change, the business world's opinions about its own power, and reveals the fingerprints of finance on American elections. Through ascerbic analysis, Bleakonomics unveils a world of extreme inequality, confusion and insanity.

In recent years, a financial crisis not encountered for almost half a century broke out globally, deeply affecting the economy of China. This book covers topics in relation to the financial crisis in China, such as how the financial crisis intensifies discussion on "the China Model", the comprehensive interpretation on the scale, structure and effects of the 4 trillion economic stimulus plan and the development of rural finance in China under circumstances of world-wide financial upheaval.

This book explores the world economic crisis that began in 2008, and which has had major consequences for U.S. agriculture. The weakening of global demand because of emerging recessions and declining economic growth results in reduced export demand and lower agricultural commodity prices, compared with those in 2008. These, in turn, reduce U.S. farm income and place downward pressure on farm real estate values. So far, the overall impact on U.S. agriculture is not as severe as on the broader U.S. economy because the record-high agricultural exports, prices, and farm income in 2007 and 2008 put U.S. farmers on solid financial ground.