If Rupert Murdoch isn't making headlines, he's busy buying the media outlets that generate the headlines. His News Corp. holdings--from the" New York Post," Fox News, and most recently "The Wall Street Journal," to name just a few--are vast, and his power is unrivaled. So what makes a man like this tick? Michael Wolff gives us the definitive answer in "The Man Who Owns the News."
With unprecedented access to Rupert Murdoch himself, and his associates and family, Wolff chronicles the astonishing growth of Murdoch's $70 billion media kingdom. In intimate detail, he probes the Murdoch family dynasty, from the battles that have threatened to destroy it to the reconciliations that seem to only make it stronger. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews, he offers accounts of the Dow Jones takeover as well as plays for Yahoo! and "Newsday" as they've never been revealed before.
Written in the irresistible stye that only an award-winning columnist for "Vanity Fair" can deliver, "The Man Who Owns the News" offers an exclusive glimpse into a man who wields extraordinary power and influence in the media on a worldwide scale--and whose family is being groomed to carry his legacy into the future.

"From the Hardcover edition."

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now. What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers--right from the belly of the beast.
In "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense," Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald's Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts "gateway to nowhere" housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world's toughest trading floors.
We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation's oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it.
The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America's--and the world's--financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.

"From the Hardcover edition."

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

E Pluribus Kinko's describes how a highly democratic business structure helped Kinko's grow and profit for thirty years, and how the loss of democracy contributed to the company's decline and disappearance. From 1970 to 1999, Kinko's grew from a one-hundred-square-foot copy shop to a two-billion-dollar industry leader with over 1,000 branches worldwide, with thousands of engaged and participative citizen-coworkers. The foundations of our democracy were The Philosophy, which was like a constitution that clearly articulated stakeholder rights and expectations, our Partnership Ethos, which used profit sharing to spread the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship throughout the organization, and our habit of Pot-Stirring, which produced the frequent revolutions Thomas Jefferson believed were necessary in a healthy democracy. It was very messy - and very profitable.

2009 Reprint of the original 1949 edition. Paperback. 149pp. William Delbert Gann (6 June, 1878 - 14 June, 1955) also known as W. D. Gann, was a finance trader who developed the technical analysis tool known as Gann angles. Gann market forecasting methods are based on geometry, astrology, and ancient mathematics. Opinions are sharply divided on the value and relevance of his work. Gann wrote a number of books on trading, the classic text being 45 Years in Wall Street. Gann has developed a very faithful group of followers and adherents.

On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation's fifth-largest investment bank: "In my book, they are insolvent."
This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.
Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.
How this happened - and why - is the subject of William D. Cohan's superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.
Cohan's minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt.
But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates" why" the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company's fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company's leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear's huge positions in mortgage-backed securities.
The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns' miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm's demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company).
Cohan's explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR'S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.
Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.

This book explores a century of business development of The South African Life Assurance Company, from a specific local focus to a national conglomerate expanding into global insurance markets. Established as a strategic vehicle to address Afrikaner economic marginalization and abject poverty at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sanlam has displayed both path dependence and a dynamic adaptability to complex changing contexts to become a global player. The strategic convergence of economic empowerment through the mobilization of savings into insurance products, as well as Afrikaner nationalism, assisted this growth. Sanlam has played an a-typical role in the economic empowerment of an ethnic entity through extensive investments into the industrializing South African economy. This strategic diversion created operational limitations that were only resolved early in the twenty-first century. As globalization, financial deregulation, and weakened Afrikaner political and social hegemony manifested, strategic change management relied on the path dependence of empowerment strategies to address new markets with similar needs to those of the early stakeholder market of 1918. The former mutual life office demutualized operations to become a diversified financial services group of companies operating across almost the entire African continent, as well as in India, Malaysia, and the UK. This volume presents a business history of strategic management of an insurance enterprise, and its transformation from a defined cultural context into an international empowerment strategy through innovation on all levels of business operation and organization. This book is an Open Access publication, available online under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

In this survey of international economic thought, Michael Hudson rewrites the history of trade, development and debt theorizing. He shows that mainstream free-trade surveys are censorial in excluding the protectionist logic that has guided the trade policy of Europe and the United States, especially by leaving out discussion of the transfer problem and payment of international debts. He points out that most economists throughout history have focused as much on war financing as on trade and development. Free-trade ideology and IMF-style financial austerity under today's rules, rather than benefiting all parties and maximizing welfare, leave "client" nations severely indebted. By excluding dynamics that used to be central to trade theory such as emigration and technology transfer, today's global production and financial policies tend to concentrate economic and political power in the hands of dominant nations. Prof. Michael Hudson (Economics Department, University of Missouri, Kansas City) is a frequent contributor to The Financial Times, Counterpunch, and Global Research.

Born in the wake of World War II, RAND quickly became the creator of America's anti-Soviet nuclear strategy. A magnet for the best and the brightest, its ranks included Cold War luminaries such as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation and unquestionably created Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex." In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated actors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND's greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led transformation of our social and economic system but also unleashed a resurgence of precisely the forces whose existence it denied -- religion, patriotism, tribalism.
With Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abella has rewritten the history of America's last half century and cast a new light on our problematic present.

A narrative history of one of IBM's most illustrious and secretive organizations -- IBM's Federal Systems Division -- that protected America, helped NASA put men on the moon, and spawned such technology as today's Internet, ATM transactions, ebay operations and online banking. Included in the book are space-age computer and weapons systems details never before shown to the public. Federal Systems developed such things as a dispatch system for New York City's police force, international banking systems in the UK, Japan and other countries, and a special operations system for the New York Stock Exchange. This is the first book ever written about this semi-clandestine organization operating under the IBM umbrella that supported NASA's projects from Project Mercury to Space Shuttles and Skylab. Federal Systems was also a major part of the development of modern weapons technology. Each chapter of the book focuses on one aspect of Federal Systems' 50-year history of service to the government. The organization changed hands during an IBM selloff in the early 1990s to Loral Corporation, which in turn sold it to Lockheed Martin in 1996.

"A comprehensive history of a major American mining company"

For nearly a century, the Bunker Hill Company of Idaho was a leading U.S. mining and smelting corporation that played a key role in the nation's industrial development. At the same time, it was the catalyst for unprecedented labor strife and environmental desecration. In this richly detailed history, Katherine G. Aiken traces Bunker Hill's evolution from the mine's discovery in 1885 to the company's closure in 1981.

Throughout the company's long history, management's relentless pursuit of profit and the labor-management conflicts that often resulted were nothing short of legendary. Often a tale of strife, Bunker Hill's history is at the same time a story of cooperation, dedication, and ingenuity. People literally gave their lives for the production of lead, zinc, and silver. In the end, however, environmental destruction, aging facilities, and mineral shortages, as well as foreign competition, crippled the company's economic viability. Aiken offers an in-depth profile that illustrates major trends in American corporate culture.

From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, a fascinating look at the crossroads of kin and coin David S. Landes has earned a reputation as a brilliant writer and iconoclast among economic historians. In his latest acclaimed work, he takes a revealing look at the quality that distinguishes a third of today's Fortune 500 companies: family ownership. From the banking fortunes of Rothschild and Morgan to the automobile empires of Ford and Toyota, Landes explores thirteen different dynasties, revealing what lay behind their successes-and how extravagance, bad behavior, and poor enterprise brought some of them to their knees. A colorful history that is full of surprising conclusions, Dynasties is an engrossing mix of ambition, eccentricity, and wealth.

Hidden Under the Corporate Ladder gives a brutally honest look inside a scandalous Fortune 100 company. The story takes place in Dallas, Texas, in the mid 1990s, as told firsthand by an employee hired to work for a corporation's branch location to figure out why its operation isn't productive. Jackie expects misconduct; however, she finds more than she bargained for. When one of the perpetrators uncovers her mission and confides in her that he is in a Witness Protection Program with past Mob ties, he threatens to "do away" with her if she reports any wrongdoing-just as he did with the last person who ratted on him. The story is compelling as the reader is riveted to each chapter's no-holds-barred description of scandal, deception, sexual misconduct, misappropriation of funds, discrimination, and even death. Although the book is driven by scandal that is dark, twisted, or just plain vulgar, it is also filled with life's sometimes sad and disappointing situations as well as love and devotion. Most of all, it is filled with life itself. Destined to have a profound effect, the story is always powerful and keeps the reader turning the page as it details and describes misuse of management in unimaginable and incomprehensible ways.

Violet Crown Award, Writers League of Texas, 2007 Citation, San Antonio Conservation Society, 2009 Scarred by the deaths of his mother and sisters and the failure of his father's business, a young man dreamed of making enough money to retire early and retreat into the secure world that his childhood tragedies had torn from him. But Harry Luby refused to be a robber baron. Turning totally against the tide of avaricious capitalism, he determined to make a fortune by doing good. Starting with that unlikely, even naive, ambition in 1911, Harry Luby founded a cafeteria empire that by the 1980s had revenues second only to McDonald's. So successfully did Luby and his heirs satisfy the tastes of America that Luby's became the country's largest cafeteria chain, creating more millionaires per capita among its employees than any other corporation of its size. Even more surprising, the company stayed true to Harry Luby's vision for eight decades, making money by treating its customers and employees exceptionally well. Written with the sweep and drama of a novel, House of Plenty tells the engrossing story of Luby's founding and phenomenal growth, its long run as America's favorite family restaurant during the post-World War II decades, its financial failure during the greed-driven 1990s when non-family leadership jettisoned the company's proven business model, and its recent struggle back to solvency. Carol Dawson and Carol Johnston draw on insider stories and company records to recapture the forces that propelled the company to its greatest heights, including its unprecedented practices of allowing store managers to keep 40 percent of net profits and issuing stock to all employees, which allowed thousands of Luby's workers to achieve the American dream of honestly earned prosperity. The authors also plumb the depths of the Luby's drama, including a hushed-up theft that split the family for decades; the 1991 mass shooting at the Killeen Luby's, which splattered the company's good name across headlines nationwide; and the rapacious over-expansion that more than doubled the company's size in nine years (1987-1996), pushed it into bankruptcy, and drove president and CEO John Edward Curtis Jr. to violent suicide. Disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's adage that "there are no second acts in American lives," House of Plenty tells the epic story of an iconic American institution that has risen, fallen, and found redemption-with no curtain call in sight.

During Wall Street's crime wave in the 1980s, no single brokerage firm, banker or trader destroyed the financial security of more people than Prudential Bache Securities. The losses from all the celebrated insider scandals add up to a fraction of the damage caused by The Rock-- the costliest securities fraud ever. Why did the nation's third largest brokerage firm, whose very name conveyed rock-solid respectability, launch such a vicious fraud? "Serpent on the Rock" has the answer. Using hundreds of exclusive sources and thousands of internal, confidential records, it reveals the shocking true story behind the wrongdoing, the cover-up, and the investigations of the real-life thriller that shook the nation and the world.

"Corporate Survival: The Critical Importance of Sustainability Risk Management" thoroughly examines the rising sustainability risks that affect thriving businesses, the environment, various societies, people in foreign lands, and our children.

Author Dan Anderson, a professor of risk management and insurance, has been observing sustainability risk management issues for his entire career. In "Corporate Survival" he presents guidelines for various professionals in the risk management and insurance industries. In his view, corporations need to establish sound sustainability risk management systems in order to survive potentially major financial and professional damages. These damages can arise from liability suits, customer boycotts, shareholder actions, new regulations, and international pressures.

Anderson provides well-timed direction for establishing risk management systems, as well as numerous examples of how companies successfully employ sustainability risk management strategies. He also demonstrates the advantages of following his advice for corporate survival, including reducing sustainability risk costs, improving competitive advantage, attracting both reliable customers and productive employees, augmenting the firm's reputation and community image, and increasing profits.

"Corporate Survival" will help all corporations and those in the fields of risk management and insurance improve business systems while enhancing environmental quality and social justice conditions.