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Books > History > History of specific subjects > History of specific institutions
The events of 9/11 presented the financial industry with the
greatest operational crisis in its history. Key officials were
killed; others could not be located. Primary and backup sites were
unavailable or inadequate. Massive amounts of critical data were
lost, and there was a crushing inability to communicate, locate or
verify information. It was not known for a time which firms could
participate in the markets and to what degree, nor was it clear to
what extent certain markets had been damaged and when they should
reopen. Nor could the human impact of the 9/11 events be divorced
from the business issues. Those grappling to restore the markets
had to cope with their own feelings of anxiety, shock and loss, and
to deal with a uniquely horrific blend of personal and professional
difficulties. This book tells of the regeneration of the U.S.
markets, day by day, immediately following 9/11, with a focus on
the U.S. Government securities market. The bottom line is that 9/11
brought the most important financial market in the world - the one
looked to by investors globally for safety in times of trouble - to
the brink of paralysis. The crisis was ultimately resolved through
the willpower and wisdom of groups of disparate individuals,
accompanied by an unprecedented climate of cooperation among fierce
competitors that embodied the American spirit at its finest.
Winner, Alberta Historical Resources Foundation Heritage Award,
Canadian Museums Association Outstanding Achievement in
Publications, and Redgees Legacy AwardShortlisted, Robert Kroetsch
City of Edmonton Book PrizeRemember pearl-snap Western shirts,
Scrubbies jeans, and denim jackets, George W. Groovy, Cowboy Kings,
Red Straps? Take a trip down memory lane and relive the GWG story!
Remember the slogans "Anything Goes," "They wear longer, because
they're made stronger," and Wayne Gretzky's declaration that "I
grew up in GWGs"? GWGs have been a cultural icon in Canada since
the company's founding in 1911. Here, at long last, is the
complete, lushly illustrated history of the Great Western Garment
Company, whose products were staples for some generations and
defined cool for others. This lavish book includes archival
photographs, advertisements, product photos, and insights on the
long history of this iconic Canadian company. Begun in Edmonton,
GWG not only manufactured jeans, but also helped immigrant women
support their families, becoming a model of management and labour
working collaboratively. GWG eventually became the largest workwear
manufacturing company in Canada, providing different styles of work
and leisure clothing for men, women, and children, and for the
military during both world wars. Although Levis acquired the
company during the 1960s and '70s and closed the last factories in
2004, the GWG brand remains a part of pop culture. It is firmly
fixed in the Canadian psyche and still holds a place in Canadian
hearts.
"Magnificently and heartbreakingly told. . . . Hudson] shows
vividly that really filthy, face-to-face fraud and hard-sell
bullying . . . brought the economy down around our ears."--"The
Boston Globe"
In this page-turning, true-crime expose, award-winning reporter
Michael W. Hudson reveals the story of the rise and fall of the
biggest subprime lender and Wall Street's biggest patron of
subprime: Ameriquest and Lehman Brothers. They did more than any
other institutions to produce the biggest financial scandal in
American history.
It's a tale populated by a remarkable cast of characters: a
shadowy billionaire who created the subprime industry out of the
ashes of the 1980s S&L scandal; insatiable Wall Street
executives; ensnared home owners; investigators who tried to expose
the fraud; politicians who turned a blind eye; and, most of all,
the drug-snorting, high-living salesman who tell all about the
money they made, the lies they told, the deals they closed.
Provocative and gripping, "The Monster" is a searing look at the
bottom-feeding fraud and top-down greed that fueled the financial
collapse.
In September 1910, the activist Roger Casement arrived in the
Amazon jungle on a mission for the British government: to
investigate reports of widespread human-rights abuses in the
forests along the Putumayo River. Casement was outraged by what he
uncovered: nearly thirty thousand Indians had died to produce four
thousand tons of rubber for Peruvian and British commercial
interests, under the brutal rubber baron Julio Cesar Arana. In
1912, Casement's seven-hundred-page report of the Putumayo violence
set off reverberations throughout the world. Drawing on a wealth of
original research, "The Devil and Mr. Casement" is a haunting story
of modern capitalism with enormous contemporary political
resonance.
THIS 20 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Pamphlets: Elbert
Hubbard's Selected Writings: Part 1, by Elbert Hubbard. To purchase
the entire book, please order ISBN 0766103846.
The world of CEOs and boards has become an entitled insiders'
club--virtually free of accountability--and the abject failure of
our corporate leaders to police themselves is costing Americans
trillions and seriously undermining the strength of our economy.
Whereas boards are supposed to act as watchdogs, guarding
shareholders' interests, they have become enabling lapdogs to CEOs,
who are aided and abetted in their pursuit of outrageous pay and
unfettered power by a bevy of supporting players, including
compensation consultants who justify exorbitant pay packages and
accountants and attorneys who see no evil.
Based on extensive original reporting and interviews with
high-level insiders at a host of leading companies, John Gillespie
and David Zweig--both Harvard MBAs with thirtyplus years of Fortune
100 experience--reveal the inner workings of this dysfunctional
culture and the many methods CEOs and boards use to shut
shareholders out, entrench themselves, and fight reforms with
shareholders' own money. "Money for Nothing "is a vital expose of
how the game is played and a powerful call for change, laying out
the specific reforms that are needed to fix the glaring
dysfunctions that are imperiling the health of American business.
In "Right of the Dial," Alec Foege explores how the mammoth
media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications evolved from a
local radio broadcasting operation, founded in 1972, into one of
the biggest, most profitable, and most polarizing corporations in
the country. During its heyday, critics accused Clear Channel, the
fourth-largest media company in the United States and the nation's
largest owner of radio stations, of ruining American pop culture
and cited it as a symbol of the evils of media monopolization,
while fans hailed it as a business dynamo, a beacon of unfettered
capitalism.What's undeniable is that as the owner at one point of
more than 1,200 radio stations, 130 major concert venues and
promoters, 770,000 billboards, and 41 television stations, Clear
Channel dominated the entertainment world in ways that MTV and
Disney could only dream of. But in the fall of 2006, after years of
public criticism and flattening stock prices, Goliath finally
tumbled--Clear Channel Communications, Inc., spun off its
entertainment division and plotted to sell off one-third of its
radio stations and all of its television concerns, and to transfer
ownership of the rest of its holdings to a consortium of private
equity firms. The move signaled the end of an era in media
consolidation, and in "Right of the Dial," Foege takes stock of the
company's successes and abuses, showing the manner in which Clear
Channel reshaped America's cultural and corporate landscape along
the way.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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