American Finance

Drive through rural America and you’ll see small town after small town empty and decaying. As you drive past the abandoned manufacturing plants and shuttered Victorian homes once inhabited by its workers and executives, you can picture what the town was like forty years ago. A thriving community where the company president and assembly line worker went to the same church and whose children went to the same school.

Author John F. Wasik tracks Lincoln from his time in the 1830s as a young Illinois state legislator pushing for internal improvements; through his work as a lawyer representing the Illinois Central Railroad in the 1840s; to his presidential fight for the Transcontinental Railroad; and his support of land-grant colleges that educated a nation. These brick-and-mortar developments were essential to how the nation could lift citizens above poverty and its isolating origins.

Race, Work, and Leadership is a rare and important compilation of essays that examines how race matters in people's experience of work and leadership. What does it mean to be Black in corporate America today? How are racial dynamics in organizations changing? How do we build inclusive organizations?

With a nation seemingly more divided than ever, many worry that Americans risk losing ground on solving the complex, interrelated problems the country faces - including rising inequality, the specter of climate change, astronomical health care costs, and economic stagnation. The renowned economist Jeffrey D. Sachs offers a practical approach to move America toward a new consensus: sustainable development.

In Inside Money, acclaimed historian, commentator, and former financial executive Zachary Karabell offers the first full and frank look inside this institution against the backdrop of American history. Blessed with complete access to the company's archives, as well as a thrilling understanding of the larger forces at play, Karabell has created an X-ray of American power - financial, political, cultural - as it has evolved from the early 1800s to the present.

Like every other prospering democracy, the United States developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism into strong growth and healthy social development. In this bargain, government and business were as much partners as rivals. Public investments in education, science, transportation, and technology laid the foundation for broadly based prosperity.

Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency. But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity—the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect union” that had first drawn him to politics.

Billionaire Wilderness takes you inside the exclusive world of the ultra-wealthy, showing how today's richest people are using the natural environment to solve the existential dilemmas they face. Justin Farrell spent five years in Teton County, Wyoming, the richest county in the United States and a community where income inequality is the worst in the nation. He conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews, gaining unprecedented access to tech CEOs, Wall Street financiers, oil magnates, and other prominent figures in business and politics.

A Washington Post reporter's intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin - Paul Ryan's hometown - and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class. This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its factory stills - but it's not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next, when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.

There is no better guide than Paul Krugman to basic economics, the ideas that animate much of our public policy. Likewise, there is no stronger foe of zombie economics, the misunderstandings that just won’t die. In Arguing with Zombies, Krugman tackles many of these misunderstandings, taking stock of where the United States has come from and where it’s headed in a series of concise, digestible chapters. Drawn mainly from his popular New York Times column, they cover a wide range of issues, organized thematically and framed in the context of a wider debate.

In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

For more than three decades, Jeffrey D. Sachs has been at the forefront of international economic problem solving. But Sachs turns his attention back home in The Price of Civilization, a book that is essential reading for every American. In a forceful, impassioned, and personal voice, he offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country’s economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity.

In this deeply personal memoir, Schwab describes his passion to have Main Street participate in the growing economy as investors and owners, not only earners. Schwab opens up about his dyslexia and how he worked around and ultimately embraced it, and about the challenges he faced while starting his fledgling company in the 1970s. A year into his grand experiment in discounted stock trading, living in a small apartment in Sausalito with his wife, Helen, and new baby, he carried a six-figure debt and a pocketful of personal loans.

Before Bill Gross was known among investors as the Bond King, he was a gambler. In 1966, a fresh college grad, he went to Vegas armed with his net worth ($200) and a knack for counting cards. Ten thousand dollars and countless casino bans later, he was hooked, so he enrolled in business school. The Bond King is the story of how that whiz kid made American finance his casino.

Over 4,000 students gathered at the University of Michigan to hear Republican Party candidate Ron Paul speak. As he began to address the topics of monetary policy and the coming depression, a chant rose from the crowd, "End the Fed! End the Fed!" As dollar bills were lit on fire and thrown into the night skies, it became clear that the real problem, one that nobody in the media was talking about, was the central bank-an unconstitutional entity and a political, economic, and moral disaster.

What happens when you take on the establishment? In Adults in the Room, renowned economist and former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis gives the full, blistering account of his momentous clash with the mightiest economic and political forces on earth.

Fifteen Cents on the Dollar follows the lives of four Black Millennial professionals and a banking company founded with the stated mission of closing the Black-white wealth gap. That company, known as Greenwood, a reference to the historic Black Wall Street district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, generated immense excitement and hope among people looking for new ways of business that might lead to greater equity. But the twists and turns of Greenwood’s journey also raise tough questions about what equality really means.

Food is a conduit for connection; we envision smiling families gathered around a table-eating, happy, content. But what happens when poverty, mental illness, homelessness, and addiction claim a seat at that table? In The Meth Lunches, Kim Foster peers behind the polished visions of perfectly curated dinners and charming families to reveal the complex reality when poverty and food intersect.

Are you a citizen of the United States who lives abroad? Maybe you're thinking about moving from the United States, and aren't sure how this affects your tax filing requirements. Or perhaps you have been tax non-compliant for many years, and don't know how to get caught up with the US government without incurring huge fees. You could be a self-employed "digital nomad" who works from many different countries, moving wherever you want at your leisure.

Don't have enough money saved up for retirement? No problem. Never started a 401k or IRA? Don't worry. And are you so far behind in your personal finances you're worried you'll never be able to retire? It's all good. Because whether you know it or not, the entire US retirement system is horribly flawed and was doomed to fail anyway. And that's why every American needs to listen to Poor Richard's Retirement.