International Finance

Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone profound changes - economic cycles that veer from boom to bust - from which it has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason's Postcapitalism argues that we are on the brink of a change so big and so profound that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system within which entire societies function, will mutate into something wholly new.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

The 21st century has seen a rise in the global middle class that brings an unprecedented convergence of interests and perceptions, cultures and values. Kishore Mahbubani is optimistic. We are creating a new global civilization. Eighty-eight percent of the world's population outside the West is rising to Western living standards, and sharing Western aspirations. Yet Mahbubani, one of the most perceptive global commentators, also warns that a new global order needs new policies and attitudes.

Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China.

The global freight forwarding market has been seeing a steady growth of around 5 percent for the last four years. New trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trans-Atlantic Partnership (TAP), and many others are bringing the whole world into one marketplace. This is an industry that, in my opinion, is still in its infancy. With TPP, TAP, and many other global trade agreements, the need for such services will grow higher every year.

The world is changing fast. Political risk - the probability that a political action could significantly impact a company's business - is affecting more businesses in more ways than ever before. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets. Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. In today's globalized world, there are no "safe" bets.

In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle to explain the unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets.

When Hu Jintao, China's then vice president, came to visit the New York Stock Exchange and Ground Zero in 2002, he asked Hank Paulson to be his guide. It was a testament to the pivotal role that Goldman Sachs played in helping China experiment with private enterprise. In Dealing with China, the best-selling author of On the Brink draws on his unprecedented access to both the political and business leaders of modern China to answer several key questions.

North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.

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 about modern economies and economics. The audiobook identifies the origin of the crisis in the complex interaction between globalization, hugely destabilizing global imbalances and our dangerously fragile financial system.

A case for why regionalization, not globalization, has been the biggest economic trend of the past forty years.

America is a smuggler nation. Our long history of illicit imports has ranged from West Indies molasses and Dutch gunpowder in the 18th century, to British industrial technologies and African slaves in the 19th century, to French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th century, to Mexican workers and Colombian cocaine in the modern era. Contraband capitalism, it turns out, has been an integral part of American capitalism.

When journalist and traveler Kelsey Timmerman wanted to know where his clothes came from and who made them, he began a journey that would take him from Honduras to Bangladesh to Cambodia to China and back again. Where Am I Wearing? intimately describes the connection between impoverished garment workers' standards of living and the all-American material lifestyle.

In The Euro, Nobel Prize-winning economist and best-selling author Joseph E. Stiglitz dismantles the prevailing consensus around what ails Europe, demolishing the champions of austerity while offering a series of plans that can rescue the continent - and the world - from further devastation. Hailed by its architects as a lever that would bring Europe together and promote prosperity, the euro has done the opposite. As Stiglitz persuasively argues, the crises revealed the shortcomings of the euro.

As Morgan Stanley's chief Asia specialist, getting Asia right is Stephen Roach's personal obsession, and this in-depth compilation represents more than 70 of Roach's key research efforts not just on Asia, but also on how the region fits into the broad context of increasingly globalized financial markets. The book argues that the "Asia factor" is not a static concept, but rather one that is constantly changing and evolving.

When Arthur B. Laffer spearheaded the theory of supply-side economics and became a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, he took his place as an economic icon. More recently, he joined with Stephen Moore and Peter J. Tanous to write The End of Prosperity - a clarion call delineating what is wrong with current political approaches to America's present economic challenges.

However, this book is not about how to grow a $500 account into a $500,000 account. It is precisely these exaggerated return expectations that bring most beginners to failure. Instead, the author shows, in a realistic way, how you can become a full-time trader in spite of limited start-up capital. This applies both for traders who want to remain private, as well as for those who want to eventually trade customer funds.

Friedman brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy - both of which could poison our world if we do not act quickly and collectively. His argument speaks to all of us who are concerned about the state of America in the global future.

The eminent economic historian Harold James presents a new perspective on financial crises, dividing them into "good" crises, which ultimately expand markets and globalization, and "bad" crises, which result in a smaller, less prosperous world. Examining seven turning points in financial history—from the depression of the 1840s through the Great Depression of the 1930s to the COVID-19 crisis—James shows how crashes prompted by a lack of supply, like the oil shortages of the 1970s, lead to greater globalization as markets expand and producers innovate to increase supply.

South Korea's extraordinary economic and technological transformation after the Korean War (1950-1953) is often referred to by observers and historians as the "Miracle on the Han River." The nation underwent an astonishing makeover from being one of the poorest countries to become the 12th largest economy in the world and 4th in Asia. South Korea also became one of the most technologically advanced countries in a short span. As in other capitalist economies, some people have benefited from the economic and technological attainments, while others have been left out....