Modern Money

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather than making things, they simply connect people. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last 10 years.

The Richest Man in Babylon is the most important and valuable personal finance book ever written. This book profoundly influenced successful entrepreneurs like Tony Robbins, Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, and thousands of others.

America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, median wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess?

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.

A masterful account of today's money culture, showing how the underpricing of risk leads to catastrophe. With his trademark humor and brilliant anecdotes, Michael Lewis paints the mood and market factors leading up to each event, weaves contemporary accounts to show what people thought was happening at the time, and then, with the luxury of hindsight, analyzes what actually happened and what we should have learned from experience.

How many romantic dates, job promotions, or hidden dreams have you missed and wasted the opportunity to act on because you were afraid of failing? How many times have you watched someone achieve what you’ve always wanted and felt that terrible pang of jealousy and self-pity? No man is born confident, assertive, and fearless. But anyone can become confident.

Are you sick of hearing the same personal finance advice but never being able to get ahead? Paying off debt takes more than making a budget and cutting your spending. Years of bad spending habits, not planning for setbacks, and stress that depletes your motivation are just some of the barriers that prevent people from paying off debt. This book will show you how to knock down every barrier and finally achieve debt freedom. You’ll experience a renewed vigor to pay off your debt and feel the financial weight lifted off your shoulders.

J. P. Morgan is more than just the name on one of the largest banks in America. He was a man who altered the course of American finance and the chief financier for the strategic interests of the titans of the day, such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. He also financed new and ingenious technologies developed by Thomas Edison and was a visionary who saw the potential in Nikola Tesla. Hear all about him and find areas that you may have in common with this towering titan.

Machine learning (ML) is changing virtually every aspect of our lives. Today ML algorithms accomplish tasks that until recently only expert humans could perform. As it relates to finance, this is the most exciting time to adopt a disruptive technology that will transform how everyone invests for generations. The book addresses real-life problems faced by practitioners on a daily basis and explains scientifically sound solutions using math, supported by code and examples.

Here is a bold, new account of the lives and ideas of the great economists - Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and many others - all written by a top free-market economist and presented in an entertaining and persuasive style. Professor Mark Skousen tells a powerful story of economics with dozens of anecdotes of the great economic thinkers.

In many immigrant households, money isn’t often a topic of discussion, so financial education can be minimal—especially when a family is just trying to survive the day-to-day. Despite being the largest minority group in the United States, the Latino community still faces cultural and systemic barriers that prevent them from building wealth. As a first-generation Latina, Jannese Torres, award-winning money expert, educator, and podcaster, knows these unique challenges well.

This book applies the principles of the original Think and Grow Rich to the modern day. It uses updated language, writing, and illustrations. This book is for the ordinary individual who wants to make it big. Its title is critical to the beliefs behind this resource. The surest way to wealth is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are dreamers, designers, and doers. Dreams are the ultimate economic engine. All people dream, but not all develop the designs needed to make those dreams come true. A few do, but still within that subgroup; only a few do the things necessary to build a solid business....

The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This was the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constituted a major philosophic revolution. In this series of essays, she presented her stand on the persecution of big business, the causes of war, the default of conservatism, and the evils of altruism.

A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Prize. In The Quest, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change and conflict, in a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them. The Quest tells the inside stories, tackles the tough questions, and reveals surprising insights about coal, electricity, and natural gas.

In 1869, when the final spike was driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, few were prepared for its seismic aftershocks. Once a hodgepodge of short, squabbling lines, America's railways soon exploded into a titanic industry helmed by a pageant of speculators, crooks, and visionaries. The vicious competition between empire builders such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman sparked stock market frenzies, panics, and crashes; provoked strikes; transformed the nation's geography; and culminated in a ferocious two-man battle....

Here is a bold new history of economics, the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built a rigorous social science without peer.

We are entering a golden age of alternative investments. Alternative asset classes including private equity, hedge funds, catastrophe reinsurance, real assets, non-traditional credit, alternative risk premia, digital assets, collectibles, and other novel assets are now available to investors and their advisors in a way that they never have been before.

The Wise Investor isn't just another financial advice book—it's a transformative journey that challenges conventional wisdom about wealth building. This modern parable educates and inspires, shedding light on the often-overlooked truths about achieving real financial independence. Unlike step-by-step books promising quick (and fleeting) riches, The Wise Investor shows you the path to building "Real Wealth"—the perfect balance of money, time, and freedom.

From the invention of interest in Mesopotamia and the origin of paper money in China, to the creation of mutual funds, inflation-indexed bonds, and global financial securities, here is a sweeping survey of financial innovations that have changed the world. Written by a distinguished group of experts - including Robert Shiller, Niall Ferguson, Valerie Hansen, and many others - The Origins of Value traces the evolution of finance through 4,000 years of history.

What is money? How is it created? What's the point of taxes and how should they be implemented? Are federal deficits bad for the economy? Would abolishing poverty lead to higher inflation? Is inflation something to avoid? These are just some of the questions Scott Santens explores in order to answer the biggest question of all about the concept of universal basic income (UBI) and virtually all government spending in general: "How do we pay for it?" Utilizing modern monetary theory (MMT), Santens leads readers through a fascinating journey. He connects the economic dots in a way everyone can...