Public Economics

The bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers was the pivotal event of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. Ever since the bankruptcy, there has been heated debate about why the Federal Reserve did not rescue Lehman in the same way it rescued other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG. The Fed's leaders from that time, especially former Chairman Ben Bernanke, have strongly asserted that they lacked the legal authority to save Lehman because it did not have adequate collateral for the loan it needed to survive.

Spanning nine countries, filled with heroic tales of bold decisions and self-sacrifice, and probing vast historical undercurrents, "The Miracle" takes readers inside private boardroom meetings, heated business negotiations, factory floors, and presidential cabinet sessions for a behind-the-scenes look at the events that shaped Asia's economic ascent - and will shape the world in the century to come.

Modern-day markets do not arise spontaneously or evolve naturally. Rather they are crafted by individuals, firms, and most of all, by governments. Author Steven Vogel builds his argument upon the recognition that all markets are crafted then systematically explores the implications for analysis and policy. In modern societies, there is no such thing as a free market. Markets are institutions, and contemporary markets are all heavily regulated. The "free market revolution" that began in the 1980s did not see a deregulation of markets, but rather a re-regulation.

Editors H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Halil Kiymaz, and their coauthors examine PE and provide important insights about topics such as major types of PE (venture capital, leveraged buyouts, mezzanine capital, and distressed debt investments), how PE works, performance and measurement, uses and structure, and trends in the market. Listeners can gain an in-depth understanding about PE from academics and practitioners from around the world.

According to Unintended Consequences, the conventional wisdom masks the real causes of our economic disruption and puts us at risk of a slew of unintended—and potentially dangerous—consequences. It’s a fascinating and contrarian case for how the economy really works, what went wrong over the past decade, and what steps we can take to start growing again.

In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

James Howard Kunstler's critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler's shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions.

Nichts, was die Arbeit anbelangt, ist heute mehr selbstverständlich. Das zweite Maschinenzeitalter selbstlernender Computer und Roboter revolutioniert unseren Arbeitsmarkt. Es definiert neu was "Arbeit" ist, und wozu wir eigentlich noch arbeiten. Schon seit einiger Zeit arbeiten wir in den westlichen Industrieländern nicht mehr, um unsere Existenz zu sichern. Wir arbeiten, um zur Erwerbsarbeitsgesellschaft dazuzugehören.

In The Body Economic, Stuckler and Basu mine data from around the globe and throughout history to show how government policy becomes a matter of life and death during financial crises. In a series of historical case studies stretching from 1930s America, to Russia and Indonesia in the 1990s, to present-day Greece, Britain, Spain, and the U.S., Stuckler and Basu reveal that governmental mismanagement of financial strife has resulted in a grim array of human tragedies.

Unequal Gains offers a radically new understanding of the economic evolution of the United States, providing a complete picture of the uneven progress of America from colonial times to today. While other economic historians base their accounts on American wealth, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson focus instead on income - and the result is a bold reassessment of the American economic experience.

Our take-make-waste economy has cost consumers and taxpayers billions while cheating us out of a habitable planet. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Waste-Free World makes a persuasive, forward-looking case for a circular economic model, a “closed-loop” system that wastes no natural resources. Entrepreneur, CEO, and sustainability expert Ron Gonen argues that circularity is not only crucial for the planet but holds immense business opportunity.

We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skillfully distills in World on the Edge.

Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy - but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged.

The 2018 Nobel laureate for economics analyzes the politics and economics of the central environmental issue of today and points the way to real solutions.

Ryan Hass charts a path forward in America's relationship and rivalry with China rooted in the relative advantages America already possesses. Hass argues that while competition will remain the defining trait of the relationship, both countries will continue to be impacted - for good or ill - by their capacity to coordinate on common challenges that neither can solve on its own, such as pandemic disease, global economic recession, climate change, and nuclear nonproliferation.

We Are Better Than This fundamentally reframes budget debates in the United States. Author Edward D. Kleinbard explains how the public's preoccupation with tax policy alone has obscured any understanding of government's ability to complement the private sector through investment and insurance programs that enhance the general welfare and prosperity of our society at large.

Nadie como Paul Krugman para acercarnos a los principales conceptos económicos y las ideas que mueven gran parte de nuestras políticas públicas y para explicar con lucidez problemas económicos a menudo confusos.

Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West - and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the gas station and the mall.

Sheila Bair is widely acknowledged in government circles and the media as one of the first people to identify and accurately assess the subprime crisis. Appointed by George W. Bush as the chairperson of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 2006, she witnessed the origins of the financial crisis and, in 2008, became - along with Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner-one of the key players invested in repairing the damage to our economy.

In Unexpected Revolutionaries, Manuela Moschella investigates the institutional transformation of central banks from the 1970s to the present.