1873
By: Liaquat Ahamed – Brookings Institution
On Friday, 9 May 1873 the Vienna stock market collapsed. Four months later Wall Street was in trouble. Elsewhere, as panic selling spread across financial markets, some countries defaulted on their debts, while the Bank of England was forced to raise its rates to their highest level in a century. It was the first global crash in history. And it was to have calamitous consequences.
In his powerful new book, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lords of Finance tells the epic story of that crash and explores its economic and human costs. He describes how the growth of the international bond market in the 1850s and 60s funded a frenzy of speculation in railways, construction and nation-building. He examines those who became swept up in the boom, from leading bankers like the Rothschild dynasty to national leaders both visionary and venal, to rogues and chancers like the shameless Jay Gould, to such sceptical onlookers as Mark Twain and Karl Marx. He then traces how, in the subsequent panic, investors were left with catastrophic losses, while governments on both sides of the Atlantic rushed misguidedly to reorder the world’s financial system.
Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone
By: John Y. Campbell, Tarun Ramadorai – Harvard University. Imperial College London
We interact with the financial system every day, whether taking out or paying off loans, making insurance claims, or simply depositing money into our bank accounts. Fixed exposes how this system has been corrupted to serve the interests of financial services providers and their cleverest customers—at the expense of ordinary people.
John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai diagnose the ills of today’s personal finance markets in the United States and across the globe, looking at everything from short-term saving and borrowing to loans for education and housing, financial products for retirement, and insurance. They show how the system is “fixed” to benefit those who are wealthy and more educated while encouraging financial mistakes by those who are aren’t, making it difficult for regular consumers to make sound financial decisions and disadvantaging them in some of the most consequential economic transactions of their lives. Campbell and Ramadorai describe how some even opt out of the financial system altogether, relying on unregulated and often shady mechanisms to implement necessary financial functions, with dire consequences for individuals, families, and the economy more broadly.
How to Win a Trade War
By: Soumaya Keynes, Chad Bown – Financial Times, Peterson Institute for International Economics
We used to take trade for granted. Trillions of dollars of goods and services crossed borders each year. Nobody paid too much attention: it just worked.
Now, surging oil prices can hit your mortgage. Trump’s latest tariff announcement can crash markets and ruin your pension. Brexit can sever Britain from its closest trading partners. Chinese restrictions can bring the West’s car production to a crashing halt. Curbs on trade in cutting-edge chips could determine who wins the AI race. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
In this irreverent guide, Keynes and Bown explore the history, players, and rules of trade, asking how we prepare for what the future might hold. Could trade wars lead to hot wars? What can the West learn from China? How should countries defend their economies? Timely, funny and informative, How to Win a Trade War argues that the old system is dead. But what will emerge in its place? And ultimately, what is at stake for you, your country, and your company?
Moral Economics – From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work
By: Alvin E. Roth – Stanford University
Some of the most intractable controversies in our divided society are, at bottom, about what actions and transactions should be banned. Should women and couples be able to purchase contraception, access in vitro fertilization, and end pregnancy by obtaining an abortion? Should people be able to buy marijuana? What about fentanyl? Can someone be paid to donate blood plasma, or a kidney?
Disagreements are fierce because arguments on both sides are often made in uncompromising moral or religious terms. But in Moral Economics, Nobel Prize–winning economist Alvin E. Roth asserts that we can make progress on these and other difficult topics if we view them as markets—tools to help decide who gets what—and understand how those markets can be fine-tuned to be more functional. Markets don’t have to allow everything or ban everything. Prudent market design can find a balance between preserving people’s rights to pursue their own interests and protecting the most vulnerable from harm.
Combining Roth’s unparalleled expertise as market design pioneer with his incisive, witty accounts of complicated issues, Moral Economics offers a powerful and innovative new framework for resolving today’s hardest controversies.
