A challenge to the conventional wisdom surrounding financial risk, providing insight into why easy solutions to control the financial system are doomed to failFinance plays a key role in the prosperity of the modern world—but it also brings grave dangers. We seek to manage those threats with a vast array of sophisticated mathematical tools and techniques of financial risk management. Too often, though, we fail to address the greatest risk—the peril posed by our own behavior.J...

A challenge to the conventional wisdom surrounding financial risk, providing insight into why easy solutions to control the financial system are doomed to failFinance plays a key role in the prosperity of the modern world—but it also brings grave dangers. We seek to manage those threats with a vast array of sophisticated mathematical tools and techniques of financial risk management. Too often, though, we fail to address the greatest risk—the peril posed by our own...

Why are we in such a financial mess today? There are lots of proximate causes: over-leverage, global imbalances, bad financial technology that lead to widespread underestimation of risk.But these are all symptoms. Until we isolate and tackle fundamental causes, we will fail to extirpate the disease. ECONned is the first book to examine the unquestioned role of economists as policy-makers, and how they helped create an unmitigated economic disaster.Here, Yves Smith lo...

SELECTED AS A 2008 BEST BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST"ONE OF THE SMARTEST INVESTORS ON THE PLANET."--MONEY MAGAZINE“This book is an essential read for those whowish to understand the modern world of investing.”—Alan GreenspanWinner of the 2008 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year AwardWhen Markets Collide is a timely alert...

Behind the alarming headlines about job losses, bank bailouts, and corporate greed is a little-known story of bad ideas. For fifty years or more, economists have been busy developing elegant theories of how markets work—how they facilitate innovation, wealth creation, and an efficient allocation of society's resources. But what about when markets don't work? What about when they lead to stock market bubbles, glaring inequality, polluted rivers, real estate crashes, and credit crunches?...

Financial Times Best Books of 2024: Economics — Martin Wolf"...an invaluable framework to better understanding growth, the financial sector, and the key trends shaping the global economy" — Financial Times, Tej ParikhThe shocks and crises of recent years—pandemic, recession, inflation, war—have forced executives and investors to recognize that the macroeconomy is now a risk to be actively managed. Yet unreliable forecastin...

The forces behind an economic and political crisis in the makingA “problem of twelve” arises when a small number of institutions acquire the means to exert outsized influence over the politics and economy of a nation.The Big Four index funds of Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and BlackRock control more than twenty percent of the votes of S&P 500 companies—a concentration of power that’s unprecedented in America. Then there’s the rise of private equity fun...

“A brilliant and lucid new book” (John Lanchester, New York Times Magazine) about why paper money and digital currencies lie at the heart of many of the world’s most difficult problems—and their solutionsIn The Curse of Cash, acclaimed economist and bestselling author Kenneth Rogoff explores the past, present, and future of currency, showing why, contrary to conventional economic wisdom, the regulation of paper bills—and now digital currencies—lie...

The future is uncertain but for one thing: the global economy is in disarray. Investors, companies and governments must rethink their approach in light of raging inflation, the ongoing climate crisis and an ageing population. In addition, they have to deal with the highest mountain of debt ever accrued in peacetime, disruptive innovations and the effects of multiglobalisation.So much is happening simultaneously, making it difficult to distinguish the big waves from the small hypes....

An essential account of the historic subprime mortgage crisis, from the Nobel Prize–winning economist and bestselling author of Irrational ExuberanceThe subprime mortgage crisis has already wreaked havoc on the lives of millions of people and now it threatens to derail the U.S. economy and economies around the world. In this trenchant book, best-selling economist Robert Shiller reveals the origins of this crisis and puts forward bold measures to solve it. ...

Each year we pay billions in fees to those who run our financial system. The money comes from our bank accounts, our pensions, our borrowing, and often we aren’t told that the money has been taken. These billions may be justified if the finance industry does a good job, but as this book shows, it too often fails us. Financial institutions regularly place their business interests first, charging for advice that does nothing to improve performance, employing short-term buying strategies that...

The investment markets have never been more dangerous. Interest rates are at all-time lows; the sanctity of cash deposits is under threat; government bonds are expensive and offer ultra-low or negative yields; equity markets are largely detached from reality after years of loose monetary policy. Investors need to calibrate themselves to the realities of this extraordinary new environment so that they can protect their wealth and, ideally, prosper.In Investing Through the Lookin...