Whether you’re looking to deepen your knowledge of complex banking practices, better understand the history of international finance, or simply learn more about central banking as it relates to your everyday life, this book will give you a comprehensive introduction and solid foundation for future study.

The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions.

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress.

What goes up, must come down. As any student of financial history knows, the dizzying heights of the stock market can't continue indefinitely - especially since asset prices have been artificially inflated by investor optimism around the Trump administration, ruinously low interest rates, and the infiltration of behavioral economics into our financial lives. The elites are prepared, but what's the average investor to do?

Rigged financial markets and hopeless under-regulation on Wall Street are not new problems. In this book, Susanne Trimbath gives a sobering account of naked short-selling, the failure to settle, and her efforts over decades trying to get this fixed. This is a cautionary tale. What started as a regulatory failure turned into a regulatory crisis. Shareholder democracy is in shambles. The institutions that were established to correct a problem of trade settlement failures have instead exacerbated the problem. Global financial markets may not survive what comes next.

The international monetary system has collapsed three times in the past hundred years, in 1914, 1939, and 1971. Each collapse was followed by a period of tumult: War, civil unrest, or significant damage to the stability of the global economy. Now James Rickards, the acclaimed author of Currency Wars, shows why another collapse is rapidly approaching - and why this time, nothing less than the institution of money itself is at risk.

Something is wrong with our banking system. We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his 10 years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy, he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking, the keys to modern finance.

Continuing his groundbreaking analysis of economic structures, Douglass North develops an analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies. Institutions exist due to the uncertainties involved in human interaction; they are the constraints devised to structure that interaction. Yet, institutions vary widely in their consequences for economic performance; some economies develop institutions that produce growth and development, while others develop institutions that produce stagnation.

In looking at the forces that shaped the 2016 presidential election, one thing is clear: Much of the population believes that our economic system is rigged to enrich the privileged elites at the expense of hard-working Americans. This is a belief held equally on both sides of political spectrum, and it seems only to be gaining momentum.

Why do stock and housing markets sometimes experience amazing booms followed by massive busts, and why is this happening more and more frequently? In order to answer these questions, William Quinn and John D. Turner take us on a riveting ride through the history of financial bubbles. As they do so, they help us understand why bubbles happen and why some have catastrophic economic, social, and political consequences while others have actually benefited society.

Behind the alarming headlines about job losses, bank bailouts, and corporate greed, there is a little-known story of bad ideas. For 50 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?

The way most white-collar crime works is by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. Financial crime seems horribly complicated, but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what’s theirs.

The economic and monetary disaster, which seasoned Wall Street prognosticator Peter Schiff warned of in the bestselling first edition of Crash Proof, is no longer hypothetical - it is here today. And while most people believe that the economic collapse is over, the reality is that it has only just begun. That's why he's returned with Crash Proof 2.0.

Turk and Rubino are back to say that history is about to repeat. Instead of addressing the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, the world's governments have continued along the same path, accumulating even more debt and inflating even bigger financial bubbles. So another - even bigger - crisis is coming.

Eswar Prasad explains the world of finance is at the threshold of major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite how ordinary people live. Above all, Prasad foresees the end of physical cash. The driving force won't be phones or credit cards but rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to develop their own, more stable digital currencies.