Finance Industry

As a private banker working for the largest bank in the world, UBS, Bradley Birkenfeld was an expert in Switzerland's shell-game of offshore companies and secret numbered accounts. He wined and dined ultrawealthy clients whose millions of dollars were hidden away from business partners, spouses, and tax authorities. As his client list grew, Birkenfeld lived a life of money, fast cars, and beautiful women, but when he discovered that UBS was planning to betray him, he blew the whistle to the US government.

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy - but rather superior control of subordinate labor.

How did salesforce.com grow from a start-up in a rented apartment into the world's fastest growing software company in less than a decade? Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman, and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change.

Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's US health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.

Goose Island opened as a family-owned Chicago brewpub in the late 1980s, and it soon became one of the most inventive breweries in the world. In the golden age of light and cheap beers, John Hall and his son Greg brought European flavors to America. With distribution in two dozen states, two brewpubs and status as one of the twenty biggest breweries in the United States, Goose Island became an American success story and was a champion of craft beer. Then, on March 28, 2011, the Halls sold the brewery to Anheuser-Busch InBev, maker of Budweiser, the least craft-like beer imaginable.

Seeing What's Next is a framework for predicting industry winners and losers. Every day, individuals take action based on how they believe innovation will change industries. Yet these beliefs are largely based on guesswork and incomplete data, and can lead to costly errors in judgment. Internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen and his research partners, Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth, present this guide for predicting outcomes in the evolution of any industry.

Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners.

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next 10 years - for businesses, governments, and the global community - and how we can navigate them.

A start-up wastes a billion dollars making videos nobody wants to watch. A city rushes to build landing pads for flightless air taxi prototypes. Tech giants hire thousands of techies for fake projects to stop them working for rivals. The tech industry has a tendency to go crazy. In Siliconned, industry insider Emmanuel Maggiori decodes tech’s hysteria and explains why we all pay the price for it.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

Created for risk professionals and non-risk professionals alike, this easy-to-understand guide helps you meet the increasingly insistent demand to make sophisticated assessments of companies' risk exposure. It provides the latest methods for measuring and transferring credit risk, increasing risk-management transparency, and implementing an organization-wide Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) approach.

W. Edwards Deming details the system of transformation that underlies the "14 Points for Management" presented in Out of the Crisis. The "Deming System of Profound Knowledge", as it is called, consists of four parts: appreciation for a system, knowledge about variation, theory of knowledge, and psychology. Describing the prevailing management style as a prison, Deming describes how applying the System of Profound Knowledge increases productivity, quality, and people's joy in work and joy in learning.

Mazzucato and Collington expertly debunk the myth that consultancies always add value to the economy. With a wealth of original research, they argue brilliantly for investment and collective intelligence within all organizations and communities, and for a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good. We must recalibrate the role of consultants and rebuild economies and governments that are fit for purpose.

Ben Roselli, president of First Mercantile American Bank and grandson of the founder, makes the shocking announcement that he's dying. With no offspring to inherit the company, Roselli knows that executive VPs Roscoe Heyward and Alex Vandervoort are the obvious candidates to succeed him. Heyward, who has been with First Mercantile for two decades, will do whatever it takes to bring in new clients and win the coveted presidency. Vandervoort, a newcomer from the Federal Reserve with a left-wing girlfriend, advocates for a socially responsible plan of growth.

There is a major disconnect between what we wear and our knowledge of its impact on land, air, water, labor, and human health. Even those who value access to safe, local, nutritious food have largely overlooked the production of fiber, dyes, and the chemistry that forms the backbone of modern textile production. While humans are 100 percent reliant on their second skin, it’s common to think little about the biological and human cultural context from which our clothing derives.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything takes the listener behind the scenes of these firms: their famous billionaire founders, the overlapping stories of their creation and evolution, and the outsized ambitions that led a group of clever bankers from small shops operating in a corner of Wall Street into powerhouse titans of capital. This is the story of the money and the men who handle it.

More and more business is being conducted online, so online payment solutions are an increasingly accepted and desired transaction. Money can be transferred in real-time, where in the past, someone might have to wait days for a check to arrive, hoping it would arrive at all and not get lost in the mail, and then take it to the bank to deposit and wait for funds to clear. Now, because of the strict regulatory measures that protect online payments, transfers are often available to the recipient immediately or within a few hours of transfer.

Banking on It is the firsthand account of one woman's quest to rebuild Britain's broken banking system. After a lengthy career at the top of some of Britain's leading banks, Anne Boden had become disillusioned with the status quo - the financial crash had broken trust in the whole sector, but there seemed to be little appetite to make the most of emerging technologies to revolutionise customer experience. Increasingly frustrated with the inertia within the industry, she decided to shake things up herself by doing something totally radical - setting up her own bank.

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.

This book is different. Why? Because in short, bite-size chapters I will show you how the asset management industry works. Most other books on asset management focus on portfolio management. I will instead show you a 360-degree view of the industry, covering topics including: the industry's main asset managers, who the main types of clients are, and most importantly, how people within the money management industry look at themselves.