Books

Brief Summary In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon. Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they offer the sorry spectacle of countries' stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation, and sometimes actual violence. Left unchecked, the next currency war could lead to a crisis worse than the panic of 2008. Currency wars have happened before-twice in the last century alone-and they always end badly. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated, and capital controls have been imposed. And the next crash is overdue. Recent headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Greece and Ireland, and Chinese currency manipulation are all indicators of the growing conflict. As James Rickards argues in Currency Wars, this is more than just a concern for economists and investors. The United States is facing serious threats to its national security, from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds. Greater than any single threat is the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself. Baffling to many observers is the rank failure of economists to foresee or prevent the economic catastrophes of recent years. Not only have their theories failed to prevent calamity, they are making the currency wars worse. The U. S. Federal Reserve has engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance, a sustained effort to stimulate the economy by printing money on a trillion-dollar scale. Its solutions present hidden new dangers while resolving none of the current dilemmas. While the outcome of the new currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rickards untangles the web of failed paradigms, wishful thinking, and arrogance driving current public policy and points the way toward a more informed and effective course of action. ISBN:9781591845560 Author:James Rickards

Brief Summary Managing for the Short Term: The New Rules for Running a Business in a Day-to-Day World. As managers, senior executives, and CEOs all over have painfully discovered, if you don’t manage for the short term, you won’t be around for the long term. Bestselling business author Chuck Martin found that nothing consumes business managers more than how to manage a company in the weeks and months immediately ahead. As founder of NFI Research, an executive think tank made up of some 3,000 high-level executives at over 1,400 companies, Chuck Martin has interviewed and gathered the results of thousands of management specialists the world over to discover how companies are successfully zeroing in on improving short-term performance, while still balancing these efforts with long-term strategic goals. By looking to managers and executives at companies like IBM, SAP, Deloitte & Touche, Kraft, AT&T, Dow Chemical, and hundreds of others, Martin has uncovered the "best practices” that help propel short-term performance. Among them: • Bridging the enormous disconnect between management’s strategic goals and the ability of front-line managers and employees to implement these goals • Moving even the biggest projects forward incrementally, delivering tangible results at each step along the way • Putting together time-based and events-based teams that can focus specifically on essential short-term decisions and goals • Creating incentives to reward short-term results What Chuck Martin has found is that companies that adopt practices designed to achieve short-term results are usually better positioned to achieve their long-term strategies as well. A critically important management book that addresses one of the overriding concerns of businesses today, Managing for the Short Term is an essential addition to any manager’s toolkit. ISBN:9780756767549 Author:Chuck Martin

Brief Summary Lessons from the Front Line: Market Tools and Investing Tactics from the Pros. Do you ever get the feeling that there is a world of strategic investing intelligence from which you are being excluded? Do you even wonder how much further you could go as an investor if only you were familiar with the tactics and tools used by the real front-line market strategists and the professional money managers? Well, stop wondering, because in Lessons from the Front Line a leading financial reporter reveals the secrets behind the tactics of today's most successful money managers. For over a decade, Michael Brush has been covering the markets for the New York Times, the Economist Group, and Money magazine. During that time he has interviewed many top money managers, listened to their war stories, and observed them in action. In follow-up interviews with these managers for this groundbreaking book, he develops what he's learned into 21 powerful lessons for smart individual investors, traders and day traders-lessons you won't find anywhere else. In a series of concise chapters, liberally peppered with quotes by leading money managers, analysts, and academics, Brush describes how the pros develop investor intelligence, exploit stock market patterns, make use of advanced investment tactics, and manage crises. • Read between the lines of analysts' reports • Decode conference calls between companies, money managers, and analysts • Interpret the buying and selling patterns of corporate insiders • Make the most of IPOs, biotech stocks, earnings confession season, selloffs, and rollups • Learn easy ways to spot trouble in financial statements before others do A stock-picking guide for today's new breed of savvy investor, Lessons from the Front Line arms you with the professional tools you need to dramatically increase your profit and performance. ISBN:9780471350170 Author:Michael Brush