The Reckoning - Debt, Democracy, and the Future of American Power

Market uncertainty cannot be eliminated. So rather than attempt to do away with it, why not embrace it? That is what this book is designed to do. The Permanent Portfolio takes you through Harry Browne's Permanent Portfolio approach—which can weather a wide range of economic conditions from inflation and deflation to recession—and reveals how it can help investors protect and grow their money.

Written by Craig Rowland and Mike Lawson, this reliable resource demonstrates everything from a straightforward four-asset Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) version of the strategy all the way up to a sophisticated approach using Swiss bank storage of selected assets for geographic and political diversification. In all cases, the authors provide step-by-step guidance based upon personal experience.

• This timeless strategy is supported by more than three decades of empirical evidence
• The authors skillfully explain how to incorporate the ideas of the Permanent Portfolio into your financial endeavors in order to maintain, protect, and grow your money
• Includes select updates of Harry Browne's Permanent Portfolio approach, which reflect our changing times

The Permanent Portfolio is an essential guide for investors who are serious about building a better portfolio.

This reliable resource provides you with the tools to help you understand and analyze opportunities within today's global Consumer Staples sector. With this book as your guide, you can quickly become familiar with how the Consumer Staples sector is segmented by industries, their respective macroeconomic drivers, and the challenges facing companies in this sector. Additionally, there are chapters dedicated to explaining many of the unique aspects of Consumer Staples products in emerging markets and security analysis techniques focused on Consumer Staples firms.

You don't have to be a professional to learn to better invest in the Consumer Staples sector—but you do need to be prepared. Fisher Investments on Consumer Staples can help get you up to speed in this area and help you make better decisions through any market conditions.

For more information visit www. consumerstaples.fisherinvestments.com

With more than 900 million consumers, the continent of Africa is one of the world’s fastest growing markets. In Africa Rising, renowned global business consultant Vijay Mahajan reveals this remarkable marketplace as a continent with massive needs and surprising buying power.

Crossing thousands of miles across the continent, he shares the lessons that Africa’s businesses have learned about succeeding on the continent...shows how global companies are succeeding despite Africa’s unique political, economic, and resource challenges...introduces local entrepreneurs and foreign investors who are building a remarkable spectrum of profitable and sustainable business opportunities even in the most challenging locations...reveals how India and China are staking out huge positions throughout Africa...and shows the power of the diaspora in driving investment and development.

• Recognize that Africa is richer than you think
  Africa is richer than India on the basis of gross national income (GNI) per capita, and a dozen African countries have a higher GNI per capita than China.
• Aim for Africa Two
  Opportunities exist in all parts of the market, particularly the 400 million people in the middle of the market.
• Find opportunities to organize the market
  From retailing to cell phones to banking, companies are succeeding by building infrastructure.
• Develop strategies for the most youthful market in the world
  Companies are recognizing opportunities from diapers to music to medicine in a market growing younger every day.
• Understand that Africa is not a “media dark” continent
  From Nollywood to satellite to broadband, media is exploding on the continent.
• Recognize the hidden strength of the African diaspora
  The African diaspora brings resources and knowledge to African development and expands the African opportunity beyond the continent.
• Build Ubuntu markets
  Create profitable businesses, sustainable growth, and social organizations by meeting basic human needs.

Strategy and History comprises a selection of Professor Gray's key contributions to strategic debate over the past thirty years.

These essays have been selected both because they had significant messages for contemporary controversies, and because they have some continuing relevance for today and the future. Each essay in this book is really about strategy in the modern world, and reflects the many dimensions of this complex subject.

This book covers a wide range of subjects and historical events, but there are key issues covered throughout:

• being strategic
• the consequences of actions
• a respect for Clausewitz’s theory of war
• historical dependency
• the importance of geography
• being critical of enthusiasm for technology over human factors 
• the primacy of politics.

This important publication provides an invaluable insight into the development of strategic studies over the past 30 years from one of the world's leading theorists and practitioners of the subject. The book will be of great interest to all students  and analysts of strategy and international studies.

China has dominated the news for nearly a decade and will continue to grab headlines as it moves inexorably toward becoming the world's largest economy. It already has the largest middle class in the world; the most Internet users; the largest army; and is the world's largest polluter. Yet all this growth causes problems as China adapts to the laws of other lands in which it has investments; learns how to meet international guidelines and safety standards for its products; stretches its resources to the limit; and struggles to maintain stability and control over an increasingly restive population.

China Inside Out explores the social and economic forces unleashed by China's relentless drive to modernization. Bill Dodson presents the stories of average Chinese workers, along with interviews with experts interlaced with his own experiences. The end result is an insider's view of the forces reshaping China as it takes an increasingly prominent role in the new world order.

• Looks at the trends reshaping China and reveals how China's place in the world is evolving
• Written by an industry analyst, advisor, and business manager in China, who is also a columnist for the China Economic Review
• Explains important changes for investors and business leaders interested in China

For business leaders, investors, and China watchers, China Inside Out offers a truly in-depth examination of China's changing role in the world.

Kirsten Grind’s The Lost Bank is a magisterial and gripping account of these events, tracing the cultural shifts, the cockamamie financial engineering, and the hubris and avarice that made this incredible story possible. The men and women who become the central players in this tragedy— the regulators and the bankers, the home buyers and the lenders, the number crunchers and the shareholders—are heroes and villains, perpetrators and victims, often switching roles with one another as the drama unfolds.

As a reporter at the time for the Puget Sound Business Journal, Grind covered a story set far from the epicenters of finance and media. It happened largely in places such as the suburban homes of central California and the office buildings of Seattle, but Grind covered the story from the beginning, and the clarity and persistence of her reporting earned her many awards, including being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald Loeb Award. She takes readers into boardrooms and bedrooms, revealing the power struggles that pitted regulators at the Office of Thrift Supervision and the FDIC against one another and the predatory negotiations of investment bankers and lawyers who enriched themselves during the bank’s rise and then devoured the decimated bank in its final days.

Written as compellingly as the finest fiction, The Lost Bank makes it clear that the collapse of Washington Mutual was not just the largest bank failure in American history. It is a story of talismanic qualities, reflecting the incredible rise and the precipitous collapse of not only an institution but of trust, fortunes, and the marketplaces for risk across the world.

The true story of how risk destroys, as told through the ongoing saga of AIG

From the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the subject of the financial crisis has been well covered. However, the story central to the crisis-that of AIG-has until now remained largely untold. Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate Suicide tells the inside story of what really went on inside AIG that caused it to choke on risk and nearly brining down the entire economic system. The book

• Reveals inside information available nowhere else, including the personal notes and records of key players such as the former Chairman of AIG, Hank Greenberg
• Takes readers behind the scenes at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
• Details how an understanding of risk built AIG, but a disdain for government regulators led to a run-in with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer

Fatal Risk is the comprehensive and compelling true story of the company at the center of the financial storm and how it nearly caused the entire economic system to collapse.