Leave the Capital


Book Description

During the British Invasion in the mid-sixties, the world turned and looked at London. That's how it remained, until four Mancunian musicians opted to plough their hard-earned cash back into the city they loved in the form of proper recording facilities. Eric Stewart of The Mindbenders and songwriter extraordinaire Graham Gouldman created Strawberry Studios; Keith Hopwood and Derek Leckenby of Herman's Hermits crafted Pluto. Between them, they facilitated a musical revolution that would be defined by its rejection of the capital. This book tells the story of Manchester music through the prism of the two studio's key recordings. Of course, that story inevitably takes in The Smiths, Joy Division, The Fall, and The Stone Roses. But it's equally the story of `Bus Stop' and `East West' and `I'm Not in Love'. Above all, it's the story of music that couldn't have been made anywhere else but Manchester.




The World After Capital


Book Description

Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies, scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.




The Capital: A Novel


Book Description

“A dark comedy of manners packed with urgency” (H. W. Vail, Vanity Fair), The Capital is an instant classic of world literature. A highly inventive novel of ideas written in the rich European tradition, The Capital transports readers to the cobblestoned streets of twenty-first-century Brussels. Chosen as the European Union’s symbolic capital in 1958, this elusive setting has never been examined so intricately in literature. Translated with "zest, pace and wit" (Spectator) by Jamie Bulloch, Robert Menasse's The Capital plays out the effects of a fiercely nationalistic “union.” Recalling the Balzacian conceit of assembling a vast parade of characters whose lives conspire to form a driving central plot, Menasse adapts this technique with modern sensibility to reveal the hastily assembled capital in all of its eccentricities. We meet, among others, Fenia Xenopoulou, a Greek Cypriot recently “promoted” to the Directorate-General for Culture. When tasked with revamping the boring image of the European Commission with the Big Jubilee Project, she endorses her Austrian assistant Martin Sussman’s idea to proclaim Auschwitz as its birthplace—of course, to the horror of the other nation states. Meanwhile, Inspector Émile Brunfaut attempts to solve a gritty murder being suppressed at the highest level; Matek, a Polish hitman who regrets having never become a priest, scrambles after taking out the wrong man; and outraged pig farmers protest trade restrictions as a brave escapee squeals through the streets. These narratives and more are masterfully woven, revealing the absurdities—and real dangers—of a fracturing Europe. A tour de force from one of Austria’s most esteemed novelists, The Capital is a mordantly funny and piercingly urgent saga of the European Union, and an aerial feat of sublime world literature.




The Purpose of Capital


Book Description

An exploration of our understanding of the purpose of capital and the cultural, historic and environmental aspects of how we have come to understand the relation between economic, social and environmental components of capital. Offers a vision of capital as a fuel to promote individual freedom in the context of community and Earth.




Capital in the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.




Capital


Book Description

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.




Capital Rules


Book Description

"The rise of global financial markets in the last decades of the twentieth century was premised on one fundamental idea: that capital ought to flow across country borders with minimal restriction and regulation. Freedom for capital movements became the new orthodoxy. In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that this was not always the case. Transactions routinely executed by bankers, managers, and investors during the 1990s—trading foreign stocks and bonds, borrowing in foreign currencies—had been illegal in many countries only decades, and sometimes just a year or two, earlier. How and why did the world shift from an orthodoxy of free capital movements in 1914 to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that neither the U.S. Treasury nor Wall Street bankers have preferred or promoted multilateral, liberal rules for global finance. Instead, European policy makers conceived and promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture. Whereas U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization, French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, “managed” globalization. This contest over the character of globalization continues today."




Love and Capital


Book Description

Brilliantly researched and wonderfully written, Love and Capital reveals the rarely glimpsed and heartbreakingly human side of the man whose works would redefine the world after his death. Drawing upon previously unpublished material, acclaimed biographer Mary Gabriel tells the story of Karl and Jenny Marx's marriage. Through it, we see Karl as never before: a devoted father and husband, a prankster who loved a party, a dreadful procrastinator, freeloader, and man of wild enthusiasms -- one of which would almost destroy his marriage. Through years of desperate struggle, Jenny's love for Karl would be tested again and again as she waited for him to finish his masterpiece, Capital. An epic narrative that stretches over decades to recount Karl and Jenny's story against the backdrop of Europe's Nineteenth Century, Love andCapital is a surprising and magisterial account of romance and revolution -- and of one of the great love stories of all time.




Capital Wars


Book Description

Economic cycles are driven by financial flows, namely quantities of savings and credits, and not by high street inflation or interest rates. Their sweeping destructive powers are expressed through Global Liquidity, a $130 trillion pool of footloose cash. Global Liquidity describes the gross flows of credit and international capital feeding through the world’s banking systems and wholesale money markets. The huge jump in the volume of international financial markets since the mid-1980s has been boosted by deregulation, innovation and easy money, with financial globalisation now surpassing the peaks of integration reached before the First World War. Global Liquidity drives these markets: it is often determinant, frequently disruptive and always fast-moving. Barely one fifth of Wall Street’s huge gains over recent decades have come from earnings: rising liquidity and investors’ appetite for riskier financial assets have propelled stock prices higher. Similar experiences are shared worldwide and even in emerging markets, such as India, flat earnings have not deterred waves of foreign money and domestic mutual funds from driving-up stock prices. Now with central banks actively pursuing quantitative easing policies, industrial corporations flush with cash and rising wealth levels among emerging market investors, the liquidity theory of investment has never been more important. International spill-overs of these rapacious cross-border flows sets off capital wars and exposes the unattractive face of liquidity called ‘risk.’ As the world grows bigger, it becomes ever more volatile. From the early 1960s onwards, the world economy and its financial markets have suffered from three broad types of shocks – labour costs, oil and commodities, and global liquidity. Financial markets spin on fragile axes and the absence of liquidity often provides a warning of upcoming troubles. Global Liquidity is a much-discussed, but narrowly-researched and vaguely-defined topic. This book deeply explores the subject by clearly defining and measuring liquidity worldwide and by showing its importance for investors. The roles of central banks, shadow banking, the rise of Repo and growth of wholesale money are discussed. Additionally, covering the latest developments in China’s increasingly dominant financial economy, this book will appeal to practitioners, policy-makers, economists and academics, as well as those with a general interest in how financial markets work.




Capital


Book Description

Go inside the elite investment firm with Capital. The Capital Group is one of the world?s largest investment management organizations, but little is known about it because the company has shunned any type of publicity. This compelling book, for the first time, takes you inside one of the most elite and private investment firms out there?the Capital Group Companies?a value investment firm par excellence. It digs deeps to reveal the corporate culture and long-term investment strategies that have made Capital the one organization where most investment professionals would like to work and would most recommend as long-term investment managers for their family and friends.