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Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World

Author : John B. Taylor

Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company

Page : 517 pages

File Size : 42,52 MB

Release : 2008-01-17

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 0393609235

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Book Description

“A valuable insider’s account of financial diplomacy in the Bush administration.”—Jeffrey E. Garten, Washington Post Sworn in as head of the U.S. Treasury Department’s international finance division just three months prior to 9/11, John B. Taylor soon found himself at the center of the war on terror. Global Financial Warriors takes you inside the White House Situation Room, to the meetings of the G7 finance ministers, and to cities worldwide as Taylor assembles a coalition to freeze terrorist assets, plans the financial reconstruction in Afghanistan, oversees the development of a new currency in Iraq, and deals with the spread of financial crises. From reforming the IMF and the World Bank to negotiating international agreements to reduce Iraq’s debt by 80 percent and cancel the debt of very poor countries, Taylor’s unparalleled access offers the reader an insider’s account of a pivotal time in international finance.





Corporate Governance Failures

Author : James P. Hawley

Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press

Page : 351 pages

File Size : 20,28 MB

Release : 2011-04-15

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 0812204646

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Book Description

Corporate governance, the internal policies and leadership that guide the actions of corporations, played a major part in the recent global financial crisis. While much blame has been targeted at compensation arrangements that rewarded extreme risk-taking but did not punish failure, the performance of large, supposedly sophisticated institutional investors in this crisis has gone for the most part unexamined. Shareholding organizations, such as pension funds and mutual funds, hold considerable sway over the financial industry from Wall Street to the City of London. Corporate Governance Failures: The Role of Institutional Investors in the Global Financial Crisis exposes the misdeeds and lapses of these institutional investors leading up to the recent economic meltdown. In this collection of original essays, edited by pioneers in the field of fiduciary capitalism, top legal and financial practitioners and researchers discuss detrimental actions and inaction of institutional investors. Corporate Governance Failures reveals how these organizations exposed themselves and their clientele to extremely complex financial instruments, such as credit default swaps, through investments in hedge and private equity funds as well as more traditional equity investments in large financial institutions. The book's contributors critique fund executives for tolerating the "pursuit of alpha" culture that led managers to pursue risky financial strategies in hopes of outperforming the market. The volume also points out how and why institutional investors failed to effectively monitor such volatile investments, ignoring relatively well-established corporate governance principles and best practices. Along with detailed investigations of institutional investor missteps, Corporate Governance Failures offers nuanced and realistic proposals to mitigate future financial pitfalls. This volume provides fresh perspectives on ways institutional investors can best act as gatekeepers and promote responsible investment.



Hard Lessons

Author : United States. Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction

Publisher : Government Printing Office

Page : 480 pages

File Size : 35,96 MB

Release : 2009

Category : History

ISBN :

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Book Description

Product Description: The billions of dollars expended in Iraq constitute the largest relief and reconstruction exercise in American history. SIGIR's lessons learned capping report characterizes this effort in four phases (pre-war to ORHA, CPA, post-CPA/Negroponte era, and Khalilzad, Crocker, and the Surge). From this history, SIGIR forwards a series of conclusions and recommendations for Congress to consider when organizing for the next post-conflict reconstruction situation. Over the past five years, the United States has provided nearly fifty billion dollars for the relief and reconstruction of Iraq. This unprecedented rebuilding program, implemented after the March 2003 invasion, was developed to restore Iraq's essential services, build Iraq's security forces, create a market-based economy, and establish a democratic government--all in pursuit of U.S. interests in a stable and free Iraq. Did the U.S. rebuilding program achieve its objectives? Was the money provided well-spent or wasted? What lessons have we learned from the experience? Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), answers these and other important questions by presenting a comprehensive history of the U.S. program, chiefly derived from SIGIR's body of extensive oversight work in Iraq, hundreds of interviews with key figures involved with the reconstruction program, and thousands of documents evidencing the reconstruction work that was - or was not - done. The report examines the limited pre-war planning for reconstruction, the shift from a large infrastructure program to a more community-based one, and the success of the Surge in 2007 and beyond. Hard Lessons concludes that the U.S. government did not have the structure or resources in place to execute the mammoth relief and reconstruction plan it took on in 2003. The lessons learned from this experience create a basis for reviewing and reforming the U.S. approach to contingency relief and reconstruction operations.



Hard Lessons: the Iraq Reconstruction Experience

Author : Stuart W. Bowen

Publisher : DIANE Publishing

Page : 508 pages

File Size : 43,21 MB

Release : 2009-05

Category : Technology & Engineering

ISBN : 1437912745

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Book Description

A combination of poor planning, weak oversight and greed cheated U.S. taxpayers and undermined American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. taxpayers have paid nearly $51 billion for projects in Iraq, including training the Iraqi army and police and rebuilding Iraq's oil, electric, justice, health and transportation sectors. Many of the projects did not succeed, partly because of violence in Iraq and friction between U.S. officials in Washington and Iraqi officials in Baghdad. The U.S. gov¿t. "was neither prepared for nor able to respond quickly to the ever-changing demands" of stabilizing Iraq and then rebuilding it. This report reviews the problems in the war effort, which the Bush admin. claimed would cost $2.4 billion. Charts and tables.



To Lead the World

Author : Melvyn P. Leffler

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 318 pages

File Size : 13,78 MB

Release : 2008-07-21

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 0199888027

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Book Description

U.S. national security policy is at a critically important crossroads. The Bush Doctrine of unilateralism, pre-emptive war, and the imposition of democracy by force has proven disastrous. The United States now finds itself vilified abroad, weakened at home, and bogged down in a seemingly endless and unwinnable war. In To Lead the World, Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro bring together eleven of America's most esteemed writers and thinkers to offer concrete, historically grounded suggestions for how America can regain its standing in the world and use its power more wisely than it has during the Bush years. Best-selling authors such as David Kennedy, Niall Ferguson, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, and Samantha Power address such issues as how the US can regain its respect in the world, respond to the biggest threats now facing the country, identify reasonable foreign policy goals, manage the growing debt burden, achieve greater national security, and successfully engage a host of other problems left unsolved and in many cases exacerbated by the Bush Doctrine. Representing a wide range of perspectives, the writers gathered here place the current foreign-policy predicament firmly in the larger context of American and world history and draw upon realistic appraisals of both the strengths and the limits of American power. They argue persuasively that the kind of leadership that made the United States a great--and greatly admired--nation in the past can be revitalized to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Written by prize-winning authors and filled with level-headed, far-sighted, and achievable recommendations, To Lead the World will serve as a primary source of political wisdom in the post-Bush era and will add immeasurably to the policy debates surrounding the 2008 presidential election.



Underground Empire

Author : Henry Farrell

Publisher : Henry Holt and Company

Page : 166 pages

File Size : 41,41 MB

Release : 2023-09-12

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1250840562

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Book Description

Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize A Responsible Statecraft best foreign policy book of 2023 A deeply researched investigation that reveals how the United States is like a spider at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control, which it weaves in the form of globe-spanning networks such as fiber optic cables and obscure payment systems America’s security state first started to weaponize these channels after 9/11, when they seemed like necessities to combat terrorism—but now they’re a matter of course. Multinational companies like AT&T and Citicorp build hubs, which they use to make money, but which the government can also deploy as choke points. Today’s headlines about trade wars, sanctions, and technology disputes are merely tremors hinting at far greater seismic shifts beneath the surface. Slowly but surely, Washington has turned the most vital pathways of the world economy into tools of domination over foreign businesses and countries, whether they are rivals or allies, allowing the U.S. to maintain global supremacy. In the process, we have sleepwalked into a new struggle for empire. Using true stories, field-defining findings, and original reporting, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman show how the most ordinary aspects of the post–Cold War economy have become realms of subterfuge and coercion, and what we must do to ensure that this new arms race doesn’t spiral out of control.



Peerless and Periled

Author : Kati Suominen

Publisher : Stanford University Press

Page : 330 pages

File Size : 38,63 MB

Release : 2012-06-20

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 0804784906

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Book Description

As the world economy emerges from the financial crisis, critics are announcing an end of the American era. The United States is said to be in an inexorable decline, and the expectation for the 21st century is for China to eclipse America and for the contours of global governance to blur. The loss of America's preeminent status will undercut our sway abroad and our safety and standard of living at home. But is America really done? Is the American era really over? In this provocative account, based on interviews with senior policymakers and cutting-edge research, Kati Suominen argues that talk of the end of Pax Americana is more smoke than fire. The international crisis did not fundamentally change the way the world is run. The G20 is but an American-created sequel to the G8, the US dollar still reigns supreme, and no country has resigned from the US-built, post-war financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This continuity reflects an absence of alternatives; there are no rival orders that would match the growth and globalization generated by leaving the United States at the helm. But Washington has no time for complacency. The American order is peerless, but it is also imperiled. To transcend this critical moment in history, the United States must step up and lead. Only America can uphold its order. In an interdependent world economy of rising powers, the US must stand for strategic multilateralism: striking deals with pivotal powers to tame destabilizing financial imbalances, securing free and fair markets abroad for US banks and businesses, and transforming the IMF and emerging Asian and European financial schemes into rapid responders to instability.



Private Warriors

Author : Ken Silverstein

Publisher : Verso

Page : 292 pages

File Size : 10,55 MB

Release : 2000

Category : History

ISBN : 9781859843253

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Book Description

Widely-researched and fast-paced, Private Warriors surveys the generals, gun-runners and national security staffers who were cast adrift at the end of the Cold War and who now operate in the private sector. In these pages we encounter Ernst Werner Glatt, a right-wing German who was for many years the Pentagon's preferred gun-runner; ex-Secretary of State Alexander Haig who now lobbies for China and assists in selling weapons to Turkey; and Frank Gaffney, an ex-Pentagon official who has grown rich by promoting the biggest boondoggle of them all, Star Wars. Today's private warriors have a direct financial interest in war and the connections to push for the maintenance of bloated military budgets.



What Caused the Financial Crisis

Author : Jeffrey Friedman

Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press

Page : 372 pages

File Size : 23,10 MB

Release : 2011-06-06

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 081220493X

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Book Description

The deflation of the subprime mortgage bubble in 2006-7 is widely agreed to have been the immediate cause of the collapse of the financial sector in 2008. Consequently, one might think that uncovering the origins of subprime lending would make the root causes of the crisis obvious. That is essentially where public debate about the causes of the crisis began—and ended—in the month following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the 502-point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in mid-September 2008. However, the subprime housing bubble is just one piece of the puzzle. Asset bubbles inflate and burst frequently, but severe worldwide recessions are rare. What was different this time? In What Caused the Financial Crisis leading economists and scholars delve into the major causes of the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression and, together, present a comprehensive picture of the factors that led to it. One essay examines the role of government regulation in expanding home ownership through mortgage subsidies for impoverished borrowers, encouraging the subprime housing bubble. Another explores how banks were able to securitize mortgages by manipulating criteria used for bond ratings. How this led to inaccurate risk assessments that could not be covered by sufficient capital reserves mandated under the Basel accords is made clear in a third essay. Other essays identify monetary policy in the United States and Europe, corporate pay structures, credit-default swaps, banks' leverage, and financial deregulation as possible causes of the crisis. With contributions from Richard A. Posner, Vernon L. Smith, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and John B. Taylor, among others, What Caused the Financial Crisis provides a cogent, comprehensive, and credible explanation of why the crisis happened. It will be an essential resource for scholars and students of finance, economics, history, law, political science, and sociology, as well as others interested in the financial crisis and the nature of modern capitalism and regulation.