Tower of Thieves, AIG

Tower of Thieves, AIG PDF Author: Andrew Spencer
Publisher: ibooks
ISBN: 1883283698
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This is a true story of personal greed and downfall, corporate greed fueled with economic and social treachery, shareholder waste and discrimination at AIG, 70 Pine Street in the heart of the financial district. This address is know as the AIG Tower, hence our working title *** TOWER OF THIEVES *** The central character is a man with a wife, a family, who has cheated his way to the top BY DOING GOOD. What he sees and what he does validates what unchecked power on Wall Street will do to a man and what it has done to an entire company and country. The events at AIG lead right to the CEO and Senior Vice Chairman and how our guy fights an entire corrupt organization and how he became one of those he despised. “We found each other pretty easily – he recognized me from a photo that had appeared in the local paper about the book I was writing about Bear Stearns – and he asked if we could go ‘somewhere more private’ to talk. Part of me thought this was ridiculous. A big part of me, in fact. All this cloak-and-dagger nonsense seemed out of place in early summer Nantucket, Massachusetts, of all places. But there was some little sliver inside that told me this could be good. So I went along with it. We went to a park, sat down and, once we’d gotten through the formalities about how the Bear book was going, we got down to business. ‘I should tell you that I’m going to federal prison at the end of the year,’ he began. “In my admittedly limited experience with such introductions, I have to say that any time a conversation starts with someone’s announcing their impending sentencing date, fasten your seatbelt, because the story that follows is usually related to the sentencing date itself and is also usually pretty interesting. I took notes as John rolled out his story, the same story you’re about to read here. After about five minutes, though, I realized I was no longer writing. I was just listening in disbelief to what he was telling me. This meeting took place long before AIG was the poster child for corporate greed and chutzpah. For that matter, this was before a lot of people had ever even heard of AIG, and even fewer people knew what they did as a corporation.” This is a story of what our taxpayer dollars have purchased.

Tower of Thieves, AIG

Tower of Thieves, AIG PDF Author: Andrew Spencer
Publisher: ibooks
ISBN: 1883283698
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a true story of personal greed and downfall, corporate greed fueled with economic and social treachery, shareholder waste and discrimination at AIG, 70 Pine Street in the heart of the financial district. This address is know as the AIG Tower, hence our working title *** TOWER OF THIEVES *** The central character is a man with a wife, a family, who has cheated his way to the top BY DOING GOOD. What he sees and what he does validates what unchecked power on Wall Street will do to a man and what it has done to an entire company and country. The events at AIG lead right to the CEO and Senior Vice Chairman and how our guy fights an entire corrupt organization and how he became one of those he despised. “We found each other pretty easily – he recognized me from a photo that had appeared in the local paper about the book I was writing about Bear Stearns – and he asked if we could go ‘somewhere more private’ to talk. Part of me thought this was ridiculous. A big part of me, in fact. All this cloak-and-dagger nonsense seemed out of place in early summer Nantucket, Massachusetts, of all places. But there was some little sliver inside that told me this could be good. So I went along with it. We went to a park, sat down and, once we’d gotten through the formalities about how the Bear book was going, we got down to business. ‘I should tell you that I’m going to federal prison at the end of the year,’ he began. “In my admittedly limited experience with such introductions, I have to say that any time a conversation starts with someone’s announcing their impending sentencing date, fasten your seatbelt, because the story that follows is usually related to the sentencing date itself and is also usually pretty interesting. I took notes as John rolled out his story, the same story you’re about to read here. After about five minutes, though, I realized I was no longer writing. I was just listening in disbelief to what he was telling me. This meeting took place long before AIG was the poster child for corporate greed and chutzpah. For that matter, this was before a lot of people had ever even heard of AIG, and even fewer people knew what they did as a corporation.” This is a story of what our taxpayer dollars have purchased.

Genealogy of American Finance

Genealogy of American Finance PDF Author: Robert E. Wright
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539215
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In this unique, well-illustrated book, readers learn how fifty financial corporations came to dominate the U.S. banking system and their impact on the nation's political, social, and economic growth. A story that spans more than two centuries of war, crisis, and opportunity, this account reminds readers that American banking was never a fixed enterprise but has evolved in tandem with the country. More than 225 years have passed since Alexander Hamilton created one of the nation's first commercial banks. Over time, these institutions have changed hands, names, and locations, reflecting a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and other restructuring efforts that echo changes in American finance. Some names, such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, will be familiar to readers. The origins of others, including Zions Bancorporation, founded by Brigham Young and owned by the Mormon Church until 1960, are surprising. Exploring why some banks failed and others thrived, this book wonders, in light of the 2008 financial crisis, whether recent consolidations have reached or even exceeded economically rational limits. A key text for navigating the complex terrain of American finance, this volume draws a fascinating family tree for projecting the financial future of a nation.

The Watchman's Rattle

The Watchman's Rattle PDF Author: Rebecca Costa
Publisher: Vanguard
ISBN: 1593156502
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Why can't we solve our problems anymore? Why do threats such as the Gulf oil spill, worldwide recession, terrorism, and global warming suddenly seem unstoppable? Are there limits to the kinds of problems humans can solve? Rebecca Costa confronts- and offers a solution to-these questions in her highly anticipated and game-changing book, The Watchman's Rattle. Costa pulls headline for today's news to demonstrate how accelerating complexity quickly outpaces that rate at which the human brain can develop new capabilities. With compelling evidenced based on research in the rise and fall of Mayan, Khmer, and Roman empires, Costa shows how t ht tendency to find a quick solutions- leads to frightening long term consequence: Society's ability to solve its most challenging, intractable problems becomes gridlocked, progress slows, and collapse ensues. A provocative new voice in the tradition of thought leaders Thomas Friedman, Jared Diamond and Malcolm Gladwell, Costa reveals how we can reverse the downward spiral. Part history, part social science, part biology, The Watchman's Rattle is sure to provoke, engage and incite change.

Transformations in Central Europe between 1989 and 2012

Transformations in Central Europe between 1989 and 2012 PDF Author: Tomas Kavaliauskas
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739174118
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book is an in-depth study of the transformations in Central Europe in the years since the fall of Communism. In a comparative analysis of geopolitical, ethical, cultural, and socioeconomic shifts, this essential text investigates the post-communist countries.

The Alcalde

The Alcalde PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
As the magazine of the Texas Exes, The Alcalde has united alumni and friends of The University of Texas at Austin for nearly 100 years. The Alcalde serves as an intellectual crossroads where UT's luminaries - artists, engineers, executives, musicians, attorneys, journalists, lawmakers, and professors among them - meet bimonthly to exchange ideas. Its pages also offer a place for Texas Exes to swap stories and share memories of Austin and their alma mater. The magazine's unique name is Spanish for "mayor" or "chief magistrate"; the nickname of the governor who signed UT into existence was "The Old Alcalde."

Liberty Means Freedom for All

Liberty Means Freedom for All PDF Author: Steven H. Propp
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 9781475958737
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description
Thomas Anderson has just graduated from CSU Stentoria, with his degree in Political Science. Its an election year, and as a young progressive in California who has been raised by equally progressive parents, he is very much concerned with the political issues currently being discussed in the mass media. A chance encounter with a fellow graduate named Kelly Kelso, however, shakes up his sett led view of the world. He is challenged to examine the rising number of alternatives to the two-party system presented by third party movements such as the Libertarian Party and the Green Party, and is forced to acknowledge that there is far more to politics than simply Democrat versus Republican, and liberal versus conservative. Thomas delves energetically into not only the growing Libertarian movement, but the free market perspective of the Austrian School of economics, as well as the rigid yet compelling view of Ayn Rands philosophy of Objectivism. His explorations grow wider, now encompassing the Tea Party movement and the Christi an Right; tax resisters and gun rights advocates; survivalists and militia members; anarchists, communists, and Democratic Socialists; as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement. He debates the radical environmental views of animal welfare and animal rights advocates, and challenges opponents of corporate globalism as well as deniers of global warming, as he struggles to reformulate and articulate his own developing beliefs, while coping with a sea of conflicting ideas and opposition. But this abstract political theory is brought into sharp encounter with concrete political reality, when Thomas hears a news report of an armed conflict with authorities taking place just outside of town, involving someone with whom he has become emotionally involved

When China Rules the World

When China Rules the World PDF Author: Martin Jacques
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101151455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
Greatly revised and expanded, with a new afterword, this update to Martin Jacques’s global bestseller is an essential guide to understanding a world increasingly shaped by Chinese power Soon, China will rule the world. But in doing so, it will not become more Western. Since the first publication of When China Rules the World, the landscape of world power has shifted dramatically. In the three years since the first edition was published, When China Rules the World has proved to be a remarkably prescient book, transforming the nature of the debate on China. Now, in this greatly expanded and fully updated edition, boasting nearly 300 pages of new material, and backed up by the latest statistical data, Martin Jacques renews his assault on conventional thinking about China’s ascendancy, showing how its impact will be as much political and cultural as economic, changing the world as we know it. First published in 2009 to widespread critical acclaim - and controversy - When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order has sold a quarter of a million copies, been translated into eleven languages, nominated for two major literary awards, and is the subject of an immensely popular TED talk.

House of Outrageous Fortune

House of Outrageous Fortune PDF Author: Michael Gross
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451666217
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
“Michael Gross’s new book…packs [in] almost as many stories as there are apartments in the building. The Jackie Collins of real estate likes to map expressions of power, money and ego… Even more crammed with billionaires and their exploits than 740 Park” (Penelope Green, The New York Times). With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, penthouses that cost almost $100 million, and a tenant roster that’s a roll call of business page heroes and villains, Fifteen Central Park West is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. In this “stunning” (CNN) and “deliciously detailed” (Booklist, starred review) New York Times bestseller, journalist Michael Gross turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that’s sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross “takes another gossip-laden bite out of the upper crust” (Sam Roberts, The New York Times), which includes Denzel Washington, Sting, Norman Lear, top executives, and Russian and Chinese oligarchs, to name a few. And he recounts the legendary building’s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially déclassé Manhattan neighborhood. More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New York’s rich and famous—and is a bellwether of the city’s changing social and financial landscape.

Anti-Piketty

Anti-Piketty PDF Author: Jean-Philippe Delsol
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 1944424261
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has enjoyed great success and provides a new theory about wealth and inequality. However, there have been major criticisms of his work. Anti-Piketty: Capital for the 21st Century collects key criticisms from 20 specialists—economists, historians, and tax experts—who provide rigorous arguments against Piketty's work while examining the notions of inequality, growth, wealth, and capital.

The Siege of Delhi

The Siege of Delhi PDF Author:
Publisher: Mittal Publications
ISBN:
Category : Delhi (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description