by Emily Lambert ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2011
For the general reader, a full-blooded introduction to an arcane world.
Forbes senior writer Lambert delivers a history of the birth and evolution of Chicago’s swashbuckling futures market.
The buying and selling of futures contracts—agreements to receive at a future date a specific quality and quantity of a given commodity for a fixed price—had its origins elsewhere, but the practice took hold in post–Civil War Chicago, the prairie city built for trade. The Irish-dominated Board of Trade opened with a focus on grain; an early version of what became the Jewish-dominated Mercantile Exchange followed in 1874, specializing in butter and eggs. Hedgers used futures to minimize risk; speculators sought profits in the interstices of fluctuating prices. Their maneuvering served a useful purpose, marking the direction of prices based on the current market conditions, but from the beginning farmers and merchants saw the traders as “unscrupulous gamblers,” rogues staffing a “filching machine.” Over time the futures market would grow well beyond its humble origins, expanding from exclusively agricultural products—soybeans, corn, cattle and pork bellies—to more esoteric goods and articles like foreign currencies, stock options and carbon credits. Although Chicago’s now-merged and much-copied exchange handles billions of dollars, the whiff of disrepute persists. Lambert charts this market’s many colorful twists and turns, the scandals and the triumphs, and devotes loving attention to a parade of outrageous risk-takers. She follows the market’s migration from the brawling trading pits to the computer age, from its status as a mere stockyard adjunct to today’s stand-alone, glass-tower imperiousness. Although she provides lucid explanations of how the market works and how the various money-making strategies collide, the charm of her fast-paced, informal history comes from the book’s animating insight: “Finance is like biology: Everything is intertwined.” Drawing from interviews, newspaper clippings and various histories, the author demonstrates that geography, past-practice and, above all, individual personalities matter mightily in the shaping of markets. The futures market appears to have been invented to prove her thesis.
For the general reader, a full-blooded introduction to an arcane world.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-465-01843-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
by Enrico Moretti ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2012
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's...
A fresh, provocative analysis of the debate on education and employment.
Up-and-coming economist Moretti (Economics/Univ. of California, Berkeley) takes issue with the “[w]idespread misconception…that the problem of inequality in the United States is all about the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent.” The most important aspect of inequality today, he writes, is the widening gap between the 45 million workers with college degrees and the 80 million without—a difference he claims affects every area of peoples' lives. The college-educated part of the population underpins the growth of America's economy of innovation in life sciences, information technology, media and other areas of globally leading research work. Moretti studies the relationship among geographic concentration, innovation and workplace education levels to identify the direct and indirect benefits. He shows that this clustering favors the promotion of self-feeding processes of growth, directly affecting wage levels, both in the innovative industries as well as the sectors that service them. Indirect benefits also accrue from knowledge and other spillovers, which accompany clustering in innovation hubs. Moretti presents research-based evidence supporting his view that the public and private economic benefits of education and research are such that increased federal subsidies would more than pay for themselves. The author fears the development of geographic segregation and Balkanization along education lines if these issues of long-term economic benefits are left inadequately addressed.
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's more profound problems.Pub Date: May 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-75011-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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