The Sustainability Edge: How to Drive Top-line Growth With Triple-bottom-line Thinking
Suhas Apte and Jagdish N. Sheth
Rotman-UTP Publishing, December 2016, $32.95

Business leaders need to embrace sustainability in order to ensure the lasting success of their organizations. Co-authors Suhas Apte and Jagdish N. Sheth bring their expertise from practice and from academia to illustrate how business leaders can embed sustainability in a truly holistic and transformative way.

Through an examination of such companies as Walmart, AT&T, IKEA, and the Tata Group, Apte and Sheth have developed a proven and actionable framework rooted in e real-world success of these companies. The case studies reveal how business leaders proactively engage, energize, and promote market sustainability to all of their stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, and the government. The Sustainability Edge enables companies to critically engage their stakeholders and influence them to accept sustainability as part of their core mission.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
Marc Levinson
Basic Books, November 2016, $36.50

In An Extraordinary Time, acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson describes how the end of the postwar boom reverberated throughout the global economy, bringing energy shortages, financial crises, soaring unemployment, and a gnawing sense of insecurity. Politicians—suddenly unable to deliver the prosperity of years past—railed haplessly against currency speculators, oil sheikhs, and other forces they couldn’t control. From Sweden to Southern California, citizens grew suspicious of their newly ineffective governments and rebelled against the high taxes needed to support social welfare programs enacted when coffers were flush.

Almost everywhere, the pendulum swung to the right, bringing politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power. But their promise that deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, and smaller government would restore economic security and robust growth proved unfounded. Although the guiding hand of the state could no longer deliver the steady economic performance the public had come to expect, free-market policies were equally unable to do so. The golden age would not come back again.

A sweeping reappraisal of the last 60 years of world history, An Extraordinary Time forces us to come to terms with how little control we actually have over the economy.

The Curse of Cash
Kenneth S. Rogoff
Princeton University Press, August 2016, $40.50

The world is drowning in cash—and it’s making us poorer and less safe. In The Curse of Cash, Kenneth Rogoff, one of the world’s leading economists, makes a persuasive and fascinating case for an idea that, until recently, would have seemed outlandish: getting rid of most paper money.

Even as people in advanced economies are using less paper money, there’s more cash in circulation—a record $1.4 trillion in U.S. dollars alone, or $4,200 for every American, mostly in $100 bills. And the U.S. is hardly exceptional. So what’s all that cash being used for? The answer is simple: a large part is feeding tax evasion, corruption, terrorism, the drug trade, human trafficking, and the rest of a massive global underground economy.

As Rogoff shows, paper money can also cripple monetary policy. In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, central banks have been unable to stimulate growth and inflation by cutting interest rates significantly below zero for fear this action would drive investors to abandon Treasury bills and stockpile cash. This constraint has paralyzed monetary policy in virtually every advanced economy and is likely to be a recurring problem in the future.

The Curse of Cash offers a plan for phasing out most paper money and addresses the issues the transition will pose: from fears about privacy and price stability to providing subsidized debit cards for the poor.

While phasing out the bulk of paper money will hardly solve the world’s problems, it would be a significant step toward addressing a surprising number of very big ones. Provocative, engaging, and backed by compelling original arguments and evidence, The Curse of Cash is certain to spark widespread debate.

Fraud: An American History From Barnum to Madoff
Edward J. Balleisen
Princeton University Press, January 2017, $43.95

The U.S. has always proved an inviting home for boosters, sharp dealers, and outright swindlers. Worship of entrepreneurial freedom has complicated the task of distinguishing aggressive salesmanship from unacceptable deceit, especially on the frontiers of innovation. At the same time, competitive pressures have often nudged respectable firms to embrace deception. As a result, fraud has been a key feature of American business since its beginnings. In this sweeping narrative, Edward J. Balleisen traces the history of fraud in America—and the evolving efforts to combat it—from the age of P. T. Barnum through the eras of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff.

Starting with an early 19th-century American legal world of “buyer beware,” this unprecedented account describes the slow, piecemeal construction of modern regulatory institutions to protect consumers and investors, from the Gilded Age through to the New Deal and the Great Society. It concludes with the more recent era of deregulation, which has brought with it a spate of costly frauds, including the savings and loan crisis, corporate accounting scandals, and the recent mortgage-marketing debacle.

A Complete Guide to the Futures Market: Technical Analysis, Trading Systems, Fundamental Analysis, Options, Spreads and Trading Principles, Second Edition
Jack D. Schwager with Mark Etzkorn
December 2016, $150.00

A Complete Guide to the Futures Market is the comprehensive resource for futures traders and analysts. Spanning everything from technical analysis, trading systems, and fundamental analysis to options, spreads, and practical trading principles, A Complete Guide is required reading for any trader or investor who wants to successfully navigate the futures market.

Clear, concise, and to the point, this fully revised and updated second edition provides a solid foundation in futures market basics, details key analysis and forecasting techniques, explores advanced trading concepts, and illustrates the practical application of these ideas with hundreds of market examples.

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
Peter F. Drucker and Jim Collins
January 2017, $36.99

This is a 50th anniversary commemorative edition of Peter F. Drucker’s timeless classic work on leadership and management, with a foreword by Jim Collins.

For decades, Drucker was widely regarded as “the dean of this country’s business and management philosophers.” In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management: the executive.

The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds us, is the ability to “get the right things done.” This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mould them into results.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
James Rickards
Portfolio, November 2016, $39.00

A drumbeat is sounding among the global elites. The signs of a coming financial crisis, one exponentially bigger than the last, are unmistakable. This time, the elites have an audacious plan to protect themselves from the fallout: hoarding cash now and locking down the global financial system when a crisis hits.

New York Times bestselling author James Rickards sounded the alarm on currency manipulation in Currency Wars and correctly predicted that the Federal Reserve would not raise interest rates for years in The Death of Money. In The New Case for Gold he predicted the rise of negative interest rates. Now, as he shows in this frightening, meticulously researched book, governments around the world have no compunction about conspiring against their citizens. As he writes, “Your money may be like a jewel in a glass case at Cartier; you can see it but not touch it.”

Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street
Maureen O’Hara
W.W. Norton & Company, October 2016, $35.95

In 2001, Goldman Sachs structured a complex financial contract so that its client, the government of Greece, would appear to have far less debt than it actually did. When news of this transaction came out years later, the inevitable question arose: even though Goldman’s actions were legal, were they ethically wrong? Is modern finance itself inherently unethical?

In Something for Nothing, financial economist Maureen O’Hara explains that one of the key innovations of modern finance is its reliance on arbitrage, the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets to generate profits and remove inefficiencies. When done correctly, arbitrage can create value at little or no cost (in effect, getting “something for nothing”); but it can also be an exploitative tool.

In a lucid, insightful discussion of the ethics of arbitrage in modern finance, O’Hara reveals how the rules can often be stretched into still-legal yet highly unethical business practices. Examining key cases in clear and persuasive prose, O’Hara illuminates various aspects of financial ethics, from the Goldman Greek transaction to Lehman Brothers’ attempt to cover up its debt, JPMorgan Chase’s manoeuvres in California’s energy markets, Bernie Madoff’s trading strategies in the 1980s, high-frequency trading practices, and toxic loans in France.