CFA Society Of Toronto - Home Page
Towards Sustainable Well-Being: Moving Beyond GDP in Canada and the World
Edited by Anders Hayden, Céofride Gaudet, and Jeffrey Wilson
University of Toronto Press
October 2022, $42.95
Towards Sustainable Well-Being examines existing efforts and emerging possibilities to improve upon gross domestic product (GDP) as the dominant indicator of economic and social performance. Contributions from leading international and Canadian researchers in the field of beyond-GDP measurement offer a rich range of perspectives on alternative ways to measure well-being and sustainability, along with lessons from around the world on how to bring those metrics into the policy process.
The book highlights a distinction between a reformist beyond-GDP vision, which seeks to improve policymaking and quality of life within existing political and economic institutions, and a transformative vision that aims for more fundamental change, including a move beyond economic growth. Illustrating the many advances that have occurred in Canada and internationally, Towards Sustainable Well-Being proposes next steps for both the reformist and transformative visions, as well as possible common ground between them in the pursuit of sustainable well-being.
James Rickards
Penguin Publishing Group
November 2022, $39.00
The supply chain crisis is coming to a head. Today, your favourite products are missing from store shelves, caught in supply chain limbo somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But what does this supply chain disruption look like six months, or even three years, from now? While we hope that post-pandemic recovery will resolve these issues, the reality is that digital currency, meme stonks, and social media can’t solve the age-old problem of producing and moving physical goods across oceans and continents. According to Jim Rickards, consumer frustration is only the tip of a very large, menacing iceberg that threatens global economic collapse. Our global economy faces unprecedented challenges in the next few months. But whether we sink or swim depends on how prepared we are—and what we do now to thwart the coming collapse.
For Profit: A History of Corporations
William Magnuson
Basic Books
November 2022, $40.00
For Profit offers a history of how corporate innovation has shaped society, from ancient Rome to Silicon Valley. Law professor William Magnuson argues that the story of the corporation didn’t have to come to this. Throughout history, he finds, corporations have been purpose-built to benefit the societies that surrounded them. Corporations enabled everything from the construction of ancient Rome’s roads and aqueducts to the artistic flourishing of the Renaissance to the rise of the middle class in the twentieth century. By recapturing this original spirit of civic virtue, Magnuson argues, corporations can help craft a society in which all of us—not just shareholders—benefit from the profits of enterprise.
Disability Friendly: How to Move from Clueless to Inclusive
John D. Kemp
Wiley
October 2022, $33.99
Although progress has been made around equality for many marginalized groups, people with disabilities are still massively underrepresented in organizations’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. People with disabilities make up at least 15 percent of the population, yet they are still too often overlooked. Many people with disabilities are highly motivated, create fantastic work, and add tremendous value to organizations.
Disability Friendly is a clarion call to businesses around the world to realize the opportunities presented by employing people with disabilities. It explains the potential of employees with disabilities, as well as how to create a culture of inclusion and, in the process, help people with disabilities become proud contributors.
Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
October 2022, $42.50
McKinsey & Company is the most prestigious consulting company in the world, earning billions of dollars in fees from major corporations and governments that turn to it to maximize their profits and enhance efficiency. McKinsey’s vaunted statement of values asserts that its role is to make the world a better place, and its reputation for excellence and discretion attracts top talent from universities around the world. But what does it actually do?
Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining tens of thousands of revelatory documents, and following rule number one of investigative reporting: Follow the money.
Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon
William D. Cohan
Penguin Publishing Group
November 2022, $54.00
No company embodied American ingenuity, innovation, and industrial power more spectacularly and more consistently than the General Electric Company (GE). GE once developed and manufactured many of the inventions we take for granted today, nearly everything from the lightbulb to the jet engine. GE also built a cult of financial and leadership success envied across the globe and became the world’s most valuable and most admired company. But even at the height of its prestige and influence, cracks were forming in its formidable foundation.
In a masterful re-appraisal of a company that once claimed to “bring good things to life,” pre-eminent financial journalist William D. Cohan argues that the incredible story of GE’s rise and fall is not only a paragon, but also a prism through which we can better understand American capitalism. Beginning with its founding, innovations, and exponential growth through acquisitions and mergers, Cohan plumbs the depths of GE’s storied management culture, its pioneering doctrine of shareholder value, and its seemingly hidden blind spots, to reveal that GE wasn’t immune to the hubris and avoidable mistakes suffered by many other corporations.
In Power Failure, Cohan punctures the myth of GE, exploring in a rich narrative how a once-great company wound up broken and in tatters—a cautionary tale for the ages.
Leveraged: The New Economics of Debt and Financial Fragility
Edited by Moritz Schularick
University of Chicago Press
November 2022, $71.95
The 2008 financial crisis was a seismic event that laid bare how financial institutions’ instabilities can have devastating effects on societies and economies. The COVID-19 pandemic wrought similar financial devastation at the beginning of 2020, and once more, massive interventions by central banks were needed to ward off the collapse of the financial system. All of which begs the question: why is our financial system so fragile and vulnerable that it needs government support so often?
For a generation of economists who have risen to prominence since 2008, these events have defined not only how they view financial instability, but financial markets more broadly. Leveraged brings together these voices to take stock of what we have learned about the costs and causes of financial fragility and offer a new canonical framework for understanding it. Their message: the origins of financial instability in modern economies run deeper than the technical debates around banking regulation, countercyclical capital buffers, and living wills for financial institutions. Leveraged offers a fundamentally new picture of how financial institutions and societies coexist, for better or worse.
The essays here mark a new starting point for research in financial economics. As we muddle through the effects of a second financial crisis in this young century, Leveraged provides a road map and a research agenda for the future.
Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company: 1550-1650
David Howarth
Yale University Press
February 2023, $47.50
The East India Company was the largest commercial enterprise in British history, yet its roots in Tudor England are often overlooked. The Tudor revolution in commerce led ambitious merchants to search for new forms of investment, not least in risky overseas enterprises—and for these “adventurers,” the most profitable bet of all would be on the East India Company.
Through a host of stories and fascinating details, David Howarth brings to life the Company’s way of doing business—from the leaky ships and petty seafarers of its embattled early days to later sweeping commercial success. While the Company’s efforts met with disappointment in Japan, they sowed the seeds of their success in India, setting the outline for what would later become the Raj. Drawing on an abundance of sources, Howarth shows how competition from European powers was vital to success—and considers whether the Company was truly “English” at all, or rather part of a Europe-wide movement.
Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Eighth Edition
Robert Z. Aliber, Charles P. Kindleberger, and Robert N. McCauley
Palgrave MacMillan
December 2022, $53.95
In the eighth edition of this classic text on the financial history of bubbles and crashes, Robert McCauley joins with Robert Aliber in building on Charles Kindleberger’s renowned work. McCauley draws on his central banking experience to introduce new chapters on cryptocurrency and the United States as the 21st century global lender of last resort. He also updates the book’s coverage of the recent property bubble in China and provides new perspectives on the US housing bubble of 2003–2006 and the Japanese bubble of the late 1980s. He gives new attention to the social psychology that leads people to take the risk of investing in Ponzi schemes and asset price bubbles. For the first time in this revised and updated edition, figures highlight key points to ensure that today’s generation of finance and economic researchers, students, practitioners, and policymakers—as well as investors looking to avoid crashes—have access to this panoramic history of financial crisis.
Jeremy J. Siegel
McGraw Hill
October 2022, $57.95
The long-awaited revised edition of the stocktrading classic gets you fully up to date on value investing, ESG investing, and other important developments.
The definitive guide to stock trading, Stocks for the Long Run has been providing the knowledge, insights, and tools that traders need to beat the market for nearly 30 years. This new edition brings you fully up to date on everything you need to know to draw steady profits for yourself or your clients. You’ll also get in-depth discussions of the big questions investors face: Are we seeing the eclipse of capitalism? What do global changes like climate change mean for markets worldwide?
Stocks for the Long Run is essential reading for every investor and advisor who wants to fully understand the market, including its behaviour, past trends, and future influences, in order to develop a prosperous long-term portfolio that’s both safe and secure.
