Today's financial landscape and what Wall Street doesn't want you to know Rigged Money is based on one simple truth: Wall Street needs money from Main Street, not the other way around. The financial industry has convinced the general public that investing across different asset classes is the only way to protect wealth, but this is an outdated rule that no longer applies. Since asset classes—small caps, large caps, international investments, gold, and bonds—now overlap when it comes to risk and volatility parameters, the diversification effect is gone. That's exactly what Wall Street doesn't want you to know—that the rules of the game have changed. Risk Isn't Constant: Pie charts lie when it comes to accurately describing the risk of stocks and bonds Dividends Are No Silver Bullet: They are designed to entice investors rather than to increase a company's value or your net worth Buy and Hold is Dead: The financial world (and all the companies and securities in it) moves too quickly and is changing too often for this theory to hold true today Gold Is Not an Investment: Gold is today's currency of fear, and this fear is driven by escalating government debt An unflinching look at this new financial world, Lee Munson's Rigged Money arms today's investors with the simple, smart, and clear advice needed to level the playing field.
Today's financial landscape and what Wall Street doesn't want you to know Rigged Money is based on one simple truth: Wall Street needs money from Main Street, not the other way around. The financial industry has convinced the general public that investing across different asset classes is the only way to protect wealth, but this is an outdated rule that no longer applies. Since asset classes—small caps, large caps, international investments, gold, and bonds—now overlap when it comes to risk and volatility parameters, the diversification effect is gone. That's exactly what Wall Street doesn't want you to know—that the rules of the game have changed. Risk Isn't Constant: Pie charts lie when it comes to accurately describing the risk of stocks and bonds Dividends Are No Silver Bullet: They are designed to entice investors rather than to increase a company's value or your net worth Buy and Hold is Dead: The financial world (and all the companies and securities in it) moves too quickly and is changing too often for this theory to hold true today Gold Is Not an Investment: Gold is today's currency of fear, and this fear is driven by escalating government debt An unflinching look at this new financial world, Lee Munson's Rigged Money arms today's investors with the simple, smart, and clear advice needed to level the playing field.
In this searing exposéformer Wall Street insider Nomi Prins shows how the 2007-2008 financial crisis turbo-boosted the influence of central bankers and triggered a massive shift in the world order. Central banks and international institutions like the IMF have overstepped their traditional mandates by directing the flow of epic sums of fabricated money without any checks or balances. Meanwhile, the open door between private and central banking has ensured endless opportunities for market manipulation and asset bubbles -- with government support. Through on-the-ground reporting, Prins reveals how five regions and their central banks reshaped economics and geopolitics. She discloses how Mexico navigated its relationship with the US while striving for independence and how Brazil led the BRICS countries to challenge the US dollar's hegemony. She explains how China's retaliation against the Fed's supremacy is aiding its ongoing ascent as a global superpower and how Japan is negotiating the power shift from the West to the East. And she illustrates how the European response to the financial crisis fueled instability that manifests itself in everything from rising populism to the shocking Brexit vote. Packed with tantalizing details about the elite players orchestrating the world economy -- from Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi to Ben Bernanke and Christine Lagarde -- Collusion takes the reader inside the most discreet conversations at exclusive retreats like Jackson Hole and Davos. A work of meticulous reporting and bracing analysis, Collusion will change the way we understand the new world of international finance.
Shortlisted for the SABEW Best in Business Book Awards Winner of the 2022 AAMBC Literary Award for Non-Fiction/Self Help Book of the Year A breakdown of the economic and social injustices facing Black people and other marginalized citizens inspired by political activist Kimberly Jones' viral video, “How Can We Win.” “So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for fifty years, every time that I played, if you didn't like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win? How can you win?" When Kimberly Jones declared these words amid the protests spurred by the murder of George Floyd, she gave a history lesson that in just over six minutes captured the economic struggles of Black people in America. Within days the video had been viewed by millions of people around the world, riveted by Jones’s damning—and stunningly succinct—analysis of the enduring disparities Black Americans face. In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions—those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves—the most valuable asset we have—in the fight against a system that is still rigged.
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER JUSTICE ON TRIAL Stunned by the turbulence of the 2020 election, millions of Americans are asking the forbidden question: what really happened? It was a devastating triple punch. Capping their four-year campaign to destroy the Trump presidency, the media portrayed a Democratic victory as necessary and inevitable. Big Tech, wielding unprecedented powers, vaporized dissent and erased damning reports about the Biden family's corruption. And Democratic operatives, exploiting a public health crisis, shamelessly manipulated the voting process itself. Silenced and subjected, the American people lost their faith in the system. RIGGED is the definitive account of the 2020 election. Based on Mollie Hemingway's exclusive interviews with campaign officials, reporters, Supreme Court justices, and President Trump himself, it exposes the fraud and cynicism behind the Democrats' historic power-grab. Rewriting history is a specialty of the radical left, now in control of America's political and cultural heights. But they will have to contend with the determination, insight, and eloquence of Mollie Hemingway. RIGGED is a reminder for weary patriots that truth is still the most powerful weapon. The stakes for our democracy have never been higher.
The former Stanford University sailing coach sentenced in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal tells the riveting true story of how he was drawn unwittingly into a web of deceit in this eye-opening memoir that offers a damning portrait of modern college administration and the ways in which justice and fairness do not always intersect. For eleven years, John Vandemoer ran the prestigious Stanford University sailing program in which he coached Olympians and All-Americans. Though the hours were long and the program struggled for funding, sailing gave Vandemoer’s life shape and meaning. But early one morning, everything came crashing down when Vandemoer, still in his pajamas, opened the door to find FBI and IRS agents on his doorstep. He quickly learned that a recruiter named Rick Singer had used him as a stooge in a sophisticated scheme designed to take advantage of college coaches and play to the endless appetite for university fundraising—and wealthy parents looking for an edge for their college-bound children. Vandemoer was summarily fired, kicked out of campus housing, his children booted from campus daycare. The next year of his life was a Kafkaesque hellscape, and though he was an innocent man who never received a dime was the first person to be convicted in what became known as the Varsity Blues scandal. A true story that reads like a suspense novel, Rigged Justice lays bare how a sophisticated scheme could take advantage of college coaches and university money—and how one family became collateral damage in a large government investigation that dominated national headlines.
Two veteran Wall Street insiders, Matthew Piepenburg and Thomas Lott, warn, inform and prepare Main Street investors for dramatic market drawdowns ahead. Despite the most artificial (and extended) bull melt-up in the history of capital markets, U.S. and global markets are poised to enter an equally historic and extended meltdown, dramatically impacting the portfolios, retirements and longer-term plans for the vast majority of uninformed investors. Rigged to Fail makes these risks and opportunities objectively clear and offers blunt insights and solutions to winning within an otherwise rigged-to-fail market, now driven almost entirely by an increasingly cornered, and desperate, Federal Reserve. Having spent over fifty combined years inside the blue-chip banks, hedge funds and family offices which serve the wealthiest clients, Matt and Tom have dedicated themselves to making hitherto exclusive investment insights rightfully available to all investors, regardless of market experience or income levels. Rigged to Fail plainly addresses why and how markets have become so profoundly distorted and risk-saturated by setting forth an historically-confirmed template of reckless and debt-driven policies and the recessions which always follow. Without resorting to bull or bear bias, Rigged to Fail does not dwell on fear or hope selling, but simply provides empirical evidence of the dangers facing current markets, how they got to this critical tipping point while simultaneously laying out the generational risks and opportunities which lie ahead. Matt and Tom offer clear, simple and specific portfolio and investment solutions to manage markets, and hence portfolios, during all phases of a debt-driven cycle, from the "recovery" and subsequent melt-up phase to the meltdown phase that consistently follows. Their insider perspective and heavy reliance upon blunt market data (rather than opinion) provides a plain-speak explanation of the three biggest mistakes made by uniformed investors while offering a common sense tutorial as to the oldest, simplest and yet most ignored approaches to making real money in otherwise dangerously rigged-to-fail markets. Their chapters offer direct solutions to managing risk in a market whose rise and fall is now entirely driven by central bank policies and "experiments" rather than traditional market fundamentals. In short, unprecedented risk, as well as opportunity lies ahead, and the authors promise to guide readers through these historical markets with confidence, calm and most importantly, success. Now is not the time to ignore such extraordinary, yet mostly media-hidden risks, nor to miss out on the opportunities to ensure generational wealth. As career Wall Street insiders, Matt and Tom know all too well how this market casino is stacked against the majority of uninformed investors and are committed to protecting every reader who lands upon these pages. So, scroll up and click "buy now," as the clock is indeed ticking on the most hated bull run of modern capital markets.
Dollar bills may wear out, but they don't disappear. So why can banks add trillions of new dollars to the existing ones without asking anybody's permission? In this unique disclosure of the spoils of money creation, economist Detlef Gloge reveals how each dollar created by banks is a dollar of wealth seized from society--mainly from society's most vulnerable members. At last, there is an honest, convincing exposition of banks' harmful activity that causes wealth disparity, economic stagnation, and societal conflict. Rigged Money's objectivity is a refreshing contrast to mainstream duplicity on this subject. His lucid arguments contrast with the usual academic jargon and sophistry and should appeal to anyone with common sense and social awareness. Dr. Gloge explains the founders' constitutional concept of sound money, how citizens have twice impelled the U.S. Congress to adhere to it, and why the time has come for another reminder. Rigged Money is for those who truly care about the future of the United States. It is also a wake-up call for politicians who keep looking the other way while monetary malpractice is tearing the country apart.
The largest financial fraud in history wasn't Enron's colossal accounting crimes, Bernie Madoff's record-setting Ponzi scheme or the Libor scandal, in which some of the world's biggest banks conspired to profit by manipulating interest rates. No, the largest financial fraud in history is one most Americans know little to nothing about. It isn't mentioned by politicians, reported on the nightly news or discussed by coworkers during lunch break. The biggest fraud in history is a financial scheme perpetrated by the U.S. government and its banking accomplices. Over the last century, they've used coercion, deception and market manipulation to convince Americans the U.S. dollar is as good as gold and silver. The truth is, it's not.
Millions of Americans have lost confidence in their political and economic system. After years of stagnant wages, volatile job markets, and an unwillingness by those in power to deal with profound threats such as climate change, there is a mounting sense that the system is fixed, serving only those select few with enough money to secure a controlling stake. In The System Robert B. Reich shows how wealth and power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the middle class, and undermine democracy. Addressing himself Jamie Dimon, the powerful banker and chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Reich exposes how those at the top, be they Democrats or Republicans, propagate myths about meritocracy, national competitiveness, corporate social responsibility, and the 'free market' to distract most Americans from their own accumulation of extraordinary wealth, and their power over the system. Instead of answering the call to civic duty, they have chosen to uphold self-serving policies that line their own pockets and benefit their bottom line. Reich's objective is not to foster cynicism, but rather to demystify the system so that American voters might instill fundamental change and demand that democracy works for the majority once again.
