Treasury's War
Treasury's War

Author: Juan Zarate

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2013-09-10

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1610391160

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For more than a decade, America has been waging a new kind of war against the financial networks of rogue regimes, proliferators, terrorist groups, and criminal syndicates. Juan Zarate, a chief architect of modern financial warfare and a former senior Treasury and White House official, pulls back the curtain on this shadowy world. In this gripping story, he explains in unprecedented detail how a small, dedicated group of officials redefined the Treasury's role and used its unique powers, relationships, and reputation to apply financial pressure against America's enemies. This group unleashed a new brand of financial power -- one that leveraged the private sector and banks directly to isolate rogues from the international financial system. By harnessing the forces of globalization and the centrality of the American market and dollar, Treasury developed a new way of undermining America's foes. Treasury and its tools soon became, and remain, critical in the most vital geopolitical challenges facing the United States, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and the regimes in Iran, North Korea, and Syria. This book is the definitive account, by an unparalleled expert, of how financial warfare has taken pride of place in American foreign policy and how America's competitors and enemies are now learning to use this type of power themselves. This is the unique story of the United States' financial war campaigns and the contours and uses of financial power, and of the warfare to come.

Birth of a Market
Birth of a Market

Author: Kenneth D. Garbade

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-01-13

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 0262297795

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The evolution of “a marvel of modern finance,” the market for U.S. Treasury securities, from 1917 to 1939. The market for U.S. Treasury securities is a marvel of modern finance. In 2009 the Treasury auctioned $8.2 trillion of new securities, ranging from 4-day bills to 30-year bonds, in 283 offerings on 171 different days. By contrast, in the decade before World War I, there was only about $1 billion of interest-bearing Treasury debt outstanding, spread out over just six issues. New offerings were rare, and the debt was narrowly held, most of it owned by national banks. In Birth of a Market, Kenneth Garbade traces the development of the Treasury market from a financial backwater in the years before World War I to a multibillion dollar market on the eve of World War II. Garbade focuses on Treasury debt management policies, describing the origins of several pillars of modern Treasury practice, including “regular and predictable” auction offerings and the integration of debt and cash management. He recounts the actions of Secretaries of the Treasury, from William McAdoo in the Wilson administration to Henry Morgenthau in the Roosevelt administration, and their responses to economic conditions. Garbade's account covers the Treasury market in the two decades before World War I, how the Treasury financed the Great War, how it managed the postwar refinancing and paydowns, and how it financed the chronic deficits of the Great Depression. He concludes with an examination of aspects of modern Treasury debt management that grew out of developments from 1917 to 1939.

The Civil War
The Civil War

Author: Stephen W. Sears

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13:

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This book does not recount the history of the Civil War. Rather, the intent is to give, in words and pictures, impressions of that war.

Rescue Board
Rescue Board

Author: Rebecca Erbelding

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0385542526

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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD For more than a decade, a harsh Congressional immigration policy kept most Jewish refugees out of America, even as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In 1944, the United States finally acted. That year, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, and put a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle in charge. Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together a team of D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. Together, they tricked the Nazis, forged identity papers, maneuvered food and medicine into concentration camps, recruited spies, leaked news stories, laundered money, negotiated ransoms, and funneled millions of dollars into Europe. They bought weapons for the French Resistance and sliced red tape to allow Jewish refugees to escape to Palestine. In this remarkable work of historical reclamation, Holocaust historian Rebecca Erbelding pieces together years of research and newly uncovered archival materials to tell the dramatic story of America’s little-known efforts to save the Jews of Europe.

Bankrupting the Enemy
Bankrupting the Enemy

Author: Edward S Miller

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Published: 2007-09-10

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 161251118X

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Award-winning author Edward S. Miller contends in this new work that the United States forced Japan into international bankruptcy to deter its aggression. While researching newly declassified records of the Treasury and Federal Reserve, Miller, a retired chief financial executive of a Fortune 500 resources corporation, uncovered just how much money mattered. Washington experts confidently predicted that the war in China would bankrupt Japan, not knowing that the Japanese government had a huge cache of dollars fraudulently hidden in New York. Once discovered, Japan scrambled to extract the money. But, Miller explains, in July 1941 President Roosevelt invoked a long-forgotten clause of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to freeze Japan s dollars and forbade it to sell its hoard of gold to the U.S. Treasury, the only open gold market after 1939. Roosevelt s temporary gambit to bring Japan to its senses, not its knees, was thwarted, however, by opportunistic bureaucrats. Dean Acheson, his handpicked administrator, slyly maneuvered to deny Japan the dollars needed to buy oil and other resources for war and for economic survival. Miller's lucid writing and thorough understanding of the complexities of international finance enable readers unfamiliar with financial concepts and terminology to grasp his explanation of the impact of U.S. economic policies on Japan. His review of thirty-seven studies of Japan's resource deficiencies begs the question of why no U.S. agency calculated the impact of the freeze on Japan's overall economy. His analysis of a massive OSS-State Department study of prewar Japan clearly demonstrates that the deprivations facing the Japanese people were the country to remain in financial limbo buttressed its choice of war at Pearl Harbor. Such a well-documented study is certain to be recognized for its significant contributions to the historiography of the origins of the Pacific War.

Tides of War
Tides of War

Author: Steven Pressfield

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2007-01-30

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 055390406X

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Narrated from death row by Alcibiades’ bodyguard and assassin, a man whose own love and loathing for his former commander mirrors the mixed emotions felt by all Athens, Tides of War tells an epic saga of an extraordinary century, a war that changed history, and a complex leader who seduced a nation. Brilliant at war, a master of politics, and a charismatic lover, Alcibiades was Athens’ favorite son and the city’s greatest general. A prodigal follower of Socrates, he embodied both the best and the worst of the Golden Age of Greece. A commander on both land and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory. But like the heroes in a great Greek tragedy, he was a victim of his own pride, arrogance, excess, and ambition. Accused of crimes against the state, he was banished from his beloved Athens, only to take up arms in the service of his former enemies. For nearly three decades, Greece burned with war and Alcibiades helped bring victories to both sides — and ended up trusted by neither. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Steven Pressfield's The Profession. Praise for Tides of War “Pressfield’s battlefield scenes rank with the most convincing ever written.”—USA Today “Pressfield serves up not just hair-raising battle scenes . . . but many moments of valor and cowardice, lust and bawdy humor. . . . Even more impressively, he delivers a nuanced portrait of ancient athens.”—Esquire “Unabashedly brilliant, epic, intelligent, and moving.”—Kirkus Reviews “Pressfield’s attention to historic detail is exquisite. . . . This novel will remain with the reader long after the final chapter is finished.”—Library Journal “Astounding, historically accurate tale . . . Pressfield is a master storyteller, especially adept in his graphic and embracing descriptions of the land and naval battles, political intrigues and colorful personalities, which come together in an intense and credible portrait of war-torn Greece.”—Publishers Weekly

War by Other Means
War by Other Means

Author: Robert D. Blackwill

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-04-12

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0674545982

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A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2016 Today, nations increasingly carry out geopolitical combat through economic means. Policies governing everything from trade and investment to energy and exchange rates are wielded as tools to win diplomatic allies, punish adversaries, and coerce those in between. Not so in the United States, however. America still too often reaches for the gun over the purse to advance its interests abroad. The result is a playing field sharply tilting against the United States. “Geoeconomics, the use of economic instruments to advance foreign policy goals, has long been a staple of great-power politics. In this impressive policy manifesto, Blackwill and Harris argue that in recent decades, the United States has tended to neglect this form of statecraft, while China, Russia, and other illiberal states have increasingly employed it to Washington’s disadvantage.” —G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs “A readable and lucid primer...The book defines the extensive topic and opens readers’ eyes to its prevalence throughout history...[Presidential] candidates who care more about protecting American interests would be wise to heed the advice of War by Other Means and take our geoeconomic toolkit more seriously. —Jordan Schneider, Weekly Standard

Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton

Author: Veda Boyd Jones

Publisher: Chelsea House Pub

Published: 1999-09-01

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9780791053546

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Describes the career of Alexander Hamilton, who rose from humble beginnings to become a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and the first Secretary of the Treasury.

Currency Statecraft
Currency Statecraft

Author: Benjamin J. Cohen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 022658772X

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At any given time, a limited number of national currencies are used as instruments of international commerce, to settle foreign trade transactions or store value for investors and central banks. How countries whose currencies gain international appeal choose to use this status forms their strategy of currency statecraft. In different circumstances, issuing governments may welcome and promote the internationalization of their currency, tolerate it, or actively oppose it. Benjamin J. Cohen offers a provocative explanation of the strategic policy choices at play. In a comprehensive review that ranges from World War II to the present, Cohen convincingly argues that one goal stands out as the primary motivation for currency statecraft: the extent of a country’s geopolitical ambition, or how driven it is to build or sustain a prominent place in the international community. When a currency becomes internationalized, it generally increases the power of the nation that produces it. In the persistent contestation that characterizes global politics, that extra edge can matter greatly, making monetary rivalry an integral component of geopolitics. Today, the major example of monetary rivalry is the emerging confrontation between the US dollar and the Chinese renminbi. Cohen describes how China has vigorously promoted the international standing of its currency in recent years, even at the risk of exacerbating relations with the United States, and explains how the outcome could play a major role in shaping the broader geopolitical engagement between the two superpowers.