Foreclosing the Future
Foreclosing the Future

Author: Bruce Rich

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781610911849

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World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has vowed that his institution will fight poverty and climate change, a claim that World Bank presidents have made for two decades. But if worldwide protests and reams of damning internal reports are any indication, too often it does just the opposite. By funding development projects and programs that warm the planet and destroy critical natural resources on which the poor depend, the Bank has been hurting the very people it claims to serve. What explains this blatant contradiction? If anyone has the answer, it is arguably Bruce Rich—a lawyer and expert in public international finance who has for the last three decades studied the Bank’s institutional contortions, the real-world consequences of its lending, and the politics of the global environmental crisis. What emerges from the bureaucratic dust is a disturbing and gripping story of corruption, larger-than-life personalities, perverse incentives, and institutional amnesia. The World Bank is the Vatican of development finance, and its dysfunction plays out as a reflection of the political hypocrisies and failures of governance of its 188 member countries. Foreclosing the Future shows how the Bank’s failure to address the challenges of the 21st Century has implications for everyone in an increasingly interdependent world. Rich depicts how the World Bank is a microcosm of global political and economic trends—powerful forces that threaten both environmental and social ruin. Rich shows how the Bank has reinforced these forces, undercutting the most idealistic attempts at alleviating poverty and sustaining the environment, and damaging the lives of millions. Readers will see global politics on an increasingly crowded planet as they never have before—and come to understand the changes necessary if the World Bank is ever to achieve its mission.

Making Big Money Investing in Foreclosures
Making Big Money Investing in Foreclosures

Author: Peter Conti

Publisher: Dearborn Trade

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780793173655

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The key to making money in real estate is finding motivated sellers. Financial trouble is often the single biggest motivator. From finding properties in foreclosure, to negotiating with sellers in financial distress, to reselling the properties to realize healthy profits, Making Big Money Investing in Foreclosures without Cash or Credit is a comprehensive money-making guide. Best-selling authors Peter Conti and David Finkel pull all the steps together into a seven-step action plan, so that investors can apply what they have learned and start making money.

Mortgaging the Earth
Mortgaging the Earth

Author: Bruce Rich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1134167180

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This critique of World Bank operations examines the effects of this organization on the societies in which it operates. Highly critical of the Bank's practices in its 50 years of operation, the author demonstrates how the Bank has become virtually unaccountable and a law unto itself. He describes how the Bank has supported oppressive regimes and loaned money to support large projects which have displaced local populations. He argues further that the Bank's current policies of structural adjustment are arresting the development of Third World countries.

Foreclosed America
Foreclosed America

Author: Isaac Martin

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-04-01

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 0804795789

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From 2007 to 2012, almost five percent of American adults—about ten million people—lost their homes because they could not make mortgage payments. The scale of this home mortgage crisis is unprecedented—and it's not over. Foreclosures still displace more American homeowners every year than at any time before the twenty-first century. The dispossession and forced displacement of American families affects their health, educational success, and access to jobs. It continues to block any real recovery in the hardest-hit communities. While we now know a lot about how this crisis affected the global economy, we still know very little about how it affected the people who lost their homes. Foreclosed America offers the first representative portrait of those people—who they are, how and where they live after losing their homes, and what they have to say about their finances, their neighborhoods, and American politics. It is a sobering picture of Americans down on their luck, and of a crisis that is testing American democracy.

Owning Our Future
Owning Our Future

Author: Marjorie Kelly

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Published: 2012-07-04

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1609945220

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A collection of company profiles that “succeeds in demonstrating how more sustainable business ventures can function in practice” (Publishers Weekly). As long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing financial income for the few, our economy will be locked into endless growth and widening inequality. But now people are experimenting with new forms of ownership, which Marjorie Kelly calls generative: aimed at creating the conditions for life for many generations to come. These designs may hold the key to the deep transformation our civilization needs. To understand these emerging alternatives, Kelly reports from all over the world, visiting a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multibillion-dollar employee-owned department-store chain in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical company in Denmark, a farmer-owned dairy in Wisconsin, and other places where a hopeful new economy is being built. Along the way, she finds the five essential patterns of ownership design that make these models work. “This magnificent book is a kind of recipe for how civilization might cope with its too-big-to-fail problem. It’s a hardheaded, clear-eyed, and therefore completely moving account of what a different world might look like—what it already does look like in enough places that you will emerge from its pages inspired to get involved.” —Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy

Preventing the Next Mortgage Crisis
Preventing the Next Mortgage Crisis

Author: Dan Immergluck

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-08-20

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1442253142

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The great U.S. mortgage crisis was a transformative event that will reverberate for decades across families, neighborhoods, and cities. After years of research on various aspects of the crisis, Dan Immergluck examines what went wrong, identifying the factors that created the fragile housing finance system, which provided fertile ground for calamity. He also examines the federal response to the crisis, including who benefitted most from the response, and how a more effective and fair response could have been formulated. To reduce the incidence of future crises, Immergluck provides a pathway for building a more stable and fair housing finance system that would be less vulnerable to the booms and busts of global finance. Housing finance helps determine access to stable, decent-quality, affordable housing and also affects the geography of housing and educational opportunities. Thus, housing markets shape our communities, our neighborhoods, and our social and economic opportunities. Immergluck’s analysis and formulation of a way forward will be of particular interest to those concerned with urban form, neighborhood change and stability, and urban planning and policy, as well as those interested in housing and mortgage markets more generally.