In A Banker's Journey, financial journalist and historian Daniel Gross, who, like Edmond Safra, traces his heritage to Aleppo, Syria, reconstructs the public life of an intensely private man. With exclusive access to Safra's personal archives, Gross tracks the banker's remarkable journey from Beirut to Milan, São Paulo, Geneva, and New York—to the pinnacle of global finance.Edmond Safra was fifteen in 1947, when his father sent him to establish a presence in Milan, Italy. ...

The Great Financial Crisis, which started in 2007-08, was originally called the ‘sub-prime’ crisis because its origins could be traced to excessive lending in the real estate sector in the US, concentrated mostly in sunbelt states like Nevada, Florida and California. There were similar pockets of excess lending for housing in Europe, notably in Ireland and Spain. But a key difference emerged later: in Ireland and Spain, the local banking systems almost collapsed and the governments experie...

The financial crisis that has gripped this country since last September has had so many twists and turns, it would make for a great drama -- if it all were not so real and damaging. Companies are shutting down and laying off workers, 401ks are melting away, and the government is spending $700 billion dollars to bail out banks and financial institutions -- and that's only the beginning. The financial services industry, and the many industries that depend on it -- from housing to cars -- is ...

Bubbles—from hot stocks in the 1920s to hot stocks in the 1990s—are much-lamented features of contemporary economic life. Time and again, American investors, seduced by the lures of quick money, new technologies, and excessive optimism, have shown a tendency to get carried away. Time and again, they have appeared foolish when the bubble burst. The history of finance is filled with tragic tales of shattered dreams, bankruptcies, and bitter recriminations.But what if the I-told-you-s...

An actionable, inviting, and confidence-boosting philosophy on how to tackle problems in your workplace and win.Our workplaces urgently need to get better, but change can feel murky, daunting, or even impossible. We imagine a different world, too, but billionaires are doing their best to make things worse.In Unions of Our Own, veteran labor organizer and cofounder of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union Daniel Gross provides a radically new, step-by-ste...

Blending cutting-edge legal strategies for winning justice at work with a theory of dramatic, bottom-up social change, this practical audio guide to workers’ rights aims to make work better while reinvigorating the labor movement. A powerful organization model called "solidarity unionism" is explained, showing how the labor force can avoid the pitfalls of the legal system and utilize direct action to win fair rights. The audio edition includes new cases governing fundamental labor rights a...

Welcoming women, Blacks, and immigrants long before most other unions, the Wobblies from the start were labor’s outstanding pioneers and innovators, unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as “unorganizable.” Wobblies organized the first sit-down strike (at General Electric, Schenectady, 1906), the first major auto strike (6,000 Studebaker workers, Detroit, 1911), the first strike to shut down all three coalfields in Colorado (1927), and the first “no-fare” transit-...

God can't wear pants. Pants are material. God is spiritual. You search everywhere in the Bible NO pants. Which means pants don't matter to God?All military troops wear pants into battle. You can't just go into battle without pants! That's just silly. So why doesnt God need a dashing set of trousers to guard His children or Himself? Because pants are just pants. Thats why pants arent included in the Armor of God found in Ephesians.To these statements, I say, Nope. Youll see....

This book is concerned with the optimization problem of maximizing the number of spanning trees of a multigraph. Since a spanning tree is a minimally connected subgraph, graphs and multigraphs having more of these are, in some sense, immune to disconnection by edge failure. We employ a matrix-theoretic approach to the calculation of the number of spanning trees.The authors envision this as a research aid that is of particular interest to graduate students or advanced undergraduate students...

If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel M. Gross provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening – and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The res...

What is a hostile environment? How exactly can feelings be mixed? What on earth might it mean when someone writes that he was "happily situated" as a slave? The answers, of course, depend upon whom you ask.Science and the humanities typically offer two different paradigms for thinking about emotion—the first rooted in brain and biology, the second in a social world. With rhetoric as a field guide, Uncomfortable Situations establishes common ground between these two paradigm...

The art and science of talent search: how to spot, assess, woo, and retain highly talented people.How do you find talent with a creative spark? To what extent can you predict human creativity, or is human creativity something irreducible before our eyes, perhaps to be spotted or glimpsed by intuition, but unique each time it appears?Obsessed with these questions, renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to ...