A Washington Post and Strategy+Business Book of the Year.Stagnant wages. Feeble growth figures. An angry, disillusioned public. The early 1970s witnessed the arrival of the problems that define the twenty-first century.In An Extraordinary Time, Marc Levinson investigates how the oil crisis of the 1970s marked a radical turning point in global economics: and paved the way for the political and financial troubles of...

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.But the container did...

Extensively revised to reflect the dramatic shifts and consolidation of the financial markets, the seventh edition of this highly regarded book provides a clear and incisive guide to a complex world that even those who work in it often find hard to understand.With chapters on the markets that deal with money, foreign exchange, equities, bonds, commodities, financial futures, options and other derivatives, it looks at why these markets exist, how they work and who trades in them, an...

From the acclaimed author of The Box, a new history of globalization that shows us how to navigate its futureGlobalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is also one of the most contentious issues of our time. While it may have made goods less expensive, it has also sent massive flows of money across borders and shaken the global balance of power. Outside the Box offers a fresh and l...

The decades after World War II were a golden age across much of the world. It was a time of economic miracles, an era when steady jobs were easy to find and families could see their living standards improving year after year. And then, around 1973, the good times vanished. The world economy slumped badly, then settled into the slow, erratic growth that had been the norm before the war. The result was an era of anxiety, uncertainty, and political extremism that we are still grappling with t...

Longlist, 2026 FT and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year AwardHow a little-known executive revolutionized the delivery businessJames E. Casey was a most improbable revolutionary. Shy and soft-spoken, in his day he was all but unknown to the public at large. Drawing little attention to himself, he laid the foundation of an industry that is fundamental to the modern world economy—the industry that manages businesses’ long-d...

From the acclaimed author of The Box, a new history of globalization that shows us how to navigate its futureGlobalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is alsoone of the most contentious issues of our time. While it may have made goods less expensive, it has also sent massiveflows of money across borders and shaken the global balance of power. Outside the Box offers a fresh and lively historyof ...

In An Extraordinary Time, acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson recounts the global collapse of the postwar economy in the 1970s. While economists struggle to return us to the high economic growth rates of the past, Levinson counterintuitively argues that the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly; slow economic growth is the norm—no matter what economists and politicians may say. Yet these atypical years left the public with unreasonable expectations of what gover...

In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of do...

Conservatives today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailin...

We all want to help. Over the past fifty years $1 trillion of aid has flowed from Western governments to Africa, with rock stars and actors campaigning for more. But this has not helped Africa. It has ruined it.Dambisa Moyo's excoriating and controversial book reveals why millions are actually poorer because of aid, unable to escape corruption and reduced, in the West's eyes, to a childlike state of beggary.Dead Aid shows us another way. Using hard...

When the first fissures became visible to the naked eye in August 2007, suddenly the most powerful men in the world were three men who were never elected to public office. They were the leaders of the world’s three most important central banks: Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. Over the next five years, they and their fellow central bankers deployed trillions of dollars, pounds and euros to co...