A Barrel Of Gold

A robber's attempt to steal a barrel of gold is stopped by a robber.

Gold is wealth. Wealth is power. Power is a curse. This captivating fantasy adventure—the untold story of the daughter King Midas turned to gold—will dazzle you with the kind of action, adventure, twists, turns, and a bit of romance to make any fan of magic and mythology greedy for more. After King Midas’s gift—or curse—almost killed his daughter, he relinquished The Touch forever. Ten years later, Princess Kora still bears the consequences of her father’s wish: her skin shines golden, rumors follow her everywhere she goes, and she harbors secret powers that are getting harder to hide. Kora spends her days concealed behind gloves and veils. It isn’t until a charming duke arrives that Kora believes she could indeed be loved. But their courtship is disrupted when a thief steals treasures her father needs to survive. Thanks to Kora’s unique ability to sense gold, she sails off on her quest to find the missing items. Magic, mythology, fantasy, and pirate adventures charge through every page as Kora learns that not everything is what it seems—not her companions, not the thieves, and not even Kora herself. A Touch of Gold: Is told from the perspective of Kora, King Midas’s daughter and a strong female protagonist Is a clean fantasy adventure, perfect for fans of the #1 New York Times bestselling books, The Wrath & the Dawn and Cinder Is an enchanting and captivating fantasy adventure/fairy tale retelling Features a beautifully decorated cover Will have strong appeal to readers ages 13 & up

How a small family company in the Finger Lakes became one of the most important wine producers in the United States, only to be taken down by corporate greed and mismanagement. In 1880, Walter Stephen Taylor, a cooper’s son, started a commercial grape juice company in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Two years later, wine production was added, and by the 1920s, the Taylor Wine Company was firmly established. Walter Taylor’s three sons carefully guided the company through Prohibition and beyond, making it the most important winery in the Northeast and profoundly affecting the people and community of Hammondsport, where the company was headquartered. In the 1960s, the Taylor family took the company public. Ranked sixth in domestic wine production and ripe for corporate takeover, the company was sold to Coca-Cola in 1977. Three more changes of corporate ownership followed until, in 1995, this once-dynamic and important wine producer was obliterated, tearing apart the local economy and changing a way of life that had lasted for nearly a century. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews with many of the principal players, Thomas Pellechia skillfully traces the economic dynamism of the Finger Lakes wine region, the passion and ingenuity of the Taylor family, and the shortsighted corporate takeover scenario that took down a once-proud American family company. In addition to providing important lessons for business innovators, Over a Barrel is a cautionary tale for a wine region that is repeating its formative history. “Over a Barrel offers various cautionary lessons that can be applied to all too many businesses. The Taylor paterfamilias began making wine from grapes in the Finger Lakes region, and his three sons improved it. But when the world of wine consumption changed, the Taylors didn’t, and they eventually sold out. Subsequent corporate owners gradually destroyed the wine and the farmers who grew the grapes. Only the black sheep grandson stayed true to the family code, ranting from his perch on Bully Hill.” — Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It, Third Edition, Revised and Expanded

The spike in the oil price to almost $150 per barrel in summer 2008 was the last great excess of the crazed noughties bull markets, staged even as stock markets crumbled worldwide. Contrary to entrenched establishment opinion still embraced by many, 'Petromania' proves this oil price blowout was a classic speculative bubble, but driven primarily by new modes of financial speculation. Demolishing widespread, oft-repeated but incorrect arguments that such trade in paper barrels cannot move oil prices, 'Petromania' details how this financialisation of the oil markets meshed with other trends to create a moment that saw investment banks and hedge funds collectively wield more power over the price of black gold than OPEC or any multinational oil company. It also shows how regulatory blindness to the 'dark matter' of modern finance caused so many to confuse fantasy with reality for so long. 'Petromania' matters not just because fortunes were won and lost in oil's dizzying ascent and crash, but because this bubble spelled misery for ordinary people worldwide, destabilised developing world governments, and delayed interest rate cuts desperately needed to address the ongoing global recession. 'Petromania' matters because while all eyes are on the crippled banking system, we risk ignoring valuable lessons about twenty-first century markets from this other great boom-and-bust - even as the forces that blew the bubble are once again at work. And 'Petromania', this tale of black gold, dark matter and paper barrels, is written by one of the few commentators who correctly called the bubble before it burst.

How the Coming Global Crash Will Create a Historic Gold Rush demonstrates the causal relationship between a deep economic crisis and a historical increase in the price of gold. Through the last years of his presidency, Jimmy Carter struggled with the legacy of the OPEC oil embargo causing large lines at the gas pump to pay surging gasoline costs. After the 1973 embargo, the price of oil quadrupled, forcing the United States into a deep recession that lasted into 1975. Gold surged during this period of stagflation, the unusual economic condition in which stagnant economic growth and high inflation coincide. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, gold hit a high of $843/ounce. In 2008–2009, the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and the bursting of the real estate bubble caused a Great Recession in which prestigious financial institutions failed across the globe and serious investors poured their money into gold to maintain their total asset value. In 2010, gold’s price hit a high of $1,426/ounce. In the wake of the economic collapse caused by the COVID-19 lockdown, gold hit a yearly high of $2,058.40 in 2020, on the way to an all-time high of $2,074.60 on March 8, 2022. The global economy faces an economic meltdown in 2023, the magnitude of which we have not seen since the Great Depression in the 1930s. When the bubble in hedge funds and derivative contracts bursts, financial institutions worldwide will have to absorb billions and possibly even trillions of dollars in losses, an amount of money almost inconceivable in any other era of global financial history. In this book, Dean Heskin and Jerome R. Corsi explain the reality of 2022–2023: the dollar may collapse, and mounting unemployment and plummeting property values may accelerate the near disappearance of the middle class. In the dystopian world we are entering, gold and silver may be the only “money” that will hold its value.

Russian folk beliefs have left their mark, not only on superstitions and customs, but in music, art and some major literary works by the likes of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Gogol. An exciting exploration of the Russian lower mythology, Russian Folk Belief offers a fascinating glimpse into the admixture of pagan and Christian elements which comprise the world view of the Russian peasant.