Debacle

La Debacle is the penultimate novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle. A stirring account of profound friendship between two soldiers from opposite ends of the class divide during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1.

A provocative critique of the Obama administration's economic policies and an examination of America's difficult economic future During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised "a net spending cut" to make government smaller in order to reduce the deficit. But this huge increase in government spending and debt, and the resulting prospect of higher taxes, will make America a poorer country. Are Americans happier because the government has determined where this money should be spent? According to John Lott and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, the answer is no, and in Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future they explain why. Obama's economic policies have raised unemployment, slowed economic growth, dramatically raised the national debt, squandered taxpayer money through poor investments, and damaged the housing market. The book explains why Obama's policies on spending, taxes, and regulation have all worked to harm the recovery, increase unemployment, and depress housing prices. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the deficits that President Obama proposes for the years from 2011 through 2020 come to a staggering $126,000 per family of four, and John Lott and Grover Norquist make clear why the costs outweigh the benefits Explains why Keynesian economics is more a way of transferring wealth to political constituencies than a legitimate economic theory for understanding how the economy operates Posits that Obama's economic policies were more an opportunity "to do big things" than to solve the country's economic problems Arguing that the policies of the Obama administration have created widespread economic chaos, Debacle is a bleak look at American finance from Grover Norquist.

When the rubber duckies for River Heights’s duck derby go missing, Nancy and her friends are ready to quack the case in the sixteenth book in the interactive Nancy Drew Clue Book mystery series. River Heights is hosting a duck derby to raise funds to install new benches by the pond in the park. Nancy, Bess, and George want to help, so they ask Mayor Strong if they can number the rubber duckies that will be used in the race. It’s a big responsibility, but they know they can do it. Then the box holding the duckies goes missing from Nancy’s doorstep! The girls need to find the duck-napper fast, but there’s a flock of suspects. Where do they even start without even a squeak of a clue? Will the Clue Crew figure out who flew off with their rubber duckies before the Mayor finds out they’re gone?

JUST WHO DO YOU HAVE TO KILL TO GET HEALTH CARE AROUND HERE? In this book, you, the reader, get to be the main character in an exciting tale of blackmail and corporate espionage. You're an alcoholic temp with a dream of one day being a celebrated novelist. Unfortunately, you drink too much. When you wake up from a blackout, you discover you've been framed for murder. Someone wants you to take a permanent job, and he's ready to blackmail you into doing it. What will you do? Will you turn yourself over to the cops and write a memoir about being wrongly imprisoned? Will you go perm and enjoy the benefits of health care? Or will you escape into the sewers and live with the Mole People? The choice is yours! If you want to just surrender and go to jail, turn to page 6. If you want to hide by blending in with a group of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, turn to page 160. If you'd like to let Haviland Payne, CEO of SkoolKidz Uniformz, have her way with you, turn to page 73. If you want to see how the whole situation gets resolved on page 181, turn to page 181.

This book analyzes in depth all major derivatives debacles of the last half century including the multi-billion losses and/or bankruptcy of Metallgesellschaft (1994), Barings Bank (1995), Long Term Capital Management (1998), Amaranth (2006), Société Générale (2008) and AIG (2008). It unlocks the secrets of derivatives by telling the stories of institutions which played in the derivative market and lost big. For some of these unfortunate organizations it was daring but flawed financial engineering which brought them havoc. For others it was unbridled speculation perpetrated by rogue traders whose unchecked fraud brought their house down. Should derivatives be feared “as financial weapons of mass destruction” or hailed as financial innovations which through efficient risk transfer are truly adding to the Wealth of Nations? By presenting a factual analysis of how the malpractice of derivatives played havoc with derivative end-user and dealer institutions, a case is made for vigilance not only to market and counter-party risk but also operational risk in their use for risk management and proprietary trading. Clear and recurring lessons across the different stories call not only for a tighter but also “smarter” control system of derivatives trading and should be of immediate interest to financial managers, bankers, traders, auditors and regulators who are directly or indirectly exposed to financial derivatives. The book groups cases by derivative category, starting with the simplest and building up to the most complex — namely, Forwards, Futures, Options and Swaps in that order, with applications in commodities, foreign exchange, stock indices and interest rates. Each chapter deals with one derivative debacle, providing a rigorous and comprehensive but non-technical elucidation of what happened. The book is translated and available in French, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Korean.

This supplement written by Michael Bixby can be packaged for Free with the text.

For more than a century, oil has been the engine of growth for a society that delivers an unprecedented standard of living to many. We now take for granted that economic growth is good, necessary, and even inevitable, but also feel a sense of unease about the simultaneous growth of complexity in the processes and institutions that generate and manage that growth. As societies grow more complex through the bounty of cheap energy, they also confront problems that seem to increase in number and severity. In this era of fossil fuels, cheap energy and increasing complexity have been in a mutually-reinforcing spiral. The more energy we have and the more problems our societies confront, the more we grow complex and require still more energy. How did our demand for energy, our technological prowess, the resulting need for complex problem solving, and the end of easy oil conspire to make the Deepwater Horizon oil spill increasingly likely, if not inevitable? This book explains the real causal factors leading up to the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, a disaster from which it will take decades to recover.