Posts Tagged ‘wall’

7ce0221de24f1dfa7b3fea632c79847e Bloomberg Defends Pastors Right to Burn Quran   Wall Street Journal
Telegraph.co.uk

 Bloomberg Defends Pastors Right to Burn Quran   Wall Street Journal
Bloomberg Defends Pastor's Right to Burn Quran
Wall Street Journal
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended on Tuesday a Florida pastor's right to burn copies of the Quran during a public demonstration on the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. ...
Reaction to proposed Koran burning doesn't faze Florida churchLos Angeles Times
Evangelical Christian Group in Florida Plans to Burn KoransVoice of America
US officials, religious leaders condemn plans to burn Korans on 9/11Washington Post
The Associated Press -Christian Science Monitor -ABC News
all 2,935 news articles »

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260521ac83c8f82f13e0fc2fc10d11e9 Earl, Losing Force Fast, Churns by New England   Wall Street Journal
National Geographic
 Earl, Losing Force Fast, Churns by New England   Wall Street Journal
Earl, Losing Force Fast, Churns by New England
Wall Street Journal
AP Hurricane Earl flooded streets Friday in Atlantic City, NJ, as it churned northward up the East Coast. HYANNIS, Mass.—A weakening yet still potent Hurricane Earl headed late Friday for summer resort towns in
Cape Cod greets Earl with plywood and grumblingReuters
Tropical Storm Earl Weakens, Heads for Coast of Nova ScotiaBloomberg
Earl Weakens to Tropical Storm near New EnglandCBS News
The Virginian-Pilot -Plain Dealer -New York Times
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0e482cdb9fdeb190328383955e773a58 2010 Amy Knapps Big Grid Family Organizer wall calendar

Product Description

The Essential organization and communication tool for the whole family!

  • Get the whole family on the same page's schedule
  • Color-coded stickers show you everyone's activities at a glance
  • Easily keep track of bill-paying, grocery shopping, family chores, and all the details of daily life
  • Never again forget a birthday, anniversary, or other important event
  • Plenty of room for scheduling appointments, dates, trips, and outings
  • Keep vital medical information handy for everyone in the family
  • Great tools for planning ahead for vacations, back-to-school, and holidays
  • Find important phone and emergency numbers quickly

$10.88

2010 Amy Knapp's Big Grid Family Organizer wall calendar
f5c08a6e6c9b6e63840bc79248d85ab2 The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane
  • ISBN13: 9781591843290
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Product Description
What Liar's Poker was to the 1980s, The Zeroes is to the first decade of the new century: an insider's memoir of a gilded era when Wall Street went insane-and took the rest of us down with it.

Randall Lane never set out to become a Wall Street power broker. But during the decade he calls the Zeroes, he started a small magazine company that put him near the white-hot center of the biggest boom in history. Almost by accident, a man who drove a beat-up Subaru and lived in a rented walk-up became the go-to guy for big shots with nine-figure incomes.

Lane's saga began with a simple idea: a glossy magazine exclusively for and about traders, which would treat them like rock stars and entice them to splurge on luxury goods. Trader Monthly was an instant hit around the world. Wall Streeters loved the spotlight, and advertisers like Gulfstream, Maybach, and Bulgari loved the marketing opportunity.

To accelerate the buzz, Lane's staff threw parties featuring celebrities, premium steaks, cigars, and top-shelf vodka. Nothing was too expensive or too outrageous. Private jets in Napa Valley. Casino nights in London. And $1,000-a- seat boxing matches in New York, where traders from Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns pounded each other in front of tuxedoed throngs.

Before long, Wall Street's rich and powerful trusted Lane as a fellow insider-the guy who could turn an anonymous trader into a cover model and media darling. And the rest of the world sought him out as a way to tap into Wall Street's riches. As he emptied his bank account to help keep his little company afloat, he became a nexus for the absurd. Traders who turned 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina into multimillion-dollar windfalls. John McCain closing out the craps tables during an all-night gambling binge. Pop artist Peter Max hustling hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling traders paint-by-numbers portraits. Al Gore, John Travolta, Moby. Corrupt Caribbean rulers, the mobsters from Goodfellas, the pope. And a retired baseball star turned market guru named Lenny Dykstra, whose rise and fall was a great metaphor for the decade. All played roles in Lane's increasingly surreal world.

When the crash of 2008 hit, Lane's company and life savings were destroyed along with the high-flying traders and dealmakers his magazines exalted. But Lane walked away with something more lasting: an incredible true story, told by a skilled writer and reporter who sat squarely in the middle of one of the critical periods in modern financial and cultural history. People will turn to The Zeroes for many years to come, to find out what the era was really like.
$10.60

The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane
fd1c59ce809abb96c20c0b43ec92c326 War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle To Control an American Business Empire
  • ISBN13: 9780547152431
  • Condition: NEW
  • Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
Set in the highest echelon of the media, this saga of an American institution under siege is a bonfire of barbarians and boldface names.
Amazon.com Review
Product Description
This is a tale about big business, an imploding dynasty, a mogul at war, and a deal that sums up an era of change. The main character, rocked by feuding factions and those who would remake it, is the Wall Street Journal, which affects the thoughts, votes, and stocks of two million readers daily. Sarah Ellison, while at the Journal, won praise for covering the $5 billion acquisition that transformed the pride of Dow Jones and the estimable but eccentric Bancroft family into the jewel of Rupert Murdoch's kingdom. Here she expands her work, using her knowledge of the paper and its people to go deep inside the landmark transaction, as no outsider has or can, and also far beyond it, into the rocky transition when Murdoch's crew tussled with old Journal hands and geared up for battle with the New York Times. With access to all the players, Ellison moves from newsrooms (where editors duel) to estates (where the Bancrofts go at it like the Ewings). She shows Murdoch, finally, for who he is--maneuvering, firing, undoing all that the Bancrofts had protected.

Here is a superlative account of a deal with reverberations beyond the news, told with the storytelling savvy that transforms big stories into timeless chronicles of American life and power.



Amazon Exclusive: William D. Cohan Reviews War at the Wall Street Journal

William D. Cohan is an online columnist for the New York Times, appears on NPR, CNN, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, and is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, Fortune, the Washington Post, ArtNews, The Financial Times, and the Daily Beast. Cohan is the bestselling author of The Last Tycoons and House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street . Read his guest review of War at the Wall Street Journal:

WilliamCohan War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle To Control an American Business Empire

In War at The Wall Street Journal, Sarah Ellison, formerly a media reporter at the old Journal--the one we all knew and loved--has written a gripping narrative account of what happened to that gem of American Journalism and why the controlling Bancroft family agreed in 2007 to sell the paper to Rupert Murdoch, the Darth Vader of Journalism. She should know: She was part of the team that covered the story when she was at the Journal, which she has since left.

Ellison's story focuses on three sets of protagonists--none of them particularly admirable--who fought over and ultimately carved up the carcass of the Dow Jones Company, the Journal's parent company. First, are the highly dysfunctional and completely unappealing members of the extended Bancroft family--and their equally unappealing attorneys--that for years fought among themselves and seemed content to allow Dow Jones to be mismanaged and to fall into disarray. Second is the management team--led by Peter Kann and his ambitious, insensitive wife, Karen Elliott House--that allowed the Journal's financial performance to deteriorate year after year, while doing an admirable job keeping the journalistic standards high and the product enviable. Only Kann's successor as CEO, Rich Zannino, seemed to have the slightest clue that his job was to create shareholder value. Finally, comes Murdoch himself, who stopped at nothing to get his long-sought prize--including agreeing to an oversight board for the Journal he quickly ignored--and paying the whopping sum of $5.6 billion to get it (including the assumption of $600 million of debt on Dow Jones' books.)

Ellison's book does a fine job of revealing the subtext for Murdoch's unbridled ambition to get control of The Wall Street Journal: He wants to use the paper to take down, if he can, The New York Times and the Sulzberger family that owns it. He seems to have a special antipathy for Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the company's Chairman and the paper's publisher. In that regard, the fact that the entire newspaper industry is on its back and may never recover its former financial glory appears to have given Murdoch his opening. In pursuit of the Times and its national audience, Murdoch has made the new Wall Street Journal unrecognizable and its daily product undistinguished. He also has announced that he has hired a newsroom full of reporters in New York City to start covering local news stories in order to compete directly with the Times on its home turf. Curiously, Murdoch and his hand-picked management team are so delighted by their new toy, they have become blinded by what has been lost--editorially speaking--at the paper. "We produced a better paper," Ellison quotes Murdoch saying at the end of her book. "It's as simple as that."

By then, though, the reader knows Murdoch's statement is patently untrue and just more of his bullying bluster. But two other ironies have also been revealed: One, that given the ongoing distress in the journalism industry, the reporters at the paper are just happy to have jobs that continue to pay them to do--in some form anyway--what they love. And, second, that the big winners in the saga are the bumbling Bancrofts, who walked off with Murdoch's $5 billion and have scattered to the winds. A little more than a year after he bought Dow Jones, News Corp. took a $2.8 billion write-off, effectively conceding that Murdoch had paid twice as much as the company turned out to be worth.

(Photo © Frank E. Schramm III)




A Q&A with Sarah Ellison, Author of War at The Wall Street Journal
c7953ced3d5211b0a36d2d4b8b7dfd09 War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle To Control an American Business Empire

Q: How did this book come about?

A: I was covering the media at the Wall Street Journal when Rupert Murdoch made his bid for the paper. The story became an epic saga, clearly great material for a book.

Q: What was it like writing about your former employer?

A: My ten years at the Journal gave me a unique perspective on this story. I knew the institution and its people so well. I hope it made my portrait of the paper more vivid. In some ways the transition from being an employee to an outsider writing about the company was made easier by the time I spent reporting on the story while still at the paper. That was challenging; once I took leave and started writing the book, the lines were more demarcated. At that point I was just doing what I had learned to do during my years as a reporter.

Q: Why did Murdoch want to buy the WSJ?

A: He loves newspapers. He covets the influence and power that come with owning the Journal. It is the most powerful business paper in the most powerful city in the most powerful country in the world. He wants to knock the New York Times off its perch as the paper that influences the cultural and political conversation in this country. The Journal is his weapon for doing that.

Q: How has the paper changed?

A: Murdoch has turned it into a news-driven general-interest newspaper and moved it away from being a business franchise.

An interesting contrast is that the Journal used to actively avoid salacious general-interest news. In 1993, the Journal famously didn't report on Lorena and John Bobbitt for a month and a half, even as the news blanketed the pages of other papers. Then, finally, the paper broke its silence with a long profile of the urologist who operated on John Bobbitt. That was the only mention of the Bobbitts in the Journal that year. Under Murdoch, the paper would have covered that story every step of the way, like everybody else.

And it ran huge photos of Tiger Woods on the front page numerous times since his marital scandal broke, something that would have been impossible at the Journal under the previous owners.

Q: Is the paper better or worse than it used to be?

A: I think it's lost something that made it unique. Reporters at the paper now write stories that are much more similar to what journalists at a lot of other papers are writing. But Murdoch is committed to the paper, and the Bancrofts, in the latter years of their ownership, were not. So the Journal's survival is more secure under Murdoch than it was under the Bancrofts.

Interestingly, as good a businessman as Murdoch is supposed to be, the Journal is losing more money under him than it was previously. He's willing to sustain great losses for a paper he loves, which is good for the paper's staff but bad for News Corp.'s shareholders.

Q: Why is this important?

A: The Journal is the highest-circulation newspaper in the country and affects the way people think about everything from whom they'll vote for to what stocks they'll buy to whether or not they'll support a political candidate.

Q: How is the New York Times reacting?

A: The New York Times is exceedingly anxious about Murdoch's presence at the Journal. After he took over, they set up a war room of sorts to deal with his threats. Both the Journal and the Times are running the equivalent of attack ads directed at the other. (In one particularly bizarre twist, the Journal recently featured a photo of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in an article about effeminate-looking men.) In the first scene of my book, Murdoch tells Sulzberger, "Let the battle begin!" Three years later, the gloves are off.

Q: Who is winning the biggest newspaper war in generations?

A: We don't know yet. The battle has just started. Murdoch has politicized the Journal. It could end up that conservatives read the Journal and liberals read the Times, which is fitting in the highly polarized political climate of today. It seems we can't even share a paper.

(Photo © Greg Martin)





$14.99

War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle To Control an American Business Empire
cdfc4adb6028f56b8c5b0fe2a69b5cab War at the Wall Street Journal

Product Description
This is a tale about big business, an imploding dynasty, a mogul at war, and a deal that sums up an era of change. The main character, rocked by feuding factions and those who would remake it, is the Wall Street Journal, which affects the thoughts, votes, and stocks of two million readers daily. Sarah Ellison, while at the Journal, won praise for covering the $5 billion acquisition that transformed the pride of Dow Jones and the estimable but eccentric Bancroft family into the jewel of Rupert Murdoch’s kingdom. Here she expands her work, using her knowledge of the paper and its people to go deep inside the landmark transaction, as no outsider has or can, and also far beyond it, into the rocky transition when Murdoch’s crew tussled with old Journal hands and geared up for battle with the New York Times. With access to all the players, Ellison moves from newsrooms (where editors duel) to estates (where the Bancrofts go at it like the Ewings). She shows Murdoch, finally, for who he is—maneuvering, firing, undoing all that the Bancrofts had protected. 
 
Here is a superlative account of a deal with reverberations beyond the news, told with the storytelling savvy that transforms big stories into timeless chronicles of American life and power.

Amazon.com Review
Product Description
This is a tale about big business, an imploding dynasty, a mogul at war, and a deal that sums up an era of change. The main character, rocked by feuding factions and those who would remake it, is the Wall Street Journal, which affects the thoughts, votes, and stocks of two million readers daily. Sarah Ellison, while at the Journal, won praise for covering the $5 billion acquisition that transformed the pride of Dow Jones and the estimable but eccentric Bancroft family into the jewel of Rupert Murdoch's kingdom. Here she expands her work, using her knowledge of the paper and its people to go deep inside the landmark transaction, as no outsider has or can, and also far beyond it, into the rocky transition when Murdoch's crew tussled with old Journal hands and geared up for battle with the New York Times. With access to all the players, Ellison moves from newsrooms (where editors duel) to estates (where the Bancrofts go at it like the Ewings). She shows Murdoch, finally, for who he is--maneuvering, firing, undoing all that the Bancrofts had protected.

Here is a superlative account of a deal with reverberations beyond the news, told with the storytelling savvy that transforms big stories into timeless chronicles of American life and power.



Amazon Exclusive: William D. Cohan Reviews War at the Wall Street Journal

William D. Cohan is an online columnist for the New York Times, appears on NPR, CNN, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, and is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, Fortune, the Washington Post, ArtNews, The Financial Times, and the Daily Beast. Cohan is the bestselling author of The Last Tycoons and House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street . Read his guest review of War at the Wall Street Journal:

032c3458bacfe320de8ced386b0440b2 War at the Wall Street Journal

In War at The Wall Street Journal, Sarah Ellison, formerly a media reporter at the old Journal--the one we all knew and loved--has written a gripping narrative account of what happened to that gem of American Journalism and why the controlling Bancroft family agreed in 2007 to sell the paper to Rupert Murdoch, the Darth Vader of Journalism. She should know: She was part of the team that covered the story when she was at the Journal, which she has since left.

Ellison's story focuses on three sets of protagonists--none of them particularly admirable--who fought over and ultimately carved up the carcass of the Dow Jones Company, the Journal's parent company. First, are the highly dysfunctional and completely unappealing members of the extended Bancroft family--and their equally unappealing attorneys--that for years fought among themselves and seemed content to allow Dow Jones to be mismanaged and to fall into disarray. Second is the management team--led by Peter Kann and his ambitious, insensitive wife, Karen Elliott House--that allowed the Journal's financial performance to deteriorate year after year, while doing an admirable job keeping the journalistic standards high and the product enviable. Only Kann's successor as CEO, Rich Zannino, seemed to have the slightest clue that his job was to create shareholder value. Finally, comes Murdoch himself, who stopped at nothing to get his long-sought prize--including agreeing to an oversight board for the Journal he quickly ignored--and paying the whopping sum of $5.6 billion to get it (including the assumption of $600 million of debt on Dow Jones' books.)

Ellison's book does a fine job of revealing the subtext for Murdoch's unbridled ambition to get control of The Wall Street Journal: He wants to use the paper to take down, if he can, The New York Times and the Sulzberger family that owns it. He seems to have a special antipathy for Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the company's Chairman and the paper's publisher. In that regard, the fact that the entire newspaper industry is on its back and may never recover its former financial glory appears to have given Murdoch his opening. In pursuit of the Times and its national audience, Murdoch has made the new Wall Street Journal unrecognizable and its daily product undistinguished. He also has announced that he has hired a newsroom full of reporters in New York City to start covering local news stories in order to compete directly with the Times on its home turf. Curiously, Murdoch and his hand-picked management team are so delighted by their new toy, they have become blinded by what has been lost--editorially speaking--at the paper. "We produced a better paper," Ellison quotes Murdoch saying at the end of her book. "It's as simple as that."

By then, though, the reader knows Murdoch's statement is patently untrue and just more of his bullying bluster. But two other ironies have also been revealed: One, that given the ongoing distress in the journalism industry, the reporters at the paper are just happy to have jobs that continue to pay them to do--in some form anyway--what they love. And, second, that the big winners in the saga are the bumbling Bancrofts, who walked off with Murdoch's $5 billion and have scattered to the winds. A little more than a year after he bought Dow Jones, News Corp. took a $2.8 billion write-off, effectively conceding that Murdoch had paid twice as much as the company turned out to be worth.

(Photo © Frank E. Schramm III)




A Q&A with Sarah Ellison, Author of War at The Wall Street Journal
c7953ced3d5211b0a36d2d4b8b7dfd09 War at the Wall Street Journal

Q: How did this book come about?

A: I was covering the media at the Wall Street Journal when Rupert Murdoch made his bid for the paper. The story became an epic saga, clearly great material for a book.

Q: What was it like writing about your former employer?

A: My ten years at the Journal gave me a unique perspective on this story. I knew the institution and its people so well. I hope it made my portrait of the paper more vivid. In some ways the transition from being an employee to an outsider writing about the company was made easier by the time I spent reporting on the story while still at the paper. That was challenging; once I took leave and started writing the book, the lines were more demarcated. At that point I was just doing what I had learned to do during my years as a reporter.

Q: Why did Murdoch want to buy the WSJ?

A: He loves newspapers. He covets the influence and power that come with owning the Journal. It is the most powerful business paper in the most powerful city in the most powerful country in the world. He wants to knock the New York Times off its perch as the paper that influences the cultural and political conversation in this country. The Journal is his weapon for doing that.

Q: How has the paper changed?

A: Murdoch has turned it into a news-driven general-interest newspaper and moved it away from being a business franchise.

An interesting contrast is that the Journal used to actively avoid salacious general-interest news. In 1993, the Journal famously didn't report on Lorena and John Bobbitt for a month and a half, even as the news blanketed the pages of other papers. Then, finally, the paper broke its silence with a long profile of the urologist who operated on John Bobbitt. That was the only mention of the Bobbitts in the Journal that year. Under Murdoch, the paper would have covered that story every step of the way, like everybody else.

And it ran huge photos of Tiger Woods on the front page numerous times since his marital scandal broke, something that would have been impossible at the Journal under the previous owners.

Q: Is the paper better or worse than it used to be?

A: I think it's lost something that made it unique. Reporters at the paper now write stories that are much more similar to what journalists at a lot of other papers are writing. But Murdoch is committed to the paper, and the Bancrofts, in the latter years of their ownership, were not. So the Journal's survival is more secure under Murdoch than it was under the Bancrofts.

Interestingly, as good a businessman as Murdoch is supposed to be, the Journal is losing more money under him than it was previously. He's willing to sustain great losses for a paper he loves, which is good for the paper's staff but bad for News Corp.'s shareholders.

Q: Why is this important?

A: The Journal is the highest-circulation newspaper in the country and affects the way people think about everything from whom they'll vote for to what stocks they'll buy to whether or not they'll support a political candidate.

Q: How is the New York Times reacting?

A: The New York Times is exceedingly anxious about Murdoch's presence at the Journal. After he took over, they set up a war room of sorts to deal with his threats. Both the Journal and the Times are running the equivalent of attack ads directed at the other. (In one particularly bizarre twist, the Journal recently featured a photo of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in an article about effeminate-looking men.) In the first scene of my book, Murdoch tells Sulzberger, "Let the battle begin!" Three years later, the gloves are off.

Q: Who is winning the biggest newspaper war in generations?

A: We don't know yet. The battle has just started. Murdoch has politicized the Journal. It could end up that conservatives read the Journal and liberals read the Times, which is fitting in the highly polarized political climate of today. It seems we can't even share a paper.

(Photo © Greg Martin)







War at the Wall Street Journal

1780b97da6ad5aa8316d66e0b948081c Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Streets Bluff

  • ISBN13: 9780470648278
  • Condition: NEW
  • Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
The collapse of America’s credit markets in 2008 is quite possibly the biggest financial disaster in U.S. history. Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street’s Bluff is the story of Bill Ackman’s six-year campaign to warn that the $2.5 trillion bond insurance business was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Branded a fraud by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and investigated by Eliot Spitzer and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ackman later made his investors more than $1 billion when bond insurers kicked off the collapse of the credit markets.

  • Unravels the story of the credit crisis through an engaging and human drama
  • Draws on unprecedented access to one of Wall Street’s best-known investors
  • Shows how excessive leverage, dangerous financial models and a blind reliance on triple-A credit ratings sent Wall Street careening toward disaster

Confidence Game is a real-world “Emperor’s New Clothes,” a tale of widespread delusion and one dissenting voice in the era leading up to the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.

Christine Richard is a reporter with Bloomberg News whose work has been recognized by The New York Press Club and The Newswomen’s Club of New York.
$14.94

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street’s Bluff

d2bdc9110852f5f896e0893a3fd355a9 Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System   and Themselves
  • ISBN13: 9780670021253
  • Condition: NEW
  • Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
A real-life thriller about the most tumultuous period in America’s financial history by an acclaimed New York Times Reporter

Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world’s economy.

“We’ve got to get some foam down on the runway!” a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world’s financial system would experience.

Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail re-creates all the drama and turmoil, revealing never disclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. This true story is not just a look at banks that were “too big to fail,” it is a real-life thriller with a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were too big to fail.
$16.00

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves

694f83d2af0874917bf193ecc2df9ea9 Fortunes Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

  • ISBN13: 9780809045990
  • Condition: NEW
  • Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description

In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein’s. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory—the basis of computers and the Internet—to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible.

Shannon and MIT mathematician Edward O. Thorp took the “Kelly formula” to Las Vegas. It worked. They realized that there was even more money to be made in the stock market. Thorp used the Kelly system with his phenomenonally successful hedge fund, Princeton-Newport Partners. Shannon became a successful investor, too, topping even Warren Buffett’s rate of return. Fortune’s Formula traces how the Kelly formula sparked controversy even as it made fortunes at racetracks, casinos, and trading desks. It reveals the dark side of this alluring scheme, which is founded on exploiting an insider’s edge.

Shannon believed it was possible for a smart investor to beat the market—and Fortune’s Formula will convince you that he was right.
William Poundstone is the bestselling author of ten nonfiction books, including Labyrinths of Reason and The Recursive Universe, both of which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein’s. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory—the basis of computers and the Internet—to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible.

Shannon and MIT mathematician Edward O. Thorp took the “Kelly formula” to Las Vegas. It worked. They realized that there was even more money to be made in the stock market. Thorp used the Kelly system with his phenomenally successful hedge fund, Princeton-Newport Partners. Shannon became a successful investor, too, topping even Warren Buffett’s rate of return. Fortune’s Formula traces how the Kelly formula sparked controversy even as it made fortunes at racetracks, casinos, and trading desks. It reveals the dark side of this alluring scheme, which is founded on exploiting an insider’s edge.
Fortune’s Formula may be the world’s first history book, gambling primer, mathematics text, economics manual, personal finance guide and joke book in a single volume. Poundstone comes across as the best college professor you ever hand, someone who can turn almost any technical topic into an entertaining and zesty lecture.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Seldom have true crime and smart math been blended together so engagingly”—The Wall Street Journal

“An amazing story that gives a big idea the needed star treatment . . . Fortune’s Formula will appeal to readers of such books as Peter L. Bernstein’s Against the Gods, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, and Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed. All try to explain why smart people take stupid risks. Poundstone goes them one better by showing how hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, for one, could have avoided disaster by following the Kelly method.”—Business Week
 
“Poundstone, a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, takes us from chalkboard to stock market and back as he explains the ‘Kelly formula’ for gambling through the lives of those who developed and exploited the system. It is a rollicking tale about money, mathematics and greed.”—Bloomberg
 
“A dazzling array of math geniuses, rogues, swindlers, Nobel Prize winners, gun-toting physicists—all massaging the formulas that give them an edge in creating fortunes.”—George J. W. Goodman (aka “Adam Smith”), author of The Money Game and Supermoney
 
“This is a wonderful tale of how mathematics got married to gambling and went off to honeymoon in Las Vegas, before finding ultimate happiness in the biggest casino of all—the world financial markets. Poundstone has produced a rogues’ gallery of mobsters and mathematicians, kneecappers and handicappers, card sharps, professors, systems players, numbers runners, and number crunchers—the best ‘investment advisers’ you can find. Anyone interested in playing the markets should buy this book and read it immediately.”—Thomas A. Bass, author of The Eudaemonic Pie and The Predictors
 
“The true story of the intertwining lives of financial legends, mathematical geniuses and crooked mobsters. Who would you expect to win an intellectual battle between professional gamblers and Nobel Prize winners? This book confirms what I’d long suspected, that the successful gambler knows more about managing money than the most PhD-laden investment banker. Poundstone’s book explains that knowledge, and you’ll be surprised by its elegance and simplicity. A fascinating book, both a cracking good yarn and a practical guide for investment success.”—Paul Wilmott, mathematician, bestselling author, and editor of Wilmott magazine
 
“From bookies to billionaires, you’ll meet a motley cast of characters in this highly original, ‘outside the box’ look at gambling and investing. Read it for the stories alone, and you’ll be surprised at how much else you can learn without even trying.”—Edward O. Thorp, author of Beat the Dealer and Beat the Market
 
“What a fantabulous book! Fortune’s Formula provides a deep but crystal-clear understanding of information theory, card-counting schemes, plunging necklines, mean-variance mapping, junk bonds sold short and gambler’s ruin, all part of an epic suspense tale crowded with eccentric geniuses and cold-blooded killers. You’ll never follow a horse race, push forward a casino chip or enter a market the same way again. Read this and weep for the edge you only thought that you had, then read it again for a real one.”—James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street
Amazon.com Review
Fortune’s Formula is a fascinating study of the connections between such seemingly unrelated topics as gambling, information theory, stock investing, and applied mathematics. The story involves the stunning brainpower of men such as MIT professor Claude Shannon, who single-handedly invented information theory, the science behind the Internet and all digital media; Ed Thorpe; and John Kelly of Bell Laboratories, who developed the “Kelly criterion,” a now-legendary investment strategy for maximizing growth while controlling risk. Initially, Shannon and Thorpe took Kelly’s theory to Las Vegas and applied it to roulette and blackjack. Later, they took it to Wall Street and cleaned up–Shannon made a personal fortune while Thorpe created the highly successful hedge firm Princeton-Newport Partners. They both discovered that Kelly’s system was particularly effective when applied to arbitrage (minute price differences that result from market inefficiencies). As Poundstone ably demonstrates, the merits of Kelly’s criterion are still hotly debated today.

Poundstone has a tendency to meander in his writing, but his asides are so revealing and interesting that they add, rather than detract, from the narrative. The book also includes a cast of fascinating and colorful characters as varied as Ivan Boesky, Warren Buffet, Rudolph Giuliani, and notorious mobsters such as Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. In explaining the lasting impact of the work done by Shannon, Thorpe, and Kelly, Poundstone even explains Kelly’s system for those wishing to follow his formula, offering readers both theoretical and practical lessons. Whether viewed as a how-to guide or straight scientific and financial history, Fortune’s Formula proves an entertaining and illuminating analysis of “the most successful gambling system of all time.” –Shawn Carkonen
$7.88

Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

ce8ef3ed157c4cc4c90022a217276f76 Wall and Piece
  • ISBN13: 9781844137879
  • Condition: USED - GOOD
  • Notes:

Product Description
The collected works of Britain’s most wanted artist.

Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable (except maybe when it’s squatting in the New York’s Metropolitan Museum or Museum of Modern Art.) Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world.

Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policeman with smiley faces, rats with drills and umbrellas. If you look hard enough you’ll find your own. His statements, incitements, ironies and epigrams are by turns intelligent and witty comments on everything from the monarchy and capitalism to the war in Iraq and farm animals.

His identity remains unknown, but his work is prolific. And now for the first time, he’s putting together the best of his work—old and new—in a fully illustrated color volume.

Banksy, real name unknown, was born in Bristol, England.
$13.40

Wall and Piece