confidence game: how hedge fund manager bill ackman called wall street\'s bluff (bloomberg)

Buy Cheap Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street's Bluff (Bloomberg)


An expose on the delusion, greed, and arrogance that led to America's credit crisis

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 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........
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the accounting game: basic accounting fresh from the lemonade stand

Buy Cheap The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand


"Fantastic Learning Tool...Don't let this book title fool you. It is not an oversimplification of accounting and financial principles. It is, however, a serious and very effective examination of a very small but progressively complex business. There are not many books available on the market that make a complex and dry subject understandable and even fun. This book successfully does just that."
-Amazon Reviewer

The Clearest Explanation Ever of the Key Accounting Basics

The world of accounting can be intimidating. Whether you're a manager, business owner or aspiring entrepreneur, you've likely found yourself needing to know basic accounting...but baffled by complicated accounting books. What if learning accounting could be as simple and fun as running a child's lemonade stand? It can.

The Accounting Game presents financial information in a format so simple and so unlike a common accounting textbook, you may forget you're learning key skills that will help you get ahead! Using the world of a child's lemonade stand to teach the basics of managing your finances, this book makes a dry subject fun and understandable. As you run your stand, you'll begin to understand and apply financial terms and concepts like assets, liabilities, earnings, inventory and notes payable, plus:

--Interactive format gives you hands-on experience
--Color-coded charts and worksheets help you remember key terms
--Step-by-step process takes you from novice to expert with ease
--Fun story format speeds retention of essential concepts
--Designed to apply what you learn to the real world

The revolutionary approach of The Accounting Game takes the difficult subjects of accounting and business finance and makes them something you can easily learn, understand, remember and use!

"The game approach makes the subject matter most understandable. I highly recommend it to anyone frightened by either numbers or accountants."
-John Hernandis, Director of Corporate Communications, American Greetings
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fixing the game: bubbles, crashes, and what capitalism can learn from the nfl

Buy Cheap Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL

American capitalism is in dire straits, caught in a perilous pattern of increasing volatility, decreasing investor returns, and ongoing bad behavior by executives. And it’s getting worse. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, we’ve seen two massive value-destroying market meltdowns and a string of ethics breaches, including accounting scandals, options-backdating schemes, and the subprime mortgage debacle.

Just what is going on here? Is it the inevitable decline of the American economy? Is it the new normal in a technology-enabled global marketplace? Or is it possible that the very theories we’ve embraced to underpin our capital markets are actually producing these crises?

In Fixing the Game, Roger Martin reveals the culprit behind the sorry state of American capitalism: our deep and abiding commitment to the idea that the purpose of the firm is to maximize shareholder value. This theory has led to a massive growth in stock-based compensation for executives and, through this, to a naive and wrongheaded linking of the real market—the business of designing, making, and selling products and services—with the expectations market—the business of trading stocks, options, and complex derivatives. Martin shows how this tight coupling has been engineered and lays out its results: a single-minded focus on the expectations market that will continue driving us from crisis to crisis—unless we act now.

Using the National Football League as his primary example, Martin illustrates that it is possible to take a much more thoughtful and effective approach than we now do to the intersection of the real and the expectations markets and to governance in general in the capital markets. Martin shows how we can act to end the destructive cycle, including:

• Restructuring executive compensation to focus entirely on the real market, not the expectations market
• Rethinking the meaning of board governance and role of board members
• Reining in the power of hedge funds and monopoly pension funds

Concise, hard-hitting, and entertaining, Fixing the Game advocates seizing American capitalism from the jaws of the expectations market and planting it firmly in the real market—and it presents the steps we must take now to do so.

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