New Books in Finance

We tend to talk about globalisation as if it arrived with container ships, multinationals and the internet. Christopher Meissner’s One from the Many: The Global Economy since 1850 (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that it has a far longer and messier history. In my latest New Books Network interview, I put that history, and some of its biggest open questions, to him.

A book for a nervous moment

Tariffs, industrial policy, “economic security” and the relocation of supply chains have revived the argument that globalisation is going into reverse. Meissner, Professor of Economics at UC Davis and a Rese...

Dependency Politics: How Foreign Aid Shapes Electoral Behaviour (Cambridge UP, 2026), by Ryan Jablonski, examines how democracy operates in countries dependent on foreign aid. Drawing on over six years of fieldwork, the book investigates the relationships between international donors and domestic politicians, exploring how aid dependency shapes policymaking and influences voters’ assessments of political performance. Challenging the assumption that voters simply reward politicians for attracting foreign aid, Jablonski demonstrates that electoral choices depend on citizens’ beliefs about how politicians influence the delivery of aid. This produces a ‘visibility-uncertainty’ paradox, whereby foreign aid can either strengthen or undermine democratic accountability. Combining surveys...

Karmic Winds: Reflections from “The Smartest Guy in Hollywood” (Rare Bird Books, 2026) is a memoir of power, collapse, and reckoning by Peter M. Hoffman, a Yale-trained lawyer and Hollywood insider who once stood at the center of the independent film boom and later found himself stripped of status, freedom, and certainty. As president of Carolco Pictures, Hoffman helped steer an era-defining slate that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, and Rambo, navigating a world of massive egos, creative brilliance, and financial brinkmanship. But ambition has its cost. After the industry turns, legal battles mount, and a federal conviction leads to imprisonment, Hoff...

When American churches face financial difficulties, a disproportionately high number of Black churches reorganize under chapter 11 bankruptcy. There are no easy explanations for this distinction: not location, denomination, leadership structure, or the reasons for the loans. In Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive (U Chicago Press, 2026), legal scholar Pamela Foohey asks why, then, Black churches account for two-thirds of all congregations that file for chapter 11 bankruptcy every year. 

Drawing on case studies of six Black churches and one white church, and 150 interviews with church leaders, members, and attorneys, Foohey finds answers in a...

Understanding the world of art—particularly antiquities and archaeological artifacts—requires tracing how objects are removed from the ground, displaced by conflict or economic hardship, and ultimately reappear in the international art market. The odyssey of an artifact from its excavation site to an auction house, a private collection, or a museum display case raises a host of pressing concerns about the fragility of cultural heritage but also the global mechanisms that sustain its circulation. In recent years, growing awareness of a possible link between the illegal antiquities trade and terrorist financing has brought new scrutiny to regions marked by w...

From a leading historian, the story of how entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants transformed commercial banking and enabled the economic and social advancement of Jews in America.

What are immigrants to do when business opportunities abound in their new home, but banks refuse essential financial support? How could they make the journey in the first place without helping hands? In this lively history, Rebecca Kobrin chronicles the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who stepped up by doing the lending themselves. Arriving from the Russian Empire and settling primarily in New York, they made livelihoods by assisting fellow Jews so they could...

The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars (Princeton UP, 2023) is an essential handbook for writing fundable grants. This easy-to-use guide features writing samples, a glossary of important terms, answers common questions, and explains pitfalls to avoid. Dr. Betty Lai focuses on skills that are universal to all grant writers, not just specific skills for one type of grant or funder. She explains how to craft phenomenal pitches and align them with your values, structure timelines and drafts, communicate clearly in prose and images, solicit feedback to strengthen your proposals, and much more. This incisive book walks you...

It is quite easy to find corruption within nonprofits. This is particularly the case in the subsector of not-for-profits that are incorporated as traditional 501(c)(3) entities. With the continuing erosion of public confidence in charities, these institutions must act now, both individually and collectively, to bolster trust and ensure public support for nonprofits that has been a hallmark of American democracy.

This book explores the causes of malfeasance in the nonprofit realm. It examines how the current inadequate regulatory environment—together with inherent “agency” problems―can lead organizations astray as they turn away from fulfilling donor wishes to inste...

Can philanthropy be an anti-racist, feminist, relational, and joyful expression of solidarity? This book argues that it not only can be for the future we seek and for philanthropy to achieve its greatest impact, but it must be.

Nationally recognized philanthropic leader Dimple Abichandani revolutionizes the precepts of modern philanthropy. Offering 10 provocative practice shifts, A New Era of Philanthropy: Ten Practices to Transform Wealth into a More Just and Sustainable Future (North Atlantic Books, 2025) engages readers with fresh answers to the question of how philanthropy can meet this high-stakes moment. This book picks up where key books...

Popular history tells the story of how the tea boycott during the American Revolution caused a transition in American taste from tea to coffee, making the young country a coffee-drinking nation. In truth, Americans did not give up their tea so easily, and the United States grew to be the second-largest importer of tea from China. Diverging from British black tea traditions, U.S. consumers preferred green tea, cultivated a particular taste for Oolong tea, and invented the English Breakfast Tea brand to market Chinese black tea.

This World in a Teacup: Credit, Taste, and Power in th...

Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts would shape early computer science and the first applications of computer technology in manufacturing and business, with profound consequences for workers and managers alike. By the 1960s, practices originally developed to improve industrial efficiency were being used by Wall...

What’s going on in the Chinese economy? China reported GDP growth of just 4.3% last quarter. Consumption is sluggish, exports are booming, electronics manufacturers and chipmakers are reporting huge profits as car sales slump.

Joe Ngai and Nick Leung dive into the Chinese economy in their latest book The Next China Is Still China: An Insider's Playbook for Winning in the New Era (Scribner, 2026), which came out earlier this year. The book is motivated by a question many executives asked amid new U.S. tariffs and COVID-driven supply shocks: Is there another economy that can replace Chin...

Authoritarian Markets explores the political foundations of China's banking boom and its far-reaching impact on the Chinese economy.

In 1978 China had no commercial banks. Today it commands the world's largest banking system, with assets equal to 40 percent of global GDP. In Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China's Banking Explosion (Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Adam Y. Liu argues that this rise was not the product of market reforms but of political bargains and bureaucratic mobilization.

In the 1990s, Beijing issued bank licenses as bargaining chips—securing cooperation from local governments as it pushed through painful reforms. The re...

How is finance changing in the contemporary world? In FinTech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance (Princeton University Press, 2026), Paul Langley, a Professor of Economic Geography at Durham Universityand Andrew Leyshon, a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economy, Policy and Place, Nottingham Trent University and Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, chart the rise of a new form of capitalism in the digital age. Drawing on detailed case studies from across the world, from familiar everyday examples such as Klarna to continent-spanning institutions such as Standard Bank, the book theorises the dy...

America’s money is global money—nearly every nation in the world writes international contracts in dollars, and in 2023, central banks around the world held nearly $6.7 trillion in dollar reserves, three times any other currency. Today, the United States’ global hegemony rests largely on its ability to produce unlimited treasury bonds that are sold around the world, dollars that supported America’s explosive growth in the twentieth century and funded its massive wars in the twenty-first. American power and the American dollar have become synonymous.
Yet in this brilliant 500-year history The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Power...

Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card at the grocery store, in looming student-loan debts, in the prices of things we want, and in our subconscious navigation of the modern world. In this revelatory book, economists Mason and Jayadev explain how and why money is so deeply misunderstood by the world it dominates—as well as the dangerous social implications of this misunderstanding. Against Money (University of Chicago Press, 2026) tackles the most dearly held “truths” of economics, arguing that the world of money has never been an impartial representation of the world...

The number of people in the world with a bank account or money service provider increased by 2 billion over the past decade. This phenomenon reflects what Dr. Tyler Girard calls the global financial inclusion agenda. This agenda emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and quickly became a prominent feature of global economic governance. 

The core idea of financial inclusion is that all individuals and businesses should have access to and use formal financial services, including bank accounts, payment services, credit, and insurance. Today, the widespread ability to digitally store and transfer money has impacted every aspe...

Privatising Humanity: How Our Essential Human Needs Became Financial Assets (Manchester UP, 2026) is the latest book from Dr Kate Bayliss, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Economics at SOAS, University of London. Dr Bayliss’ excellent title, published with Manchester University Press, is a critical examination of the privatisation paradigm.

In the book, Dr Bayliss specifically analyses the history, processes, political economy and outcomes of privatisation policies in Britain across three major economic sectors – that of water, energy, and housing. Infamously, Britain was arguably in the vanguard of a proliferation of privatisation policies in the 1980s, courtesy of t...

Indonesia is often framed as a key arena of China-Japan-US competition in the Second Cold War. In this episode, we talk with Trissia Wijaya about her book on the political economy of Chinese and Japanese infrastructure financing in Indonesia. She challenges the view that it is simply an instrument of competition and instead situates infrastructure finance within Indonesia’s own development strategies. She shows how development assistance, commercial loans, export credits, and public-private partnerships are shaped by contestation among Chinese and Japanese capital, as well as Indonesian civil society, state actors, and labor. We also link these dynamics to th...

Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant’s cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by the shipper and all the cargo-owners. A risk-sharing practice, different from the risk-shifting of marine insurance which became established relatively late, Ge...

In Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke University Press, 2026), Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodie contends that while the Irish state’s investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability and transferred wealth into the hands of...

In Singapore, the financial center of Southeast Asia, hyperurbanization and commercial development exist alongside enduring belief in the economic power of ghosts: in their ability to control the flows of money and value and to determine the outcome of investments and wagers. Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore (U Minnesota Press, 2025) explores the unlikely collusion of these two systems, demonstrating both the productive role of popular beliefs in the modern world and the surprising correlations between “late” capitalism and the workings of the spirit realm. Detailing the logic and practices of Singapore’s ghost economy—from performing exorcisms on real estat...

If governments provide financial support for affordable housing, should they provide support for inhabitants directly, or rather for the construction of dwellings? Dr. Max Krahé and Sara Schulte both work for the German economic think tank Dezernat Zukunft, and they aim to answer this question by looking at the past. In this interview we discuss the research design, the conclusions, and also what policy implications they draw from their analysis.

Want to know more? You can find everything about this housing analysis on Dezernat Zukunft. Additionally, Max Krahé provides an overview of Dr. Krahé's research projects.

More than any single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global financial markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), for almost a century, the Fed’s underlying philosophy and operations approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

Over The Chair’s eight episodes, Tim Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's most consequential chiefs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell.

The Powell podcast w...

How Low Interest Rates Change the World: Global Trends Caused by Low Rates and Emerging Factors Shaping the Future of Rates (Oxford UP, 2025) explores the societal impact of changing interest rates. Taking its starting point in the remarkable four-decade decline in global interest rates from 1980 to 2020, the book examines five global trends it caused, the underlying factors that drove interest rates lower, and emerging trends likely to shape the future path of interest rates.

The book contends that the steady decline in interest rates around the world from 1980 to 2020 played a pivotal role in shaping five significant gl...

In a world shaken by crises, why does the dollar continue to dominate? In Dollar Dominance: Why It Rules the Global Economy and How to Challenge It (Policy Press, 2025) Photis Lysandrou explores the interaction between global instability and the enduring strength of the dollar. Drawing on examples from the 2008 Great Financial Crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the author reveals how uncertainty and instability in global trade, production and politics drives investors towards the safety of the dollar, reinforcing its dominance over other currencies. With clear and insightful analysis, Lysandrou reveals the true global financial fou...

The U.S. dollar is the world’s most important currency. Trade is priced in dollars, the world’s central banks keep U.S. dollars in reserve, some places–including my home of Hong Kong, peg their currencies to the dollar. But what explains the U.S. dollar’s success? And why have some challengers, like the Japanese yen or the Chinese yuan, failed to gain traction?

Paul Blustein, author of King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency, joins us on the show today; the book was released last year, and is now in paperba...

How did an economic system that was the result of largely uncoordinated and unplanned individual decisions come to dominate our modern world? This is the core question that my guest, Berkeley economic historian Trevor Jackson, tries to answer in his new book, The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World (Norton, 2026). Jackson begins with the origins of the global monetary system in the fifteenth century and ends in the early twentieth century, when capitalism faced its most serious challenges from communism and socialism. While wage labor and financial instruments like loans and stocks feel unremarkable today, he reminds us th...

Hello! Thanks for reaching out. I'm glad you're here! Do you have any questions or thoughts about the recent discussion with Karen Hao on AI and its societal impacts?Hello! Thanks for reaching out. I'm glad you're here! Do you have any questions or thoughts about the recent discussion with Karen Hao on AI and its societal impacts?

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John is joined by the brilliant and affable Paul Kramer of Vanderbilt (The Blood of Government) to discuss Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin, 2025) by Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. With Christine A. Desan (Recall This Book adores her) he is the co-director of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University. This builds on his marvelous previous work about the global cotton trade.

John wants to know about the importance of the state as money-maker and underpinner of markets. Paul asks about the key historical ruptures; the conversation goes back a millenniu...

Eric Ries shares how financial 'gravity' pulls great companies away from their founders' purpose, and his solutions in his new book Incorruptible (Authors Equity, 2026)

Join us for a uniquely provocative conversation between our host, Richard Lucas, and renowned entrepreneur and "Lean Startup" author Eric Ries on his new book, Incorruptible. Moving beyond the surface-level summary, Richard intentionally focuses on the book's deep ethical and moral core, giving Ries the space to clarify and elaborate on his most challenging ideas.1

This is not your typical book tour stop. Richard dives into what he finds "particularly interesting," explori...

The book places special emphasis on the relationship between corporations, managers, and shareholders. Drawing on Lynn Stout’s influential work on corporate governance, the authors challenge the common belief that corporate law requires managers to maximize shareholder value at all times. In reality, corporate directors and managers are expected to exercise business judgment that balances long-term corporate health, stakeholder relationships, and legal responsibilities.

Shareholders play a critical role in corporate governance, but the authors emphasize that corporations are not simply machines for immediate shareholder profit. Instead, corporations are long-lived institutions that rely on cooperation among shareholders, employees, cu...

In today’s world, it is almost impossible to go through the day without interacting with a bank—whether through a salary payment, a debit card, a credit card, or a digital ID used to access public services online. Yet this intimate relationship between households and banks is relatively recent.

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Orsi Husz, Professor at Uppsala University, about her book Bankminded: Banks as Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden. The book traces how, from the late 1950s onwards, banks gradually became embedded in the every...

In this episode, Jeremy Sosabowski, CEO and co‑founder of AlgoDynamix, reveals how his company is reinventing market forecasting through behavioral analytics rather than traditional fundamentals or news. By decoding real‑time transactional order flow, AlgoDynamix predicts price movements (hours or days in advance) based on what traders are actually doing — a fresh, practical edge for smaller hedge funds, family offices and HNWI (High Net Worth Individuals) seeking ultimate actionable trading insights.

Jeremy shares how the company continues to expand and refine its business model and how they have built a scalable platform capable of handling complex, multi‑as...

Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans examines the impact of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic restructuring programmes during active conflicts.

Using a critical political economy perspective, the book explores how these restructuring efforts affect vulnerable communities’ survival amid violence. Chapters provide a detailed case study of Ukraine during the War in Donbas, analysing the controversial reforms in agriculture, gas and pension sectors. The resulting analysis offers valuable insights into how these reforms have influenced Ukraine’s political economy and the survi...

In Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World, the distinguished banker, executive, and historian Paolo Zannoni examines the complex relationship between states and banks that has changed the world. Drawing on in-depth archival research, he explores seven case studies: the republic of Pisa, seventeenth-century Venice, the early years of the Bank of England, imperial Spain, the Kingdom of Naples, the nascent United States during the American Revolution, and Bolshevik Russia in 1917 through 1923. Zannoni also tells the story of how the Continental Congress established the first public bank in North America, exploring the roles of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin...

In The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025) Donald Chew profiles key figures in the development of modern corporate finance while emphasizing their counterintuitive lessons for shareholders, companies, and countries. He deals with such questions as: Why did the stagflation of the 1970s prove so painful and protracted? What explains the U.S. stock market’s forty-year run of 12 percent average annual returns? Why is Japan still mired in a decades-long recession? What accounts for the resilience of U.S. stock markets in the...

Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, New York Times' journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative Davos Men-members of the billionaire class-chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man's wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle doctor on the front lines of the fight against COVID, blue-collar workers in the tenements of Buenos Aires, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, an A...

China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs), specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group from the 1980s through 2025. Using a combination of new qualitative findings and quantitative datasets, the authors observe that China has taken an evolving approach to the BWIs in order to achieve its multiple agendas, acting largely as a 'rule-taker' during its first two decades as a member, but, over time, also becoming a 'rule-shaker' inside the BWIs, and ultimately a new 'rule-maker' outside of the BWIs. The analysis highlights China's ex...

In The City's Defense: The Bank of England and the Remaking of Economic Governance, 1914-1939, Robert Yee examines how the City of London maintained its status as an international financial center. He traces the role of the Bank of England in restructuring the domestic, imperial, European, and international monetary systems in the aftermath of the First World War

Responding to mass unemployment and volatile exchange rates, the Bank expanded its reach into areas outside the traditional scope of central banking, including industrial policy and foreign affairs. It designed a system of economic governance that reinforced the preeminence...