Morningstar

In this absorbing, smart, and accessible blend of economic and cultural history, Scott Nations, a longtime trader, financial engineer, and CNBC contributor, takes us on a journey through the five significant stock market crashes in the past century to reveal how they defined the United States today

The Panic of 1907: When the Knickerbocker Trust Company failed, after a brazen attempt to manipulate the stock market led to a disastrous

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"Steven A. Cohen is a Wall Street legend. Born into a middle class family in a decidedly upper class suburb on Long Island, he was unpopular in high school and unlucky with girls. Then he went off to Wharton, and in 1992 launched the hedge fund SAC Capital, which grew into a $15 billion empire. He cultivated an air of mystery and reclusiveness -- at one point, owned the copyright to almost every picture taken of him -- and also of extreme excess,...

Presents a moment-by-moment account of the recent financial collapse that documents state efforts to prevent an economic disaster, offering insight into the pivotal consequences of decisions made throughout the past decade.

Based on the true story of four outsiders (Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt) who saw what the big banks, media and government refused to: the global collapse of the economy. A bold investment leads them into the dark underbelly of banking, where everyone and everything is in question. Winner of an **Academy Award** and a **BAFTA Award** for Best Adapted Screenplay and nominated for Best Film. Nominated for four **Golden Globes**...

Didier Sornette is professor of entrepreneurial risks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, professor of finance at the Swiss Finance Institute in Geneva, and the director of the Financial Crisis Observatory at ETH Zurich. The scientific study of complex systems has transformed a wide range of disciplines in recent years, enabling researchers in both the natural and social sciences to model and predict phenomena as diverse as earthquakes,...

The Panic of 1907 takes a historical look at what is considered the third worst market crash in history and defines how it relates to the financial markets in 2007, exactly 100 years later. In a detailed and well-written narrative, authors Bruner and Carr take the reader through the story of the crash, beginning with the dramatic story of Charles T. Barney's death (Barney was the deposed president of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, one of the first...

How did Wall Street become a self-serving and ultimately destructive profit machine that imploded? Wall Street's real job is to be our "financial utility"-good financial plumbers that funnel capital to companies so the economy can expand and create jobs and also provide the means for individual investors to build portfolios that will increase personal wealth.But Wall Street went haywire and became (in Jon Stewart's words) a "bizarro" place that lost...

"In 2009, at the peak of the financial crisis, AIG - the American insurance behemoth - was sinking fast. It was the peg upon which the nation hung its ire and resentment during the financial crisis: the pinnacle of Wall Street arrogance and greed. When Bob Benmosche climbed aboard as CEO, it was widely assumed that he would go down with his ship. In mere months, he turned things around, pulling AIG from the brink of financial collapse and restoring...

"The definitive account of the crash of 1987, a cautionary tale of how the U.S. financial system nearly collapsed ... Monday, October 19, 1987, was by far the worst day in Wall Street history. The market fell 22.6 percent--almost twice as bad as the worst day of 1929--equal to a loss of nearly 5,000 points today. But Black Monday was more than just a one-day market crash; it was seven years in the making and threatened the entire U.S. financial system....

An aide to the Senator in charge of investigating aspects of the financial crisis details unsuccessful efforts to hold financial executives criminally accountable, stop stock manipulation, and break up large banks, and suggests solutions.