BiblioVault - Books about Finance

Tax Haven Ireland

Brian O’ Boyle

Pluto Press, 2021

This is the story of how a small island on the edge of Europe became one of the world’s major tax havens. From global corporations such as Apple and Google, to investment bankers and mainstream politicians, those taking advantage of Ireland’s pro-business tax laws and shadow banking system have amassed untold riches at enormous social cost to ordinary people at home and abroad.

Tax Haven Ireland uncovers the central players in this process and exposes the coverups employed by the Irish state, with the help of accountants, lawyers, and financial services companies. From the lucrative internet porn industry to corruption in the property market, this issue distorts the economy across the state and in the wider international system, and its history runs deep, going back the country’s origins as a British colonial outpost.

Today, in the wake of Brexit and in the shadow of yet another economic crash, what can be done to prevent such dangerous behaviour and reorganize our economies to invest in the people? Can Ireland – and all of us – build an alternative economy based on fairness and democratic values?

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Terrorist Use of Cryptocurrencies

Technical and Organizational Barriers and Future Threats

Cynthia Dion-Schwarz

RAND Corporation, 2019

The success of counterterrorism finance strategies in reducing terrorist access to official currencies has raised concerns that terrorist organizations might increase their use of such digital cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin to support their activities. RAND researchers thus consider the needs of terrorist groups and the advantages and disadvantages of the cryptocurrency technologies available to them.

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Trading Futures

A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism

Filipe Maia

Duke University Press, 2022

The discourse of financialized capitalism tries to create a future predictable enough to manage risk for the wealthy, to shape the future into a profit-making site that constrains and privatizes the sense of what’s possible. Here, people’s hopes and meaning-making energies are policed through the burden of debt. In Trading Futures Filipe Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future, calling for escape routes from the debt economy. Drawing on Marxism, continental philosophy, and Latin American liberation theology, Maia provides a critical portrayal of financialization as a death-dealing mechanism that colonizes the future in its own image. Maia elaborates a Christian eschatology of liberation that offers a subversive mode of imagining future possibilities. He shows how the Christian vocabulary of hope can offer a way to critique the hegemony of financialized capitalism, propelling us in the direction of a just future that financial discourse cannot manage or control.

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Transnational Capitalism in East Central Europe's Heavy Industry

From Flagship Enterprises to Subsidiaries

Aleksandra Sznajder Lee

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Focusing on the steel industry during the post-communist transition from 1989 through 2009, Aleksandra Sznajder Lee traces the transformation of flagship state enterprises in the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia into the subsidiaries of large, international corporations. By analyzing this transformation at the three levels of enterprise, sector, and national-international nexus, she identifies the players—from international investors and European Union members to national labor unions and local industry managers—in the political economy of reform. Even in the midst of the transition to a capitalist, democratic system, Sznajder Lee finds, the state plays a key role in mediating between domestic vested interests and external pressures from international financial markets and institutions, on the one hand, and regional institutions on the other. Whereas state power may be employed to require domestic firms to operate as capitalists in the international market, it may also be used to shield enterprises from market pressures in order to promote the political and personal preferences of the elite.

This book has broad implications for the political economy of reform because it illuminates the political determinants of privatization and the resources used to resist it. In addition, Sznajder Lee sheds new light on why some countries are more likely than others to be subject to external constraints, such as IMF conditionality, and how some allegedly pro-market reformers manage to maintain public ownership over certain industry sectors.

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Tuition Rising

Why College Costs So Much, With a New Preface

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Harvard University Press, 2002

America’s colleges and universities are the best in the world. They are also the most expensive. Tuition has risen faster than the rate of inflation for the past thirty years. There is no indication that this trend will abate.

Ronald G. Ehrenberg explores the causes of this tuition inflation, drawing on his many years as a teacher and researcher of the economics of higher education and as a senior administrator at Cornell University. Using incidents and examples from his own experience, he discusses a wide range of topics including endowment policies, admissions and financial aid policies, the funding of research, tenure and the end of mandatory retirement, information technology, libraries and distance learning, student housing, and intercollegiate athletics.

He shows that colleges and universities, having multiple, relatively independent constituencies, suffer from ineffective central control of their costs. And in a fascinating analysis of their response to the ratings published by magazines such as U.S. News & World Report, he shows how they engage in a dysfunctional competition for students.

In the short run, colleges and universities have little need to worry about rising tuitions, since the number of qualified students applying for entrance is rising even faster. But in the long run, it is not at all clear that the increases can be sustained. Ehrenberg concludes by proposing a set of policies to slow the institutions’ rising tuitions without damaging their quality.

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