During our lifetime we experience any number of business cycle crises which undermine our confidence and lead many to their ruin. We also experience the ‘happy days’ when our faith in the future becomes almost limitless, and when we forget that tides always turn again. So how can we better understand and predict these cycles? To answer these questions Lars Tvede takes us through a story that moves back in time to the Scottish gambler and financial genius, John Law, and then on to the distracted Adam Smith, the stockbroker Ricardo, the investment banker Thornton, the extrovert Schumpeter, the speculator Gould and many others to trace the theory and reality of business cycles, as it has evolved over 300 years. Gradually we reach the computer jugglers of the modern day who, with giant networks of equations, try to solve the same questions that have attracted the attention of classical economists throughout the centuries. Lars Tvede concludes this historical journey with a summary of what the core of the problem is and how modern understanding of business cycles can be used to forecast economic fluctuations. The final sections of the book provide detailed studies and explanations to of how stocks, bonds, hedge funds, private equity funds, gold, diamonds, exchange rates, real estate, commodities, art and collectibles, and numerous sub-sectors of some of these markets each behave over different categories of business cycles.

This volume presents the most complete collection available of the work of Victor Zarnowitz, a leader in the study of business cycles, growth, inflation, and forecasting.. With characteristic insight, Zarnowitz examines theories of the business cycle, including Keynesian and monetary theories and more recent rational expectation and real business cycle theories. He also measures trends and cycles in economic activity; evaluates the performance of leading indicators and their composite measures; surveys forecasting tools and performance of business and academic economists; discusses historical changes in the nature and sources of business cycles; and analyzes how successfully forecasting firms and economists predict such key economic variables as interest rates and inflation.

This thought-provoking monograph analyzes long- medium- and short-term global cycles of prosperity, recession, and depression, plotting them against centuries of important world events. Major research on economic and political cycles is integrated to clarify evolving relationships between the global center and its periphery as well as current worldwide economic upheavals and potential future developments. Central to this survey are successive waves of industrial and, later, technological and cybernetic progress, leading to the current era of globalization and the changes of the roles of both Western powers and former minors players, however that will lead to the formation of the world order without a hegemon. Additionally, the authors predict what they term the Great Convergence, the lessening of inequities between the global core and the rest of the world, including the wealth gap between First and Third World nations. Among the topics in this ambitious volume: · Why politics is often omitted from economic analysis. · Why economic cycles are crucial to understanding the modern geopolitical landscape. · How the aging of the developed world will affect world technological and economic future.“/p> · The evolving technological forecast for Global North and South. · Where the U.S. is likely to stand on the future world stage. Economic Cycles, Crises, and the Global Periphery will inspire discussion and debate among sociologists, global economists, demographers, global historians, and futurologists. This expert knowledge is necessary for further research, proactive response, and preparedness for a new age of sociopolitical change.

This is the most sophisticated and up-to-date econometric analysis of business cycles now available. Francis Diebold and Glenn Rudebusch have long been acknowledged as leading experts on business cycles. And here they present a highly integrative collection of their most important essays on the subject, along with a detailed introduction that draws together the book's principal themes and findings. Diebold and Rudebusch use the latest quantitative methods to address five principal questions about the measurement, modeling, and forecasting of business cycles. They ask whether business cycles have become more moderate in the postwar period, concluding that recessions have, in fact, been shorter and shallower. They consider whether economic expansions and contractions tend to die of "old age." Contrary to popular wisdom, they find little evidence that expansions become more fragile the longer they last, although they do find that contractions are increasingly likely to end as they age. The authors discuss the defining characteristics of business cycles, focusing on how economic variables move together and on the timing of the slow alternation between expansions and contractions. They explore the difficulties of distinguishing between long-term trends in the economy and cyclical fluctuations. And they examine how business cycles can be forecast, looking in particular at how to predict turning points in cycles, rather than merely the level of future economic activity. They show here that the index of leading economic indicators is a poor predictor of future economic activity, and consider what we can learn from other indicators, such as financial variables. Throughout, the authors make use of a variety of advanced econometric techniques, including nonparametric analysis, fractional integration, and regime-switching models. Business Cycles is crucial reading for policymakers, bankers, and business executives.

#1 New York Times Bestseller “Significant...The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving.” —The New York Times Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals. In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success. In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve. Here, from a man who has been called both “the Steve Jobs of investing” and “the philosopher king of the financial universe” (CIO magazine), is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you’ll find in the conventional business press.

Business Cycles in Economic Thought underlines how, over the time span of two centuries, economic thought interacted with cycles in a continuous renewal of theories and rethinking of policies, whilst economic actions embedded themselves into past economic thought. This book argues that studying crises and periods of growth in different European countries will help to understand how different national, political and cultural traditions influenced the complex interaction of economic cycles and economic theorizing. The editors of this great volume bring together expert contributors consisting of economists, historians of economic thought and historians of economics, to analyse crises and theories of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This is alongside a comprehensive outlook on the most relevant advances of economic theory in France, Germany and Italy, as well as coverage of non-European countries, such as the United States. Several of the highly prestigious Villa Vigoni Trilateral Conferences formed the background for the discussions in this book. This volume is of great interest to students and academics who study history of economic thought, political economy and macroeconomics.