New Books in Finance

With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in higher education finance. Beth discusses the issue of student debt, and what the Biden relief plan will and will not achieve.  You can find more information about Dr. Akers and her recent writing and appearances here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

We all know that things are a little more expensive when we head to the grocery store. But what does inflation actually mean? How did we get to where we are, and what happens next? What does history have to say about our current economic situation? Annika sits down with Tyler Goodspeed of the Hoover Institution. Dr. Goodspeed served in the White House as Acting Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2020-2021, and was formerly on the Faculty of Economics at the University of Oxford, where he specialized in financial history.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, talks about her book, Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in Debt, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Indentured Students examines the long history of student loans in the United States, including important turning points in the 1960s. Shermer argues that elected officials have preferred student loans as an answer to an important social problem, the perceived-need for college education, over more structural solutions. Shermer and Vinsel also talk about what this legacy of debt means today as well as what recent public discussions about student debt might portend for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Michael Sandel is Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University. Sandel is an internationally renowned political philosopher who Newsweek has lauded as “the world’s most relevant living philosopher.” His latest project is a video series titled What Money Can’t Buy, which has Michael and an international group of college students exploring the question “What, if anything, is wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?” You can view the series for free at whatmoneycantbuy.org. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Tommie Shelby is Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His research focuses on political equality and problems of economic, social, and criminal justice. His most recent book is Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, which is published by Harvard University Press.  The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

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 exercise of 'two-way countervailing power' with one foot inside the BWIs, and another outside, and pushing for changes in both directions. China's interventions have resulted in BWs reforms and the gradual transformation of the global order, while also generating counter-reactions especially from the United States. Gregory Chin is an Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics, and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University (Canada), with a focus on the political economy of international money and development finance, China, Asia, the BRICS, and global governance. Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories. Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

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 of sterling as a reserve currency. Drawing on a range of archival evidence from national governments, private corporations, and international organizations, Yee reevaluates our understanding of Britain's impact on the global economic order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Winners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed: a provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy. Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century - widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world - many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe: Private markets are always more efficient than public ones; investment capital flows efficiently to necessary projects; massive inequality is the unavoidable side effect of economic growth; people are selfish and will only behave well with the right incentives. But a growing number of people - academic economists, business owners, policy entrepreneurs, and ordinary people - are rejecting these myths and reshaping economies around the world to reflect ethical and social values. Though they differ in approach, all share a vision of the economy as a place of moral action and accountability. Journalist Nick Romeo has spent years covering the world's most innovative economic and policy ideas for The New Yorker. In The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy (PublicAffairs, 2024), Romeo takes us on an extraordinary journey through the unforgettable stories and successes of people working to build economies that are more equal, just, and livable. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World War years, the Great Depression era, the 1970s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, and most recently the Covid-19 crisis. Through his insightful analysis, he illustrates how some of these crises contributed to increased cross-border integration of labor, goods, and capital markets, while others resulted in significant deglobalization. James classifies the crises into two categories: those caused by shortages and those driven by demand. He explains how shortages have led to greater globalization as markets expanded and producers innovated to increase supply, as evidenced by events such as the First World War and the oil shocks of the 1970s. In contrast, demand-driven crises, such as those that caused the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, have typically led to international trade contraction and decreased globalization, often accompanied by widespread skepticism of governments. To support his findings, James examines the writings of key observers who shaped our understanding of each crisis, including Karl Marx in 1848, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the 1870s, German Treasury Secretary Karl Helfferich in the First World War, John Maynard Keynes in the Great Depression, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s, Ben Bernanke in 2008, and Larry Summers and Raj Chetty in 2020. Overall, James' work provides an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between economic crises and globalization over the past two centuries, and sheds light on the potential trajectory of future economic developments. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider – but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. “Effective Altruism” and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumanism, remain dangerously influential in today’s Silicon Valley. Despite Bankman-Fried’s pose as a cuddly liberal philanthropist, they are now center stage in the global rise of the far right, and also lie at the heart of OpenAI, the tech darling that took FTX’s place as the face of the future. In this interview, Morris explains how some of the key thought processes that drive today's techno-billionaires and how we can spot the next fraudsters in our midst.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025) by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived “civilizational differences” rendered it incompatible with a Western-dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorizing offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized"/"primitive” divide. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia. Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets. Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach. By chronicling capitalism’s global history, Beckert exposes the reality of the system that now seems simply “natural.” It is said that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If there is one ultimate lesson in this extraordinary book, it’s how to leave that behind. Though cloaked in a false timelessness and universality, capitalism is, in reality, a recent human invention. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely tote up capitalism’s debits and credits. He shows us how to look through and beyond it to imagine a different and larger world. Soumyadeep Guha is a fourth-year PhD student in the History Department at Binghamton University, New York. He is interested in historical research focusing on themes such as Agrarian/Environmental History, History of Science and Tech, Global History, and their intersections. His prospective dissertation questions are on the pre-history of the ‘Green Revolution’ in Eastern India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist investment and speculation, yet open to wider social strata. Delving into auction records, memoirs, newspaper articles, financial and legal documents in six languages, Alvi explores these cultural and socio-economic developments across the British, French, and German markets, as well as trade spheres such as Russia and Scandinavia. 1914 marked the end of the European art market and cemented the connection between art and finance.  The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) Maddalena Alvi holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford, and an MLitt in Art History from the University of Glasgow. Priya S. Gandhi is a writer and strategist based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (U California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely, a former hedge fund worker takes an ethnographic approach to hedge funds. Manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? She gives readers an insider perspective on the phenomenon. Facing an unpredictable and risky stock market, hedge fund workers work long hours and build tight-knit networks with people who look and behave like them. Neely shows how the system of elite power and privilege sustains and builds over time as the beneficiaries concentrate their resources. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

In The Land Trap (Portfolio / Penguin), Mike Bird—Wall Street editor at The Economist—reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influence over the modern world. From the speculative land grabs of colonial America to China's real estate crisis today, Bird shows how fortunes are built—and destroyed—on the bedrock of land. Tracing three centuries of history, Bird explores how land quietly became the linchpin of the global banking system, driving everything from soaring housing prices to rising geopolitical tensions. As governments wrestle with inequality and land grows ever scarcer, The Land Trap offers a powerful new framework for understanding the hidden force behind today's most urgent challenges. This is the book for anyone who wants to see beyond markets and money to the real game being played on a foundation as old as civilization itself. Timely, provocative, and essential, The Land Trap will change how you see the ground beneath your feet. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) holds an MPhil in Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

In The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2023), the authors Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian conceptualise how gender, debt, and capitalism are related. For over ten years, the researchers have been working in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu, observing a credit market that specifically targets Dalit women. The book highlights not only the ways how credit is distributed, but also how it is repaid. Combining in-depth ethnography with statistical surveys and financial diaries advanced the understanding of how Dalit women deal with debt, exposing the ways in which capitalism shapes womanhood. The authors' nuanced attention to body, identity, caste, and class provides a comprehensive theory of the sexual division of debt for the first time.  Isabelle Guérin is Senior Research Fellow at the French Institute of Research for Sustainable Development, and Associate at the French Institute of Pondicherry. Santosh Kumar is a part-time researcher and founder and head of the Mithralaya School of music, dance, and arts. G. Venkatasubramanian has been a sociologist and Research Fellow at the French Institute of Pondicherry for the past thirty-five years. Sarah Vogelsanger is a researcher on social justice, gender, art and migration, based in London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Are you looking for an alternative to a career path at a big firm? Does founding your own start-up seem too risky? There is a radical third path open to you: You can buy a small business and run it as CEO. Purchasing a small company offers significant financial rewards--as well as personal and professional fulfillment. Leading a firm means you can be your own boss, put your executive skills to work, fashion a company environment that meets your own needs, and profit directly from your success. But finding the right business to buy and closing the deal isn't always easy. In the HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business: Think Big, Buy Small, Own Your Own Company (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017), Harvard Business School professors Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff help you: Determine if this path is right for you Raise capital for your acquisition Find and evaluate the right prospects Avoid the pitfalls that could derail your search Understand why a "dull" business might be the best investment Negotiate a potential deal with the seller Avoid deals that fall through at the last minute Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges. Listen to the Think Big, Buy Small podcast. Richard S. Ruback is the Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance at Harvard Business School. Royce Yudkoff is a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. Yudkoff cofounded and served for over 20 years as Managing Partner of ABRY Partners, a leading private equity investment firm. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

“If I had been enslaved for a year or two, I might not be able to believe in humanity any more.” “I am a victim of modern slavery.” These chilling words come from a Taiwanese female lured by a fake job offer, only to be sold into a scam compound in Cambodia. She is not alone. She is one of thousands deceived into this industry—people who left home hoping for a better life, only to find themselves trapped in a living nightmare. Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds (Verso Books, 2025) arrives at a critical moment, shedding light on one of the world’s fastest-growing criminal economies: Southeast Asia’s online scam industry. Running the gamut from the notorious “pig butchering” romance scams to elaborate online extortion and investment frauds, this system has transformed parts of the region into global hubs of cybercrime. Meticulously researched and grounded in years of fieldwork, Scam offers an unflinching look into the prison-like compounds that have mushroomed across multiple countries. Within these walled complexes, victims are often coerced into becoming perpetrators—trapped in what the authors describe as “compound capitalism,” a chilling hybrid of enslavement and exploitation. Scam traces how small-scale online gambling rings evolved into an international “scamdemic,” accelerated by the disruptions of COVID-19. It examines the “victim–offender trap”, a moral and psychological paradox that makes empathy difficult for outsiders. The result is a deeply human investigation into how modern slavery adapts to digital capitalism. The authors uncover the operations of scam compounds across Southeast Asia. In my interview with Ling and Ivan, what stood out was not only their depth of knowledge but their compassion. They used their skills to build trust with victims, gather evidence, and, in some cases, help orchestrate rescues. Their work is both rigorous and profoundly humane, illuminating a crisis that grows more complex each day. Though many of those involved—both perpetrators and victims—are ethnically Chinese, the networks now span continents. The scam compounds are a global phenomenon, built on economic desperation, weak governance, and digital interconnectivity. Scam is more than an exposé. It is a call to action and a vital first step toward understanding a new form of global exploitation—where modern technology and ancient cruelty combine to create a system that enslaves the vulnerable and profits from despair. Ling Li is pursuing a PhD at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a focus on the role of technology in enabling modern slavery and human trafficking in East and Southeast Asia. In the past few years, she has been providing support to survivors of scam compounds in Southeast Asia, interacting with local and international civil society organisations to bring them relief and help with repatriation. Ivan Franceschini is a lecturer at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. His current research focuses on ethnic Chinese transnational crime, especially in the field of online fraud. He co-founded the Made in China Journal and The People’s Map of Global China/ Global China Pulse. His books include Proletarian China (2022), Global China as Method (2022), and Afterlives of Chinese Communism (2019). He also co-directed the documentaries Dreamwork China (2011) and Boramey (2021). Mark Bo is a researcher who has been based in East and Southeast Asia for 2 decades. He has worked globally with local civil society partners to monitor and advocate for improved environmental and social practices in development projects and utilises his background in corporate and financial mapping to investigate stakeholders involved in Asia’s online gambling, fraud, and money laundering industries. Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Her research interests include the exploration of overseas Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies. She is also a freelance translator. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Alex Imas is the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Professor of Behavioral Science, Economics and Applied AI and a Vasilou Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has taught Negotiations and Behavioral Economics. He is a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Applied AI and the Human Capital & Economic Opportunity, an NBER Faculty Research Associate, and a CESifo Research Network Fellow. He is also an Associate Editor at the Journal of the European Economic Association and on the editorial board of Psychological Science. Alex studies behavioral economics with a focus on how people understand and mentally represent the choices they are facing. His research explores topics related to how people learn and make choices in settings with risk and uncertainty. He also studies the economics of artificial intelligence and discrimination. Alex’s work utilizes a variety of methods, including controlled laboratory experiments, field experiments, analysis of observational data and theoretical modeling. Alex Imas is the recipient of the 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Review of Financial Studies Rising Scholar Award, the New Investigator Award from the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award from the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He is the co-author, with Richard Thaler, of The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now (Simon and Schuster, 2025). He is an Associate Editor at the Journal of the European Economic Association and on the editorial board of Psychological Science. Alex was born in Bender, Moldova. Previously, he was the William S. Dietrich II Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught Behavioral Economics and Human Judgment and Decision Making. He did his PhD in economics at the University of California, San Diego and earned a BA from Northwestern University. Prior to graduate school, Imas helped found a startup and co-authored several patents as part of its intellectual property strategy. Teaching materials for The Winner’s Curse can be found here. Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads the Master’s Program in International and Development Economics at the University of San Francisco. He is also a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center and an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy. Guest interviewer Robizon Khubulashvili is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His research is at the intersection of theoretical, behavioral, and experimental microeconomics. A common question in his research is, how can we use a user's revealed preferences to improve the performance of online platforms? Robizon has studied this question in two settings: when monetary incentives are missing (an online gaming platform) and when monetary incentives are present (an online gambling platform). His work suggests that heterogeneity among users is an essential consideration in designing better online platforms; that is, a policy benefiting one type of user might harm the other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Silicon Valley wants to disrupt finance, and it might just succeed. In FinTech Dystopia, professor Hilary Allen offers an accessible, irreverent, and occasionally furious account of how tech elites are quietly taking over the financial system and making it worse in the process. Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of conversations with policymakers, journalists, and regulators, Allen explains how fintech and crypto have failed to deliver on their promises and why so much of Silicon Valley’s power comes from manipulating the law rather than from real innovation. She also explores how the spread of tech-driven finance connects to the biggest issues of our time, from inequality to political influence. Written as a serial for readers outside the academic or policy worlds, FinTech Dystopia invites you to grab a drink, settle in, and learn how Silicon Valley is reshaping money, power, and the everyday economy and what we can do about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance