Wealth, poverty and inequality

Field measurement of Lima's informal economy and the cost of legality; the founding text.

The skim era and the Teamsters pension-fund financing of Las Vegas.

The founding map of who owns Canadian business.

Organised crime as an actual industrial and logistics business.

Eike Batista and the plutocracy: how Brazilian fortunes are made and unmade.

The cartels analysed as firms: supply chains, franchising, HR.

How the pieces assemble: Nevis trusts, BVI companies, London property, Caribbean passports.

Crony capitalism, promoter leverage and the bad-loan crisis.

The strongest popular case that market-led do-gooding entrenches the status quo.

Case studies of extraction from acquired companies.

Consumer-side account of how insurers make money.

Collected 1980s finance essays

How the integrated investment bank extracts its economics from clients.

Sociologist embedded with a gang; an informal economy's incentive structure

Polemical, but the case for bond-market financing over aid is argued in investor terms.

Sceptical audit of what microfinance evidence actually supports.

Commodity desks at banks and funds after the 2008 boom.

Academic critique of Gates Foundation philanthrocapitalism.

The author trained as a wealth manager; the best account of the professionals who build the structures.

Concentration of wealth, land and market power among a few families.

Wealth, land and conservation in the American West.

Concentration traced sector by sector through its effects on customers.

Investigative case against the foundation's power.

Thomas Stanley and William Danko's 1996 research-based portrait of actual American millionaires found them living in ordinary neighborhoods, driving used cars, and running unglamorous businesses. The book's lasting value is empirical: it provides data against the cultural image of wealth as consumption, and it directly informs how the FIRE movement thinks about lifestyle design.

Weak securities enforcement and what it costs minority shareholders.

Why family farms lose ground to consolidated ownership.