Politics and Government

Why Germany could not pay the 1919 reparations, and what they would do to Europe.

Capitalism runs on creative destruction, and its success may lead it to socialism.

Why mass movements of every kind draw the same frustrated people and use one method.

Conflict as bargaining: commitment, credible threats and focal points.

Economic freedom as a condition of political freedom, applied to policy questions.

An indictment of 1960s Australia as provincial, philistine and living on its luck.

The economics of regulated industries, from pricing at marginal cost to competition.

How an unelected official amassed power and used it to rebuild New York.

Antitrust should rest on the economics of efficiency, not on protecting competitors.

The case for free markets and limited government, policy area by policy area.

How Japan's trade ministry steered industry from 1925 to 1975.

A century of US regulation through four figures, from Charles Francis Adams to Kahn.

How rival federal agencies dammed the American West's rivers for water projects.

A study of Lima's informal economy and the legal costs that keep the poor outside it.

How Taiwan's state steered industry, making the case for directed East Asian growth.

How socialist economies really worked: soft budgets, shortage and party power.

Why oil booms left Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria and others with unstable states.

Why large state plans fail when they override local, practical knowledge.

How Singapore's leaders chose policies, from courting multinationals onward.

The poor hold assets but lack the property records that turn them into capital.

How Lyndon Johnson mastered the Senate's rules and became its majority leader.

The Fed from 1913 to 1951, told from its own minutes and internal memos.

A 20-year test of 28,000 expert forecasts: foxes with many models beat hedgehogs.

Four meals traced to their sources, from fast food and organic to hunted and grown.

Tests the popular comparison of America with ancient Rome and finds deep differences.

How the dollar became the world's currency, what it gives the US, what may follow.

How ExxonMobil acts like a sovereign power, from the Valdez spill to 2011.

Why oil-rich countries have less democracy, less stability and more civil war.

The economics of climate change, and why a universal carbon price works best.

Globalisation's two phases: cheap shipping of goods, then cheap movement of ideas.

The 2008 crash, the eurozone crisis and the politics after as one connected story.

Energy and geopolitics in 2020: US shale, Russia, China and the Middle East.

Sovereign borrowing from Italian city-states to the pandemic, and what it paid for.

The Rochdale Pioneers by a contemporary; the founding cooperative account.

How bankers used depositors' money to control industry, from the Pujo inquiry.

The 1933 Senate hearings exposing bankers' practices that led to securities laws.

The 1787 Federal Convention in Philadelphia that wrote the US Constitution.

How the palace balances elite factions; still the model for makhzen capitalism.

Antitrust law should pursue one goal, consumer welfare, and drop the rest.

A theory of socialist economies, where chronic shortage is the normal state.

What Japan's institutions had solved that America had not, and what to learn.

Theodore Roosevelt's life from his birth in 1858 to the presidency in 1901.

The classic account of the first oil boom and the Al Saud bargain.

The breakup of AT&T.

How Latin American populist economic programmes follow a cycle from boom to collapse.

Kissinger's life and years in power, where realism, secrecy and strategy met.

Harry Truman's life and presidency, from the atomic bomb to the Korean War.

How Nintendo conquered the American video game market.

The case for Poland's 1990 shock therapy, from an adviser to the programme.

How East Asian governments' interventions helped produce rapid growth.

Latin America's reforms from the 1980s debt crisis to the mid-1990s, assessed.

How Chicago-trained Chilean economists came to run economic policy under Pinochet.

Preference falsification: why people hide their views and how that hides change.

Essays on moving from socialism to markets by Poland's reforming finance minister.

An insider's attack on Europe's exchange rate mechanism and monetary union.

Mexico in the NAFTA era: an uprising, assassinations, corruption and a $50bn bailout.

How Vietnam moved from central planning to a market economy, from field research.

After the Cold War, conflict will follow cultural and religious fault lines.

Written from Romanian fieldwork; how the planned economy behaved in practice.

How Malaysian policy shared ownership and rents among ethnic and political groups.

Modern Mexico from the insurgent priests of the 1810s to Zedillo and the Zapatistas.

What went wrong with Sweden's welfare-state model, leading to the 1990s crisis.

Who took charge of Central Europe's economies after 1989, without a capitalist class.

A founding leader's account of his life and Singapore's politics and history.

How inflation targeting worked in the first countries to adopt it.

Arguments for consumers to question and take on the corporate superbrands.

Why Pakistan grew for four decades while an elite captured the gains.

India's economy from independence to 2000, told alongside a P&G executive's career.

How the 1990 US sulphur dioxide allowance trading programme worked in practice.

Russia's 1990s privatisation and the rise of the oligarchs, from Moscow.

Insider: the finance minister and IDA head on how the FDI model was built.

Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, and why things are going badly there.

Formal political economy applied to the move from communism to markets.

How the IMF handled the Asian and Russian crises of 1997 and 1998, from inside.

Emerging-market crises come from the structure of national balance sheets.

The IMF's own former chief economist on the Fund's failures in Argentina.

Why similar corruption in South Korea and the Philippines led to different results.

An attack on the IMF's one-size-fits-all policies in the crises of the 1990s.

Why foreign investors' hopes of profit in 1990s China were mostly disappointed.

The Finnish model: how a welfare state produced a technology cluster.

Six men and the mechanics of how post-Soviet wealth was assembled.

How Taiwan moved into higher-value industries after its first industrialisation.

How the British Empire shaped the modern world, from globalisation to democracy.

How Lincoln brought his three rivals for the 1860 nomination into his cabinet.

How 1980s changes turned the US patent system from aid to obstacle for innovation.

The citizens' movement of reformers and activists that ended Mexico's one-party rule.

US fiscal promises far exceed future revenue, which official debt figures hide.

Africa from independence to the present, country by country.

How Argentina and the IMF headed toward the 2001 default and devaluation.

One T-shirt traced from a Texas cotton farm to a Chinese factory and beyond.

An economist's path from young communist in Hungary to analyst of socialism.

An investigation of a place living under the rule of a murderous crime organisation.

The monarchy and the Crown Property Bureau as an economic institution.

Berlusconi, media ownership and the capture of regulation.

How Southeast Asia's tycoons got rich from political favours, not productivity.

Rich countries urge poor ones to adopt the opposite of the policies they once used.

Latin America is neither doomed to fail nor saved by one reform; a balanced view.

An introduction to modern India's rise and its many contradictions.

How Israel, Taiwan and Ireland each used the state to build IT industries.

Why about sixty poor countries are stuck, caught in traps such as conflict.

The fight for Caspian Sea oil from the 19th century to the present.

Eight essays on the post-1989 move from socialism to capitalism.

How Mugabe's Zimbabwe used land seizures and money-printing to hold power.

Why most government efforts to build venture capital sectors fail.

Ireland's crash was the product of its political culture, not global finance.

What China actually does in Africa, from field research, against Western myths.

The politics of the euro from postwar plans to its first decade.

The 2008 crisis grew from political and economic imbalances, not just banker greed.

How a few scientists with ties to industry ran campaigns to deny settled science.

How PPP concessions are structured, priced and argued over.

The academic account of what havens do and how they compete.

Every US information industry moved from an open era to control by one firm.

A class analysis of the Gulf states that rejects the standard rentier-state view.

How Hugo Chavez turned Venezuela's frail democracy into a semi-authoritarian state.

Kinship networks, patronage and why the state is weaker and more durable than it looks.

How China's state-run financial system really works behind its official figures.

The authoritative volume on how the developmental state was built.

How offshore finance works, with Britain and the City of London at its centre.

The 2008 crisis from inside the FDIC, which closed failed banks and guarded deposits.

Why Italy's economy underperformed, and the firms and places showing it can change.

Nigeria's reforms: cutting $30 billion of debt, fighting corruption, restructuring.

How deregulation from 1983 produced three decades without recession.

Joseph P. Kennedy's life in banking, film, the stock market and politics.

The 2008 crisis, the policy response and the aftermath, for general readers.

How government decisions and monopolies left US internet access slow and costly.

Why some Asian nations grew rich: land reform, export-led industry, directed credit.

Lee Kuan Yew's views on China, the United States and world strategy, by topic.

Political history that explains who controls which parts of the economy.

How processed-food makers engineer salt, sugar and fat to make people eat more.

The 2007 to 2012 crises through three central bankers: Bernanke, King and Trichet.

Why banks should fund themselves with far more equity, and why their objections fail.

The 1944 Bretton Woods conference as a contest between Keynes and Harry Dexter White.

Broad employee ownership as an American tradition, and the case for reviving it.

Trade imbalances come from policies that hold down household consumption.

Insider account of the financial-warfare machinery that isolates Iranian banks.

Brazil's rise toward economic power and the many problems it still faces.

Whether a nation's banks are stable or crisis-prone is decided by its politics.

County data showing household debt, not the banks, caused the Great Recession.

Data showing China's growth came from private firms, not the state sector.

What private equity does to companies, workers and investor returns, critically.

Southern Europe lost competitiveness under the euro; a German critic's remedies.

Why the security state crowded out the productive economy from the start.

Competing regional ideas of legitimate order and the balance of power.

Twenty-five years negotiating with Chinese officials, from Goldman to the Treasury.

An investor in Russia is expelled, his firms seized, and his lawyer Magnitsky dies.

How much wealth is hidden in tax havens, and how to tax it.

How Africa's oil and minerals are extracted in ways that leave its people poorer.

The euro's design flaws traced back through the postwar monetary system.

Brazil's billionaires during the boom, and what their fortunes say about inequality.

A question-and-answer guide to how China's economy works.

The drug trade as a business: how cartels handle supply chains, staff and branding.

The euro rests on false assumptions; Europe must complete the union or end it.

The euro crisis as a clash between German and French economic traditions.

Insider: the reporters who received and worked the Mossack Fonseca leak.

What Fed independence legally is, versus what people assume.

Ten rules for judging whether a country's economy will rise or fall.

Zimbabwe's history from Rhodesia's 1965 break to Mugabe, by a lawyer and MP.

Greece's 2015 debt talks with its creditors, by its finance minister at the time.

How US healthcare became so costly and broken, and what patients can do.

John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary in the 1960s, and his policies.

How the Greek economy actually works: its product markets, courts and firms.

How Central Asia's rulers use offshore firms, foreign banks and Western property.

New York's 1975 fiscal crisis and the austerity politics it taught the nation.

How the offshore shell-company industry is actually built and sold.

For trade, but against hyperglobalisation that overrides national choices.

Insider account by the US official who designed the Iran sanctions programme.

How federal housing policy engineered segregation.

Why the platform mattered politically, and what that cost it.

How Jho Low diverted billions from Malaysia's 1MDB fund into parties and politics.

The euro from its intellectual origins to 2018, in nine acts.

How Poland achieved Europe's fastest sustained growth after 1989.

How the Gulf states became central to the Middle East's political economy after 2011.

How the offshore world lets officials who steal money hide it and spend it abroad.

Saudi Arabia told through its oil business, from the 1930s concession to Aramco.

How South Africa's state was captured, traced through procurement documents.

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

How antitrust shrank to a consumer price test, and the case for breaking up giants.

How fixation on measured performance damages the work it is meant to improve.

How the global elite's efforts to change the world keep the status quo in place.

The Australian banking misconduct that led to the 2018 Royal Commission.

A defence of American business on fraud, CEO pay, monopoly and tech, issue by issue.

Fraud in data and manufacturing at offshore generic-drug plants.

A political history of American monopoly and of the tradition that fought it.

How China's state sector returned after 2012 and slowed growth.

A challenge to donor orthodoxy on how African economies should develop.

Mohammed bin Salman's rise to power in Saudi Arabia and the decisions that followed.

How money from resource-rich autocracies flows into Western finance and law.

How Mohammed bin Salman consolidated power in Saudi Arabia.

The US drug industry from patent medicines to the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers.

The KGB network's recapture of the commanding heights.

Japanese firms after 1990 moved into hidden upstream niches rather than stagnate.

Trade imbalances come from how income is shared within countries.

Insider account of doing deals through Party patronage, and losing everything.

What happened to Eastern Europe in the thirty years after 1989, measured.

How chips became the key to economic and military power, made in a few chokepoints.

Chile's market reforms under Pinochet and their results up to the 2019 protests.

Why AI and synthetic biology will spread fast and cheaply, and how to contain them.

Eskom's former chief executive on why South Africa's power supply can't be fixed.

How trade and payment chokepoints became instruments of state coercion.

Why Germany's economic model has ended, and why the causes are structural.

Current account of the cross-strait risk that prices every Taiwanese asset.

How Apple built its manufacturing base in China, and what it gave China in return.

How the US made sanctions and economic warfare its main tool of coercion.

Insider manifesto by Palantir's CEO on tech and national power.

Six friends, including Acheson, Harriman and Kennan, who shaped US foreign policy.

The book that made the Swedish model an international reference point.

Elite theory: who actually rules, and why stated aims mislead

Mahathir's case for Malay preferences that became the New Economic Policy.

The founding pessimist study; useful baseline for what was later beaten.

How Rockefeller philanthropy reshaped American medicine.

Contemporary anatomy of the same fiscal crisis, written from the numbers.

The fight over infant formula marketing and the boycott of Nestlé.

How Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos built crony monopolies and hid their wealth abroad.

Egypt is the anchor case throughout; the standard textbook on regional state-business relations.

How oil revenue let rulers buy out the merchant families; the origin of the modern business elite.

The Rawlings structural adjustment, the reference case for African reform.

Documentary history of the strike, assembled from contemporary sources.

The family dynasties that have run the Philippines' politics and conglomerates.

The earlier survey: nationalisation, war financing and the bonyad economy.

Insider account of the Bradley programme and operational testing.

The case for sweeping reform from the finance minister who forced it through.

Field research on how money actually moves through Thai officialdom.

Brookings assessment of the reform package by economists who took it seriously.

The critical case; distributional costs behind the headline growth numbers.

The pre-crisis baseline: how the boom economy was actually structured.

Economic history that explains the industrial base the Czechs privatised.

How the productive structure and business class were remade after 1973.

The post-war economy through the liberalisation, by its best chronicler.

The state-sector redesign other governments copied; contracts, outputs, accountability.

The truth behind the tobacco industry's cover-up.

The state-chaebol bargain and how it shifted over forty years.

1997 forecast of digital money weakening the nation state

The Kuchma years in which Ukraine's oligarchic structure formed.

Why oligarch families captured the banks rather than the state capturing business.

How team owners extract public money for stadiums by threatening to move.

The definitive account of the bubble and the baht devaluation that started the Asian crisis.

Written straight after the 1997 crisis on opacity, related-party dealing and family control.

The case against water privatisation and the companies buying up water supplies.

Boris Berezovsky and the businessmen who looted Russia after the Soviet collapse.

Follow-up on the IMF programme, bank restructuring and who paid for it.

Turkey caught between two worlds, its politics up to the 2001 bank crisis.

Italy from 1980 to 2001: family capitalism, patronage and the state.

The standard account of Nazarbayev-era state building and asset allocation.

The argument that Taiwan's chip industry protects it from Chinese attack.

Suharto's rise and the New Order patronage economy behind Indonesian business.

Malaysia's 1997-98 crisis and its unorthodox answer of capital controls.

How the TRIPS treaty spread patent and copyright rents worldwide, drugs included.

How experts, capital and land were arranged in modern Egypt.

How informal credit, trust networks and trade finance work when the banking system does not.

A contested but influential reading of the Bank of Japan's credit guidance.

How great powers and local people fought over Taiwan, through the party-state era.

Country-by-country anatomy of the crisis, reform and recovery.

A writer who moved to Italy in 1999 on its courts, bureaucracy and darker side.

The standard economics volume: trade, banking, land and industrial policy.

Welfare, insider protection and why French reform keeps stalling.

Why economic reform in the Middle East reshuffled privilege rather than ending it.

Essays on Vietnam's state, business and the limits of its reform coalition.

Telecoms billionaire turned prime minister; the clearest study of business-politics fusion in Thailand.

How the Philippine elite blocked reform through liberalisation and debt after Marcos.

How drug companies turned from discovering drugs to marketing them.

Indonesia's 1997-98 collapse and the fall of Suharto, reported on the ground.

The clearest short account of how the property oligopoly extracts rent.

Why the Philippine state stays weak while strong families hold power.

How Poland's Solidarity union won the transition and lost the workers after it.

Cocoa supply chain and child labour behind confectionery majors.

How small jurisdictions fought off the OECD's harmful tax competition drive.

How Norway designed its oil licensing system, told by the geologist behind it.

A UK ambassador's account of Uzbekistan's cotton trade and its abuses.

Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution, the oligarchs and why they kept their assets.

An IMF economist on which policies were actually causal, and which transferable.

Stabilisation, privatisation and the authoritarian bargain that delivered them.

Industrial policy and FDI dependence assessed against the East Asian model.

Norway is the counterexample the whole volume is arranged around.

Comparative transition account; Czech vouchers judged against other sequencing choices.

The Pakistan army's foundations, land and industrial holdings, mapped in full.

How Hong Kong's banks and bank crises shaped the miracle economy.

Economists' report on how small open economies combine flexibility with heavy taxation.

Two centuries of graft quantified; the cost of doing business, measured.

The history of Pakistan's army and its hand in how the country is governed.

The emirate's development model and its structural dependencies.

How Egypt's judges, business elite and Islamists sought a path toward liberalism.

How drug makers became marketing machines, from Risperdal to off-label promotion.

Evidence that patents work poorly as property; the IP-as-asset skeptic case.

How Chile's AFP model was exported worldwide, and who profited.

What the Nordic model is, where it came from and where the countries differ.

How Abu Dhabi's oil wealth built the emirate and gave rise to its sovereign funds.

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

Covers EU accession as the main driver of Romanian institutional change.

Saudi Arabia's oil wealth, religious establishment and attempts at reform.

Whistleblower's account of the Anglo Leasing procurement scandals; essential country risk reading.

Contemporaneous reporting on the collapse and the Icesave dispute.

Foreign investment, labour and the costs of the transition, told critically.

Salazar and the corporatist Estado Novo economy he ran in Portugal.

Academic account of the post-2001 reform programme and its unwinding.

Glennon's case for pricing and trading water rights.

The developer-banker-politician network that inflated the property bubble.

The Niger Delta oil economy reported at ground level.

Structural reading of why the growth model was fragile from the start.

How Dubai became a centre for business and luxury, and the migrant labour beneath it.

Egypt from Nasser to Mubarak: its politics, economy and crony privatisations.

Ghana as lead exhibit in the case for African growth turnarounds.

Why growth kept disappointing despite reform; good on institutions and productivity.

Why ownership structure, not oil itself, set post-Soviet states' fortunes.

Lockheed Martin as a case study in the contractor-state relationship.

NBER volume on the post-crisis reforms that restored Swedish growth.

Institutional history of the stabilisation that made the commodity boom possible.

Vietnam's rapid change under Party control, state firms and the doi moi reforms.

Ten years of field data on what actually happened to seized farmland.

Memoir by the architect of the industrial policy and the capital controls.

A UK chancellor's memoir of the bank crisis, the guarantee and nationalisations.

An owner who converted his own firm, on employee ownership in practice.

Popular account of competitive devaluation as policy.

Dubai governed openly as a company, and what that means for those who invest there.

The critique of the transition's distributional cost.

Ethnic coalition politics as the mechanism that allocates economic rents.

Essays on Pakistan's energy, taxes, banking and the reforms they need.

How the Al-Thani family shaped modern Qatar and took hold of its gas wealth.

George Soros's Open Society foundations and what they funded.

Egypt from Nasser to Tahrir Square, and its state-run economy and opening.

How an authoritarian state uses law as an instrument of control.

The commodity-boom decade and the institutions underneath it.

How Vietnam's Communist Party talked itself into opening the economy and joining WTO.

Phone hacking, by the MP who pursued it in Parliament.

How Central Asian states play the outside powers off against each other.

Rupert Murdoch's political power, arguing his politics drove his business.

The 2010-12 euro-zone rescues and the national politics behind each one.

How these funds actually invest and what governs them; NBIM as benchmark.

Why climate policy failed to cut emissions as coal use kept rising.

The rush to buy farmland across the developing world, and who loses from it.

The political-risk case that the Gulf monarchies will not last.

Reported from inside the Chávez government as expropriation accelerated.

The cajas, the construction boom and the political economy of the bailout.

Ghana's 2010 GDP rebasing is the central case; read before trusting any African macro series.

How Qatar's sovereign wealth fund serves its foreign policy.

Kyrgyzstan's revolutions, asset seizures and the Bakiyev family's businesses.

The reference on SWF governance; Norges Bank Investment Management is the central case.

Mining and hydrocarbon conflict in the Andes; the social licence problem.

Why incumbent power in states, firms and armies now erodes faster

Fertility decline argued as an economic rather than a moral problem.

Thailand's royal succession and the political violence and censorship around it.

By an investigator on the Special Investigation Commission; connected lending and cross-ownership.

Political economy of the boom, the Icesave dispute and the aftermath.

Regulatory history explaining how a thrift-charter lender grew unsupervised.

Reporting on how Greek institutions failed, sector by sector.

Includes the Czech voucher scheme written up by people who designed and criticised it.

Former finance minister on subsidies, privatisation and the rial.

Migration and openness as the source of Australia's long-run growth.

How business associations and state elites actually bargain across the region.

Argues the currency was not the problem, the crisis management was; the best contrarian case.

The standard survey: bonyads, IRGC commercial holdings, subsidies and sanctions.

Insider account of the cement, floriculture and leather sectors by the official who ran the policy.

How modern Greece's state developed, up to the debt crisis that began in 2010.

A critique of the Gates Foundation and the rise of philanthrocapitalism.

Retrospective essays on the limits of the model and what comes next.

How soda makers built global brands, the health costs, and the push to tax soda.

How minor metals are mined, traded and hoarded.

Greece's crisis seen in its villages and streets: tax evasion and informal work.

How some societies get corruption under control while others stay corrupt.

The 'political marketplace' framework: how loyalty is priced and paid for in the region.

The oligarch model, gas trading rents and the post-Maidan reform agenda.

How donor money underwrote the EPRDF developmental state.

A sociologist trains as a wealth manager to show how fortunes are shielded offshore.

The mechanics of subsidised fuel, multiple exchange rates and arbitrage as a national industry.

Detroit's Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the largest by a US city, from inside the case.

The Greek debt crisis and first bailout, told by the finance minister who signed it.

The reform agenda India has still not executed.

Insider: the UBS banker whose disclosure ended cross-border Swiss secrecy.

A framework for how ownership is reassigned politically; the most useful guide to Hungarian counterparty risk.

How Turkey's institutions, media and business were reorganised under AKP rule.

How licensing in place of sale strips buyers of control over what they paid for.

Sovereign funds, diversification plans and the limits of the rentier bargain.

Power in a networked age; connection as the source of advantage

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

Insider: the economy minister who built convertibility defending the record.

Southeast Asia's politics and conflicts, seen by a mediator at the negotiating table.

The Zuma years assembled into a single narrative of capture.

Municipal tender corruption reconstructed from the inside.

Operator-facing handbook on governance and growth constraints across the continent.

Who actually controls the GLCs that dominate the local market.

How Viktor Orbán won and holds power in Hungary through nationalism and patronage.

How Erdogan's consolidation reshaped who wins contracts.

The state-capture network and how state enterprises were monetised.

How drug makers, regulators and distributors let the US opioid epidemic grow.

The secretly funded litigation that destroyed Gawker.

Why America lags in fibre-optic broadband, and the case against the cable incumbents.

The same author on what happened when the reforms were resisted.

The insecure jobs and falling mobility behind Germany's export success.

Insider on why Pakistani institutional reform keeps failing at implementation.

How a journalist uncovered the 1MDB fraud, told first-hand.

How deeply the two economies are now integrated.

Spain's financial crisis, its bank rescue and the shape of the country's recovery.

Insider memoir by the architect of much of the reform programme.

Firm-level evidence on politically connected business; Egypt is the core case.

Reporting on the succession, Zhanaozen and how the state and business interlock.

How the Gulf monarchies' cheap domestic energy became their central fiscal problem.

Reporting on the construction-and-credit growth model and who benefited.

Erdogan's drive to make Turkey a great power, and its cost to the lira and budget.

Procurement capture inside the governing party.

Technological learning and catch-up; the theory behind Ethiopia's industrial parks.

Why Muslim-majority countries lag: an old alliance of clerics and military states.

How the rent-extraction system is organised under Putin.

A framework for post-communist regimes, built on the Hungarian case.

The standard economic survey: resource rents, transit corridors, reform records.

Insider account by Microsoft's president on tech policy and regulation.

The 2017 coup reported from inside, including its business backers.

Gas transit, trade dependence and the economics under the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

Hong Kong's 2019 protests, from the extradition bill to months of street battles.

Colonial economism and the debt-and-cotton origins of the modern Egyptian economy.

Concentration traced sector by sector through its effects on customers.

The academic case that repurchases hollow out corporate investment.

Argument that rich societies have stagnated into repetition and sterility

Why Latin America's written rules often go unenforced, and what that costs.

The rare metals behind green tech and devices, and China's hold on their supply.

Modern Saudi Arabia's history, and whether its system can change as Vision 2030 asks.

Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura and Cargill; the definitive book on the trading houses.

Insider account of the Fed from Burns through the QE era.

A political demographer on what the numbers do and do not determine.

The drug distributors behind the opioid epidemic and the lawsuits against them.

How Britain built its overseas territories into a deliberate service industry.

NASA insider on the policy fight that funded commercial crew.

The case for localisation after the pandemic supply shocks.

Insider: two federal police delegates on the Lava Jato investigation.

Argument that online communities can become sovereign; crypto-native politics

Reporting on the endgame: PDVSA's decay, default, sanctions and dollarisation.

Lithium, cobalt and nickel supply chains behind the EV build-out.

The prosecutorial case against the industry KKR created; read as counterweight.

An investigative case against the power of the Gates Foundation.

How ownership of American agriculture came to sit with a few families and firms.

Insiders on Pentagon-Valley contracting where Palantir won

A lawyer's memoir of fighting wrongful convictions, such as Walter McMillian's.

Why managers and technocrats would replace capitalists as society's ruling class.

An inquiry into the nature of freedom and the uses of power.

A reading of Xenophon's Hiero, where a tyrant and a poet weigh the uses of tyranny.

Ways to end humanity's conflicts with nature, with other people and within the self.

The case for anarcho-capitalism, a society run on markets without a state.

Cognitive psychology applied to how leaders misperceive each other in foreign policy.

The Volcker Fed from the inside; still the fullest political account.

A report on competition in the telephone industry.

Dated but the clearest treatment of the settler-to-Kenyan capital handover.

Military spending measured against the economy that has to carry it.

How media in democracies serve state and corporate power while claiming independence.

An interpretation of the New Deal and of the historians who have written on it.

How communities manage shared resources without either the state or the market.

Memoir of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen; his only English-language book.