The Shadow Market: How a Group of Wealthy Nations and Powerful Investors Secretly Dominate the World » (Library - Unabridged CD)

Eric J. Weiner has covered business and economics issues for fifteen years as a writer and editor. His critically acclaimed first book, WHAT GOES UP: The Uncensored History of Modern Wall Street as told by the Bankers, Brokers, CEOs, and Scoundrels Who Made It Happen, was published in September 2005 by Little, Brown and Company, and was selected as one of the year’s best books by Barron’s magazine and one of the year’s “Most Enriching Reads” by Kiplinger’s. He is a former columnist and reporter for Dow Jones Newswires, and he has written for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, and countless other major publications. He also is a contributor to the news and opinion website The Huffington Post. He lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, with his wife, Paige and their son, Jake.

A maverick business journalist investigates how global economic power is increasingly controlled by foreign countries and private investors in ways that the U.S. government can't control and that the average American knows nothing about.

Eric J. Weiner's critically acclaimed first book, What Goes Up: The Uncensored History of Modern Wall Street as Told by the Bankers, Brokers, CEOs, and Scoundrels Who Made It Happen, was selected as one of the year's best books by Barron's magazine and one of the year's Most Enriching Reads by Kiplinger's. Weiner has demonstrated a deep knowledge of Wall Street and how the international financial world operates. Now, in The Shadow Market, he reveals that an enormous reshuffling of global fiscal power is taking place—-and that Americans are powerless to stop it.

Most of us are unaware of the multitrillion-dollar network of super-rich, secretive, and largely unregulated investment vehicles—-foreign...

Publishers Weekly

For Weiner (What Goes Up), the “shadow market”--an invisible nexus of wealthy nations, hedge funds, and private equity funds--controls access to capital and natural resources, and by extension, the global economy. The author attributes this shadow market’s rising influence to the secrecy surrounding its participants’ actions: since investing and business decisions are made behind closed doors, they are impossible to regulate. The book’s lengthiest discussion is devoted to the ascendancy of China, whose current account surplus is fueling extraordinary growth in its exchange reserves and whose financial policies “were a major contributor to the expansion of the U.S. lending bubble.” Weiner is equally concerned with the losers in the world’s new economic order, devoting significant space to the U.S. and “Old Europe,” both of which he considers to be poorly positioned to protect their interests in the next century. This informative, admirably lucid book is less concerned with exposing the shadow market’s influence than with placing its emergence in the context of a larger geopolitical shift in power from the West to the East. (Oct.)

Prologue: The Future Happened Yesterday 1

1 Money Is a Weapon 13

2 How to Spend $4 Trillion 33

3 The Land of Giants 51

4 Chinese Hardball 67

5 Too Small to Fail 127

6 Rogue Oil 155

7 Beware the Do-Gooders 193

8 Colonizing Europe in the Twenty-first Century 217

9 The American Dream, Now On Sale! Everything Must Go! 243

Epilogue: But What About Me? 257

Acknowledgments 267

Notes 271

Bibliography 279

Index 289