Book Bits | 21 January 2017

Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America
By David Horowitz
Summary via publisher (Humanix)
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election was more than a historic upset. It was the beginning of a major political, economic, and social revolution that will change America — and the world. One of the nation’s foremost conservative commentators, New York Times bestselling author, and a mentor to many of Donald Trump’s key advisers, David Horowitz presents a White House battle plan to halt the Democrats’ march to extinguish the values America holds dear.

The Economic Indicator Handbook: How to Evaluate Economic Trends to Maximize Profits and Minimize Losses
By Richard Yamarone
Summary via publisher (Bloomberg/Wiley)
The Economic Indicator Handbook helps investors more easily evaluate economic trends, to better inform investment decision making and other key strategic financial planning. Written by a Bloomberg Senior Economist, this book presents a visual distillation of the indicators every investor should follow, with clear explanation of how they’re measured, what they mean, and how that should inform investment thinking.

Antitrust Law in the New Economy: Google, Yelp, LIBOR, and the Control of Information
By Mark R. Patterson
Summary via publisher (Harvard University Press)
Markets run on information. Buyers make decisions by relying on their knowledge of the products available, and sellers decide what to produce based on their understanding of what buyers want. But the distribution of market information has changed, as consumers increasingly turn to sources that act as intermediaries for information—companies like Yelp and Google. Antitrust Law in the New Economy considers a wide range of problems that arise around one aspect of information in the marketplace: its quality.

Artificial Intelligence in Financial Markets: Cutting Edge Applications for Risk Management, Portfolio Optimization and Economics
Edited by Christian L. Dunis, et al.
Summary via publisher (Palgrave Macmillan)
As technology advancement has increased, so to have computational applications for forecasting, modelling and trading financial markets and information, and practitioners are finding ever more complex solutions to financial challenges. Neural networking is a highly effective, trainable algorithmic approach which emulates certain aspects of human brain functions, and is used extensively in financial forecasting allowing for quick investment decision making.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices
By Robert McNally
Summary via publisher (Columbia University Press)
As OPEC has loosened its grip over the past ten years, the oil market has been rocked by wild price swings, the likes of which haven’t been seen for eight decades. Crafting an engrossing journey from the gushing Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s to today’s fraught and fractious Middle East, Crude Volatility explains how past periods of stability and volatility in oil prices help us understand the new boom-bust era. Oil’s notorious volatility has always been considered a scourge afflicting not only the oil industry but also the broader economy and geopolitical landscape; Robert McNally makes sense of how oil became so central to our world and why it is subject to such extreme price fluctuations.