How Excessive Risk Destroyed Lehman and Nearly Brought Down the Financial Industry “Uncontrolled Risk will ruffle feathers―and for good reason―as voters and legislators learn the diffi cult lessons of Lehman’s collapse and demand that we never forget them.” Dr. David C. Shimko, Board of Trustees, Global Association of Risk Professionals “Uncontrolled Risk is a drama as gripping as any work of fiction. Williams’s recommendations for changes in the governance of financial institutions should be of interest to anyone concerned about the welfare of global financial markets.” Geoffrey Miller, Stuyvesant Comfort Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Study of Central Banks and Financial Institutions, New York University “The complex balance of free enterprise on Wall Street and the healthy regulation of its participants is the central economic issue of today. Williams’s forensic study of Lehman’s collapse may be the best perspective so far on the issues that now face regulators.” Jeffrey P. Davis, CFA, Chief Investment Officer, Lee Munder Capital Group “Provides a very perceptive analysis of the fl aws inherent in risk management systems and modern fi nancial markets. Mandatory reading for risk managers and financial industry executives.” Vincent Kaminski, Professor in the Practice of Management, Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University “Gives the reader much food for thought on the regulation of our financial system and its interplay with corporate governance reform in the United States and around the world.” Professor Charles M. Elson, Edgar S. Woolard Jr. Chair in Corporate Governance, University of Delaware The risk taking behind Wall Street's largest bankruptcy . . . In this dramatic and compelling account of Lehman Brothers’ spectacular rise and fall, author Mark T. Williams explains how uncontrolled risk toppled a 158-year-old institution―and what it says about Wall Street, Washington, D.C., and the world financial system. A former trading floor executive and Fed bank examiner, Williams sees Lehman’s 2008 collapse as a microcosm of the industry―a worst-case scenario of smart decisions, stupid mistakes, ignored warnings, and important lessons in money, power, and policy that affect us all. This book reveals:
<ul>
<li>The Congressional inquisition of disgraced CEO Dick Fuld: Did he really deserve it? </li>
<li>How the investment-banking money machine broke down: Can it be fixed? </li>
<li>The key drivers that caused the financial meltdown: Can lessons be learned from them? </li>
<li>The wild risk taking denounced by President Obama: Is Washington to blame, too? </li>
<li>The ongoing debate on reform and regulation: Can meaningful reform avert another financial catastrophe?
</li>
</ul>
This fascinating account traces Lehman’s history from its humble beginnings in 1850 to its collapse in 2008. Lehman’s story exemplifies the everchanging trends in finance―from investment vehicles to federal policies―and exposes the danger and infectious nature of uncontrolled risk. Drawing upon first-person interviews with risk management experts and former Lehman employees, Williams provides more than just a frontline report: it’s a call to action for Wall Street bankers, Washington policymakers, and U.S. citizens―a living lesson in risk management on which to build a stronger fi nancial future. Williams provides a tenpoint plan to implement today―so another Lehman doesn’t collapse tomorrow. Includes a ten-point plan to ensure a strong financial future for both Wall Street and Main Street

Uncontrolled Risk: Lessons of Lehman Brothers and How Systemic Risk Can Still Bring Down the World Financial System

Williams, Mark

History

McGraw=Hill

No cure, no pay: The story of salvage at sea

Business & Money

Century Benham

Any person grieving for someone who has committed suicide copes with a question that can never be answered: Why? In this enlightening book, directed at the lay person and professional alike, a clinical psychologist draws on the latest research to explore suicide from all aspects: its history, changing sociological patterns, psychiatric and psychological factors, and moral issues. This book is a compassionate and balanced attempt to bring some understanding to the painful feelings that lead to such an extreme act -- without judging, generalizing, or misreading the messages of suicidal behavior.

Cry of Pain: Understanding Suicide and Self-Harm

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Williams, J. Mark G.

Psychology & Counseling

Penguin Group USA

Over half a billion years ago life on earth took an incredible step in evolution, when animals learned to build skeletons. Using many different materials, from calcium carbonate and phosphate, and even silica, to make shell and bone, they started creating the support structures that are now critical to most living forms, providing rigidity and strength. Manifesting in a vast variety of forms, they provided the framework for sophisticated networks of life that fashioned the evolution of Earth's oceans, land, and atmosphere. Within a few tens of millions of years, all of the major types of skeleton had appeared. Skeletons enabled an unprecedented array of bodies to evolve, from the tiniest seed shrimp to the gigantic dinosaurs and blue whales. The earliest bacterial colonies constructed large rigid structures - stromatolites - built up by trapping layers of sediment, while the mega-skeleton that is the Great Barrier Reef is big enough to be visible from space. The skeletons of millions of coccolithophores that lived in the shallow seas of the Mesozoic built the white cliffs of Dover. These, and insects, put their scaffolding on the outside, as an exoskeleton, while vertebrates have endoskeletons. Plants use tubes of dead tissue for rigidity and transport of liquids - which in the case of tall trees need to be strong enough to extend 100 m or more from the ground. Others simply stitch together a coating from mineral grains on the seabed. In Skeletons, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams explore the incredible variety of the skeleton innovations that have enabled life to expand into a wide range of niches and lifestyles on the planet. Discussing the impact of climate change, which puts the formation of some kinds of skeleton at risk, they also consider future skeletons, including the possibility that we might increasingly incorporate metal and plastic elements into our own, as well as the possible materials for skeleton building on other planets.

Skeletons: The Frame of Life

Science & Math

Zalasiewicz, Jan

Biological Sciences

Oxford University Press

Alone in the known universe the Earth glows bright with life, a unique cosmic oasis of biodiversity which is now under threat from our own actions. The Earth is a unique as a living planet, a cosmic oasis drifting in the vastness of barren space. It is strikingly and obviously different from our nearest heavenly neighbours, the Moon, Venus and Mars, in its thin skin of biology, extending from the surface for a few kilometres into the crust, and for a few tens of kilometres into the air. But how did this remarkable abundance and diversity of life arise? How has life survived over the enormous time frame of Earth's history? And does it continue to flourish now, especially with the growing pressure for space from humans? The Cosmic Oasis examines life on Earth, from our earliest interactions with animals and plants to our absolute domination of biology. It follows our developing understanding of life's origins, its remarkable complexity, and its interactions with the air, oceans and land. It also shows how patterns of diversity across the surface of the planet evolved, and how humans are now homogenising these, degrading both biodiversity and the space in which life can exist. Within this overall trend of loss there are some remarkable examples of survival, from the beneficial relationships between the gelada monkeys and wolves of the Ethiopian highlands, and the people and brown howler monkeys of Porte Allegre in Brazil, to interactions between you and your gut microbiome. Thoughout, the authors ask what these interactions can teach us about building a better relationship with nature, and consider how we might become stewards, rather than destructive exploiters, of the life around us.

The Cosmic Oasis: The Remarkable Story of Earth's Biosphere

Milon, Anne-Sophie

The presentation of the magical and mantic in Celtic literature has persistently been dogged by misunderstanding and over-romanticized readings. Among the misconceptions about the ancient and medieval Celtic peoples, the notion of a specifically 'Celtic' astrology remains widespread in the popular mind. This study aims to counter such myth-making, and to demonstrate how a number Irish and Welsh literary writers in the medieval and Early Modern period conceived of portents in the heavens - comets, blood-coloured moons, darkened suns - and what they knew of the complex art of astrology. Early Irish churchmen felt that the end of the world was imminent, and this book explores the ways in which they saw signs in the heavens as evidence of impending apocalypse, and how they adapted such millenarian imagery for use in native sagas in Irish. It then moves on to an extended discussion of the cloud-divination ascribed to Irish druids in high medieval literary texts; this has sometimes naively been taken as evidence for the actual customs of the druidic caste, but it is shown here to be a development of the later Middle Ages, long after the druids' disappearance. Turning to Wales, the cosmological knowledge of two linked figures is scrutinized: the super-poet Taliesin, and King Arthur's prophet Merlin, whom Geoffrey of Monmouth represented in the mid 12th century as an astrological sage with a purpose-built observatory. Evidence for the knowledge of astrology amongst the learned poets of later medieval Wales is then laid out, with an analysis of a powerful late 15th century poem indicting the evil influence of the planet Saturn; such knowledge seems to have been largely medical in nature, and the book concludes with an examination of a number of Welsh astrological texts in manuscript, setting them against the longest astrological poem in a Celtic language, the mid 17th century Puritan mystic Morgan Llwyd's spiritualizing and evangelical 'Heavenly Science'.

Fiery Shapes: Celestial Portents and Astrology in Ireland and Wales 700-1700

Religion & Spirituality

Oxford University Press, USA

Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years. Indeed, the vast history that the authors relate here is dramatic and often abrupt--with massive changes in global and regional climate, from bitterly cold to sweltering hot, from arid to humid. They introduce us to the Cryogenian period, the days of Snowball Earth seven hundred million years ago, when ice spread to cover the world, then melted abruptly amid such dramatic climatic turbulence that hurricanes raged across the Earth. We read about the Carboniferous, with tropical jungles at the equator (where Pennsylvania is now) and the Cretaceous Period, when the polar regions saw not ice but dense conifer forests of cypress and redwood, with gingkos and ferns. The authors also show how this history can be read from clues preserved in the Earth's strata. The evidence is abundant, though always incomplete--and often baffling, puzzling, infuriating, tantalizing, seemingly contradictory. Geologists, though, are becoming ever more ingenious at deciphering this evidence, and the story of the Earth's climate is now being reconstructed in ever-greater detail--maybe even providing us with clues to the future of contemporary climate change. And through all of this, the authors conclude, the Earth has remained perfectly habitable--in stark contrast to its planetary neighbors. Not too hot, not too cold; not too dry, not too wet--"the Goldilocks planet."

The Goldilocks Planet: The 4 Billion Year Story of Earth's Climate

Earth Sciences

Oceans make up most of the surface of our blue planet. They may form just a sliver on the outside of the Earth, but they are very important, not only in hosting life, including the fish and other animals on which many humans depend, but in terms of their role in the Earth system, in regulating climate, and cycling nutrients. As climate change, pollution, and over-exploitation by humans puts this precious resource at risk, it is more important than ever that we understand and appreciate the nature and history of oceans. There is much we still do not know about the story of the Earth's oceans, and we are only just beginning to find indications of oceans on other planets. In this book, geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams consider the deep history of oceans, how and when they may have formed on the young Earth -- topics of intense current research -- how they became salty, and how they evolved through Earth history. We learn how oceans have formed and disappeared over millions of years, how the sea nurtured life, and what may become of our oceans in the future. We encounter some of the scientists and adventurers whose efforts led to our present understanding of oceans. And we look at clues to possible seas that may once have covered parts of Mars and Venus, that may still exist, below the surface, on moons such as Europa and Callisto, and the possibility of watery planets in other star systems.

Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets

Astronomy & Space Science

Oceans make up most of the surface of our blue planet. They may form just a sliver on the outside of the Earth, but they are very important, not only in hosting life, including the fish and other animals on which many humans depend, but in terms of their role in the Earth system, in regulating climate, and cycling nutrients. As climate change, pollution, and over-exploitation by humans puts this precious resource at risk, it is more important than ever that we understand and appreciate the nature and history of oceans. There is much we still do not know about the story of the Earth's oceans, and we are only just beginning to find indications of oceans on other planets. In this book, geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams consider the deep history of oceans, how and when they may have formed on the young Earth -- topics of intense current research -- how they became salty, and how they evolved through Earth history. We learn how oceans have formed and disappeared over millions of years, how the sea nurtured life, and what may become of our oceans in the future. We encounter some of the scientists and adventurers whose efforts led to our present understanding of oceans. And we look at clues to possible seas that may once have covered parts of Mars and Venus, that may still exist, below the surface, on moons such as Europa and Callisto, and the possibility of watery planets in other star systems.

Climate change is a major topic of concern today, scientifically, socially, and politically. It will undoubtedly continue to be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level take place, and as human society adapts to these changes. In this remarkable new work, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams demonstrate how the Earth's climate has continuously altered over its 4.5 billion-year history. The story can be read from clues preserved in the Earth's strata - the evidence is abundant, though always incomplete, and also often baffling, puzzling, infuriating, tantalizing, seemingly contradictory. Geologists, though, are becoming ever more ingenious at interrogating this evidence, and the story of the Earth's climate is now being reconstructed in ever-greater detail - maybe even providing us with clues to the future of contemporary climate change. The history is dramatic and often abrupt. Changes in global and regional climate range from bitterly cold to sweltering hot, from arid to humid, and they have impacted hugely upon the planet's evolving animal and plant communities, and upon its physical landscapes of the Earth. And yet, through all of this, the Earth has remained consistently habitable for life for over three billion years - in stark contrast to its planetary neighbours. Not too hot, not too cold; not too dry, not too wet, it is aptly known as 'the Goldilocks planet'.

The Goldilocks Planet: The 4 billion year story of Earth's climate

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williams, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Williams, Mark

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williams, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Uncontrolled Risk: Lessons of Lehman Brothers and How Systemic Risk Can Still Bring Down the World Financial System

No cure, no pay: The story of salvage at sea

Cry of Pain: Understanding Suicide and Self-Harm

Skeletons: The Frame of Life

The Cosmic Oasis: The Remarkable Story of Earth's Biosphere

Fiery Shapes: Celestial Portents and Astrology in Ireland and Wales 700-1700

The Goldilocks Planet: The 4 Billion Year Story of Earth's Climate

Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets

Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets

The Goldilocks Planet: The 4 billion year story of Earth's climate