The Shadow Market
How a Group of Wealthy Nations and Powerful Investors Secretly Dominate the World
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed financial journalist Eric J. Weiner reveals how foreign countries and private investors are increasingly controlling the global economy and secretly wresting power from the United States in ways that our government cannot reverse and about which the average American knows nothing.
The most potent force in global commerce today is not the Federal Reserve, not the international banks, not the governments of the G7 countries, and certainly not the European Union. Rather, it is the multi-trillion-dollar network of super-rich, secretive, and largely unregulated investment vehicles—foreign sovereign wealth funds, government-run corporations, private equity funds, and hedge funds—that are quietly buying up the world, piece by valuable piece.
As Weiner’s groundbreaking account shows, the shadow market doesn’t have a physical headquarters such as Wall Street. It doesn’t have a formal leadership or an index to track or a single zone of exchange. Rather, it comprises an invisible and ever-shifting global nexus where money mixes with geopolitical power, often with great speed and secrecy.
Led by cash-flush nations such as China, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and even Norway, the shadow market is hiring the brightest international financial talent money can buy and is now assembling the gigantic investment portfolios that will form the power structure of tomorrow’s economy.
Taking advantage of the Great Recession and subsequent liquidity problems in the United States and Europe, the major players of the shadow market are deploying staggering amounts of cash, controlling the capital markets, and securing not only major stakes in multinational companies but huge tracts of farmland and natural resources across the world. Yet that’s not all; they’re also pursuing political agendas made possible by their massive wealth and are becoming increasingly aggressive with the United States and other governments.
Highly informative and genuinely startling, The Shadow Market moves the conversation from “international competition” to “global financial warfare,” and stands as an urgent must-read for anyone interested in the future of the global economy, America’s position in the world, or how and where to invest money today.
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.