Archive for June, 2010

Book Reviews: Sparkling Reads for July 4th

Monday, June 28th, 2010

image courtesy Google image search

Here’s a set of mini-reviews of three new books for your July 4th holiday reading entertainment.

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Site Maintenance Alerts

Friday, June 18th, 2010

image courtesy google.com

The following maintenance operations will affect your access to some Library resources from June 19 – June 21.

  • system alert icon Duke Libraries will upgrade the server that hosts the web-application that powers the tabbed search box on our home page (catalog, e-journals, database search) on Monday, June 21, between 8:30 and 9:00 am. During the upgrade time-frame you can use the Classic Catalog for some of your search needs.
  • Ford Library’s UPenn-hosted web site FAQ will be unavailable from 10pm on Saturday 6/19 until 12 noon on Sunday 6/20 while the University of Pennsylvania conducts needed electrical maintenance.
  • The following Emerald-published online journals (Journal of Business Strategy, Journal of Consumer Marketing, and Strategy & Leadership) may be intermittently available, in the words of the publisher: “over the next few days, from 19 June,” during essential maintenance on the publisher’s site. You may still access these titles (up to, but not including the most recent year) on ABI/INFORM Complete.

Our apologies for any inconvenience the above may cause you, and please let us know if access continues to be unavailable past the deadlines stated above.

Book Review: 13 Bankers

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

image courtesy amazon.com

Johnson, Simon. 13 bankers : the Wall Street takeover and the next financial meltdown. Pantheon Books, 2010.

Since the economic crisis of 2008, dozens of new books have been written about the meltdown, some of them reviewed in this blog. In this important new work, the authors show how the financial sector and its political influence are a serious risk to the economic well-being of the global economy.

The top six banks together control assets amounting to 60 percent of the U.S. GDP. These top tier financial institutions, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are too big and too important to fail. The financial crisis made them even bigger, enlarging their market shares in derivatives, mortgages and credit cards. Yet these banks continue to take enormous risks, knowing that the government will shelter them from harm in a downturn.

Significant change is needed to address the disproportionate wealth and power in these large banks. To return to a healthy balance in our economy, the authors recommend that banks be “busted,” such that each bank is no more than 4% of U.S. GDP, with investment banks having a lower limit of 2%. Banks could then be allowed to fail without threatening the entire economy. Reckless borrowing and lending would cease and the boom/bust cycles would end. Taxpayers could stop subsidizing wealthy bankers through bailouts.

Author Simon Johnson was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He was a faculty member at Fuqua School 1991-97, and currently teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Book Reviews: “Going Green”

Monday, June 7th, 2010

going green logo

Here are a set of mini-reviews of four important new books on “going green.”

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

  • Global warming is good for business by Kimberly B. Keilbach. Quill Driver Books, 2009.Provides practical advice on identifying entrepreneurial opportunities, and describes new green technologies that have the potential to power a new generation of innovation.
  • Two billion cars: driving toward sustainability by Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon. Oxford University Press, 2009.Describes the reluctance of auto manufacturers to employ promising new technologies for reducing the auto’s carbon footprint and recommends solutions for change.
  • How to cool the planet : geoengineering and the audacious quest to fix earth’s climate. by Jeff Goodell. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.Explores options for cooling earth’s climate in a hurry, focusing on strange and promising ideas that are beginning to attract research dollars, such as “cloud brightening,” pumping water droplets into the air to buffer ocean clouds’ reflectivity.
  • Strategy for sustainability: a business manifesto by Adam Werbach. Harvard Business Press, 2009.Shows business leaders how to formulate a green strategy attuned to social, economic and cultural trends, and to implement it by engaging people inside the company and within the community..

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.