Ford Library

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

• 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.

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.

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.

Our latest list of titles:

It’s Complicated
Lovely Bones
Pirate Radio
Daybreakers
Extraordinary Measures
Invictus
Leap Year
The Messenger
The Spy Next Door
Valentine’s Day

In case you missed the brief article about summer Library database use in the last MBAA Newsletter, we wanted to post this reminder from our Database Terms of Use.

Your access to, and data from, Ford Library databases may not be used to support the work (for profit or non-profit) of any company or organization at any time, including during a summer internship. Inappropriate, or commercial use of database resources is a breach of a binding legal contract and may result in both: a) loss of access to those resources for all Duke and Fuqua users, and b) legal action being taken by the vendor against the breaching user and/or Duke University.

You can find detailed examples of appropriate summer use of Library databases on the following secure web page:

http://library.fuqua.duke.edu/internal/summerdbs.htm

Please let us know if you have any questions, and have a great summer!

Lewis, Michael. The big short : inside the doomsday machine. W. W. Norton, 2010.

Master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell calls Michael Lewis the finest storyteller of our generation. Moneyball and Liar’s Poker made him one of the best business journalists today. Among his recent successes is The Blind Side.

The Big Short is called the definitive book on the current recession. Having worked at Saloman Brothers in the 1980s, he provides an insider’s view of a perfect storm brewing. Lewis’ story revolves around several obscure Wall Street players who understood the housing market was built on a house of cards.

Although most people are left with the impact of the recession; Steve Eisman, an analyst at Oppenheimer and Co.; Greg Lippman a bond trader for Deutsche Bank; and Michael Burry, who left Stanford Medical School to manage his own hedge fund, acted upon an opportunity to make tremendous profits. Read more …

We have a long list of new titles this month:

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Mad Men. Season 3
The Men who Stare at Goats
Princess and the Frog
Red Cliff. Part I and Part II
Sherlock Holmes
An Education
Fighter
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
What Doesn’t Kill You

Here’s the April installment of Ford Library Director, Meg Trauner’s selections of five recent business books recommended to Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard.

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. W. W. Norton, 2010.

  Entertaining portrayal of market skeptics who profited from the financial meltdown.

• Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right by Atul Gawande. Metropolitan Books, 2009.

  Simple checklists can improve the practice of medicine and other complex situations.

• Chief Culture Officer: How to create a living breathing corporation by Grant McCracken. Basic Books, 2009.

  Reading cultural trends is profitable for business, and the skill can be taught.

• On the Brink: Inside the race to stop the collapse of the global financial system by Henry M. Paulson, Jr. Business Plus, 2010.

  Day-by-day account of how Paulson etc worked to save the financial system during the meltdown.

• Switch: How to change things when change is hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Broadway Books, 2010.

  Change is complicated by the disjunction between our rational and emotional minds.

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

Ford Library tips its top hat to Duke graduate student, and one of our extraordinary circulation clerks, Julia Gaffield!

While doing research at the British National Archives earlier this year for her doctoral dissertation on 19th century Haiti, Julia discovered the only known printed copy of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence.

We like to think that her duties searching out lost books here at Ford helped hone her skills at scholarly investigation; but Julia probably came to us already adept.

You can read more about Julia’s discovery, and its truly significant impacts on Haiti and its neighbors in these articles at The Duke Chronicle, and Durham Herald-Sun.

UPDATE: You can also watch a video interview with Julia on her “moment of discovery” on the Duke News & Communications site.

Well done, Julia!

Andrews, Edmund L. Busted : life inside the great mortgage meltdown. W. W. Norton, 2009.

Busted is a personal and penetrating account of one man’s experience with purchasing an overpriced house with a subprime mortgage. Written by an economics reporter for the New York Times, the author is aware of the economic and financial risks, yet he succumbs to temptation and buys a house he cannot afford. With his judgment impaired by his emotions – he is in love – Andrews enters into a vortex of debt from credit cards and desperate refinancing on his home.

Andrews ends up ruined financially. He claims responsibility, but he also blames the mortgage brokers and real estate appraisers, money lenders and Wall Street players, credit rating agencies, institutional investors and Washington policymakers. Eventually he blames his ex-wife. One person he does not blame is his new wife. The Atlantic later reported that he failed to disclose Andrews’s new wife’s history of bankruptcy.

This is not a book with a happy ending. Yet this blunt tale of personal ruin is riveting and well worth the investment in time.

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