● The Triumph of Value Investing: Smart Money Tactics for the Postrecession Era
By Janet Lowe
Author interview with US News & World Report
Q: After the market turmoil at the beginning and end of the last decade, many investors appeared to give up on the value of value investing and stocks in general, preferring bonds and commodities instead. Do you believe there are ever multi-year periods when value investing doesn’t work?
A: No, I don’t, because value investing, if you follow it, you would have been a little better prepared. Of course it was such a massive event that hardly anyone escaped unscathed, but value investors overall did better. And then an event like this is a great opportunity for value investors to buy what they need and ride the market higher. Even in my own experience with my own portfolio, I came back faster than most people in the economy.

● Bust: Greece, the Euro and the Sovereign Debt Crisis
By Matthew Lynn
Review via International Business Times
Since the eruption of the Greek debt crisis, many have declared the failure of the euro currency experiment. Matthew Lynn, a business writer, gives a detailed explanation of this failure in his book Bust: Greece, the Euro and the Sovereign Debt Crisis. First, it was indeed an experiment. “No one has tried to merge the currency of 17 nations before,” said Lynn. Moreover, the experiment is more of political rather than an economic undertaking. This is problematic because highly impactful economic policies — like the introduction of the euro currency — were not made primarily out of economic considerations.
● Why the World Economy Needs a Financial Crash and Other Critical Essays on Finance and Financial Economics (Anthem Studies in Development and Globalization)
By Jan Toporowski
Summary via publisher, Anthem Press
These essays explain why financial crisis breaks out, its social, economic and cultural consequences, and the limitations of policy in the face of economic stagnation induced by financial inflation… The essays in this volume explain how financial inflation shifts banking and financial markets towards more speculative activity, changing the financial structure of the economy and corroding the social and political values that underlie welfare state capitalism. The essays begin with an article that was published in the ‘Financial Times’ that highlights the problems of excess debt, which emerges when financial inflation exceeds the rate at which prices and incomes are rising.
● Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation
By Edward B. Barbier
Excerpt via publisher, Cambridge University Press
The difference in public attitudes between the American crowd listening to President Wilson in 1913 and the French electorate in 2009 illustrates that much has changed over the past hundred years in how we view the role of natural resources in economic development. In Wilson’s day, associating “natural resource abundance with national industrial strength” was the norm. Today, we no longer believe that this association holds. Instead, we see our economies and societies potentially threatened by a wide variety of constraints caused by natural resource scarcity. Such problems range from concerns over the cost and availability of key natural resources, including fossil fuel supplies, fisheries, arable land and water, to the environmental consequences of increasing global resource use, degradation of key ecosystems, such as coral reefs, tropical forests, freshwater systems, mangroves and marine environments, and the rising carbon dependency of the world economy. Contemporary unease over natural resource scarcity, energy insecurity, global warming and other environmental consequences is to be expected, given the rapid rate of environmental change caused by the global economy and human populations over the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, therefore, we are more accustomed to viewing “the exceeding bounty of nature” to be running out, rather than providing unlimited supplies for “our genius for enterprise.”
● The Elgar Companion to Hyman Minsky
Edited by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray
Summary via publisher, Edward Elgar Publishing
This Companion provides a timely and engaging treatment of Hyman Minsky’s approach to economics, which is enjoying a renewed appreciation because of its prescient analysis of the slow but sure transformation of the capitalist economy in the post-war period. Many have called the global financial crisis that began in the United States in 2007 a ‘Minsky crisis’, and these collected contributions demonstrate precisely why both academic economists as well as policymakers have turned to Minsky for guidance. The book brings together the foremost Minsky scholars to provide a comprehensive overview of his approach, with extensions to bring the analysis up to date.