***STANDALONE ROMANCE - ENDS HAPPILY EVER - NO CLIFFHANGERS*** Haley Rose is curvy, cute, and ambitious. After being laid off from her job as a small-town newspaper reporter, she's left rural Ohio with her two best friends for a summer of freewheeling surf, sand, and sun on the California coast. Ethan Stone is a grizzly shifter and a surfer. He's waxing down his board on the beach when his bear senses a call for help from the waves. From the moment Ethan pulls Haley's near lifeless body from the ocean, he knows that she's the one. And when they touch, the magic is confirmed. Sparks fly. They kiss. They find each other. Anything seems possible. But Ethan has his secrets. And when Haley investigates a story about bear shifters, those secrets come back to haunt him. Will Ethan be able to win Haley's heart once the truth about him is exposed? And will Haley choose love or career? Ethan knows Haley is the one, but now he has to prove it to her. Only then, will Haley know the meaning of true love. And only then will Ethan be able to claim his mate. *A Note to the Reader: Exposed is a story of hot, passionate Alpha love. In addition to steamy lovemaking, it contains some adult language. If sizzling bear shifters and their curvy BBW mates aren’t your thing, you may want to skip this book. But if you're a curvy girl who likes her leading men strong and her action scorching hot, enjoy! **If you haven't already read my Wild Alpha Shifter books, Desired, Man-Eater, or Fire Shifter, be sure to check them out! www.zolabird.com To be the first to hear about my new releases, you can join my mailing list. Just copy and paste this link into your browser: http://eepurl.com/behG25

and the use of credit ratings in the securitization markets; lending practices and securitization, including the originate-to-distribute model for extending credit and transferring risk; affiliations between insured depository institutions and securities, insurance, and other types of nonbanking companies; the concept that certain institutions are 'too-big-to-fail' and its impact on market expectations; corporate governance, including the impact of company conversions from partnerships to corporations; compensation structures; changes in compensation for employees of financial companies, as compared to compensation for others with similar skill sets in the labor market; the legal and regulatory structure of the United States housing market; derivatives and unregulated financial products and practices, including credit default swaps; short-selling; financial institution reliance on numerical models,

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.

The Great Financial Crisis that began in 2007 reminds us with devastating force that financial instability and crises are endemic to capitalist economies, and that it is only strong and dynamically-changing financial regulations that can keep the damage caused by these crises within bounds. The international financial system and individual national economies, including that of the United States, are suffering from the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Economists are struggling to understand the origins and implications of the crisis. The Handbook of the Political Economy of Financial Crises uses a political economy theoretical framework to analyze the crisis. After an opening chapter that describes the dimensions of the current crisis, the next section provides relevant theoretical frameworks. Subsequent sections apply these theoretical frameworks to analyze the background, dimensions, and implications of the crisis for the world economy. Leading scholars push forward our understanding of how and why our international and domestic economies are susceptible to financial breakdown and what can be done to mitigate this problem in the future. The methodology throughout applies theoretical concepts in the context of an historical and institutional understanding of the real world. By emphasizing the historical and institutional aspects of financial crises, the authors advance economic knowledge and provide insights into how we can manage our financial system to improve the lives of ordinary people.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was created to "examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the U.S." In this report, the Commission presents the results of its examination and its conclusions as to the causes of the crisis. More than two years after the worst of the financial crisis, our economy continues to experience the aftershocks. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes, and the economy is still struggling to rebound. This report is intended to provide a historical accounting of what brought our financial system and economy to a precipice and to help policy makers and the public better understand how this calamity came to be. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand report.

Banks were allowed to enter securities markets and become universal banks during two periods in the past century - the 1920s and the late 1990s. Both times the ensuing unsustainable booms led to destructive busts - the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the Global Financial Crisis of2007-09. Both times, universal banks made high-risk loans and packaged them into securities that were sold as safe investments to poorly-informed investors. Both times, governments were forced to arrange costly bailouts.Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 in response to the Great Depression. The Act broke up universal banks and established a decentralized financial system composed of three separate and independent sectors: banking, securities, and insurance. That system was stable and successful for overfour decades until the big-bank lobby persuaded regulators to open loopholes in Glass-Steagall during the 1980s and convinced Congress to repeal it in 1999.In Taming the Megabanks, Arthur Wilmarth, Jr. argues that we must separate banks from securities markets again to avoid another devastating financial crisis and ensure that our financial system serves Main Street business firms and consumers instead of Wall Street bankers and speculators. Wilmarth'scomprehensive and detailed analysis of the roles played by universal banks in the two worst financial catastrophes of the past century demonstrates that a new Glass-Steagall Act would make our financial system much more stable and less likely to produce boom-and-bust cycles. And giant universalbanks would no longer dominate our financial system or receive enormous subsidies.Congress did not adopt a new Glass-Steagall Act after the Global Financial Crisis. Instead, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act. Dodd-Frank's highly technical reforms tried to make banks safer but left the dangerous universal banking system in place. Universal banks continue to pose unacceptablerisks to financial stability and economic and social welfare. They exert far too much influence over our political and regulatory systems because of their immense size and their undeniable "too-big-to-fail" status.Taming the Megabanks forcefully makes the case for a a new Glass-Steagall Act to break up universal banks. A more decentralized and competitive system of independent banks and securities firms would not only provide better service to Main Street businesses and ordinary consumers but also bringstability to a volatile financial system.

Rev. ed. of: An introduction to investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity. c2010.