A great fall cannot be understood apart from the rise that preceded it. Enron Ascending is the only book to date that examines in detail the first two-thirds of that iconic energy company's life. Thus, it is the only book to date that exposes the deepest causes of Enron's stunning collapse. Nobel economist Paul Krugman predicted that history would look upon Enron's plummet as a greater turning point than the fall of the Twin Towers. Enron Ascending explains the shock of the company's fall by recalling the astounding achievements of Enron’s birth, childhood, adolescence, and early maturity. It sets forth the once-celebrated but now-forgotten industry and innovation that caused the company and its reputation to soar stratospherically. At the same time, always conscious of the company's fate, the book highlights throughout the developing habits of thought and behavior that later evolved into self-destructive acts of desperation and deceit. Written fifteen years after the firm’s demise, Enron Ascending offers the long perspective of a uniquely positioned insider, Robert L. Bradley, Jr., the company's director of public-policy analysis and Chairman Ken Lay's personal speechwriter. The book also offers a library of previously unavailable information, drawn from Bradley’s innumerable corporate documents and unrepeatable interviews, which he collected in his capacity as the company's prospective historian. Most important, however, Enron Ascending offers an antidote to the unending stories, studies, and books about Enron that are presented as just-the-facts but are in reality shaped decisively by the worldview of their authors. Bradley shows, beyond dispute, that the early habits which set precedents for Enron's history-making demise were directly contrary to the free-market behaviors and capitalist attitudes generally blamed for Enron's fall.

The history of the United States of America is also the history of the energy sector. Natural gas provides the fuel that allows us to heat our homes in winter and cool them in summer with the touch of a button or turn of a dial—when the industry runs smoothly. From the oil crisis of the 1970s to the fall of Enron and the California electricity crisis at the turn of the century to contemporary issues of hydraulic fracking, poorly conceived government policies have sometimes left us shivering, stranded, or with significantly lighter wallets. In this expansive narrative, Charles Blanchard traces the rise of natural gas and the regulatory missteps that nearly ruined the market. Beginning in the 1880s, The Extraction State explains how the New Deal regulatory compact came together in the 1920s, even before the Great Depression, and how it fell apart in the 1970s. From there, the book dissects the policies that affect us today, and explores where we might be headed in the near future.

"I'd say you were a carnival barker, except that wouldn't be fair tocarnival barkers. A carnie will at least tell you up front that he's running a shell game. You, Mr. Lay, were running what purported to be the seventh largest corporation in America."-Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL) to Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, Senate Commerce Science & Transportation's Subcommittee, Hearing on Enron, 2/12/02 The speed of Enron's rise and fall is truly astonishing and perhaps the single most important story of corporate failure in the twenty-first century. In Enron investigative journalist Loren Fox promises readers nothing short of the most compelling and insightful investigation into Enron's meteoric ascent-regarded by Wall Street and the media as the epitome of innovation-and its spectacular fall from grace. In a lively and authoritative manner, Fox discusses how the biggest corporate bankruptcy in American business history happened, why for so long no one (except for an enlightened few) saw it coming, and what its impact will be on financial markets, the U.S. economy, U.S. energy policy, and the public for years to come. With access to many company insiders, Fox's intriguing account of this corporate debacle also provides an overview of the corporate culture and business model that led to Enron's high-flying success and disastrous failure. The story of Enron is one that will reverberate in global financial and energy markets as well as in criminal and civil courts for years to come. Rife with all the elements of a classic thriller-scandal, dishonest accounting, personal greed, questionable campaign contributions, suicide-Enron captures the essence of a company that went too far too fast.

FINTECH and CRYPTOCURRENCY Dive into the world of fintech and cryptocurrency through the engaging perspectives of this diverse group of authors and uncover the intricate connections between technology, finance, and cryptocurrency that make this a must-have for anyone intrigued by the future of digital society. Digital currencies, decentralization of money, and the growth of new technologies like blockchain, the Internet of Things, and machine learning have produced new opportunities and difficulties for banking and finance, as well as users of these services in electronic commerce. New banking and finance technologies may improve operational efficiency, risk management, compliance, and client pleasure, but they can decrease barriers and introduce new concerns, such as cybersecurity risk. Cryptocurrencies with smart contracts for payments and trading, as well as AI systems with adaptive algorithms that allow picture and speech recognition, expert judgement, group categorization, and forecasting in a variety of fields, are instances of increased automation. Simultaneously, the potentials pose risks and raise regulatory concerns. The rise of blockchain technology and its widespread use have had a significant impact on the operation and management of digital systems. At the same time, researchers and practitioners have paid close attention to digital finance. Blockchain’s first applications were limited to the production of digital currency, but it has now been expanded to include financial and commercial applications. Innovative digital finance has had a huge impact on business and society since it has been extensively adopted by businesses and consumers. As a result, the goal of this edited book is to expand and deepen our knowledge of the business possibilities of novel blockchain and digital financial applications.

“They’re still trying to hide the weenie,” thought Sherron Watkins as she read a newspaper clipping about Enron two weeks before Christmas, 2001. . . It quoted [CFO] Jeff McMahon addressing the company’s creditors and cautioning them against a rash judgment. “Don’t assume that there is a smoking gun.” Sherron knew Enron well enough to know that the company was in extreme spin mode… Power Failure is the electrifying behind-the-scenes story of the collapse of Enron, the high-flying gas and energy company touted as the poster child of the New Economy that, in its hubris, had aspired to be “The World’s Leading Company,” and had briefly been the seventh largest corporation in America. Written by prizewinning journalist Mimi Swartz, and substantially based on the never-before-published revelations of former Enron vice-president Sherron Watkins, as well as hundreds of other interviews, Power Failure shows the human face beyond the greed, arrogance, and raw ambition that fueled the company’s meteoric rise in the late 1990s. At the dawn of the new century, Ken Lay’s and Jeff Skilling's faces graced the covers of business magazines, and Enron’s money oiled the political machinery behind George W. Bush’s election campaign. But as Wall Street analysts sang Enron’s praises, and its stock spiraled dizzyingly into the stratosphere, the company’s leaders were madly scrambling to manufacture illusory profits, hide its ballooning debt, and bully Wall Street into buying its fictional accounting and off-balance-sheet investment vehicles. The story of Enron’s fall is a morality tale writ large, performed on a stage with an unforgettable array of props and side plots, from parking lots overflowing with Boxsters and BMWs to hot-house office affairs and executive tantrums. Among the cast of characters Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins observe with shrewd Texas eyes and an insider’s perspective are: CEO Ken Lay, Enron’s “outside face,” who was more interested in playing diplomat and paving the road to a political career than in managing Enron’s high-testosterone, anything-goes culture; Jeff Skilling, the mastermind behind Enron’s mercenary trading culture, who transformed himself from a nerdy executive into the personification of millennial cool; Rebecca Mark, the savvy and seductive head of Enron’s international division, who was Skilling’s sole rival to take over the company; and Andy Fastow, whose childish pranks early in his career gave way to something far more destructive. Desperate to be a player in Enron’s deal-making, trader-oriented culture, Fastow transformed Enron’s finance department into a “profit center,” creating a honeycomb of financial entities to bolster Enron’s “profits,” while diverting tens of millions of dollars into his own pockets An unprecedented chronicle of Enron’s shocking collapse, Power Failure should take its place alongside the classics of previous decades – Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker – as one of the cautionary tales of our times.

As the world picks itself off the mat and begins to grow again, a bull market in all things Canadian is about to wash up on our shores. A wave of unprecedented prosperity is about to occur, one that will transform the fortunes of Canadian investors who understand how the world has dramatically shifted and why Canada will be the biggest beneficiary. High technology companies, banking, residential real estate and, of course, our much-maligned resource sector will all be front and centre in this rising wave of prosperity, driven not by America but by Asia. Shell Shocked turns the conventional investment wisdom on its head by providing compelling evidence that buying all things Canadian is a savvy bet, not a foolhardy gamble. Best yet, the global economic collapse has offered Canadian investors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prosper, while investing right here at home. Rich in detailed, fact-based analysis, Shell Shocked explains what to buy and when to buy it. The world has changed, and so has investing. Shell Shocked is your blueprint for investing success. Written by Bay Street veteran John Stephenson, Shell Shocked pinpoints the links that have brought the world to the brink of economic collapse, and describes how Canadians stand to prosper after the crisis.

Advance your skills in efficient data analysis and data processing using the powerful tools of Scala, Spark, and Hadoop About This Book This is a primer on functional-programming-style techniques to help you efficiently process and analyze all of your data Get acquainted with the best and newest tools available such as Scala, Spark, Parquet and MLlib for machine learning Learn the best practices to incorporate new Big Data machine learning in your data-driven enterprise to gain future scalability and maintainability Who This Book Is For Mastering Scala Machine Learning is intended for enthusiasts who want to plunge into the new pool of emerging techniques for machine learning. Some familiarity with standard statistical techniques is required. What You Will Learn Sharpen your functional programming skills in Scala using REPL Apply standard and advanced machine learning techniques using Scala Get acquainted with Big Data technologies and grasp why we need a functional approach to Big Data Discover new data structures, algorithms, approaches, and habits that will allow you to work effectively with large amounts of data Understand the principles of supervised and unsupervised learning in machine learning Work with unstructured data and serialize it using Kryo, Protobuf, Avro, and AvroParquet Construct reliable and robust data pipelines and manage data in a data-driven enterprise Implement scalable model monitoring and alerts with Scala In Detail Since the advent of object-oriented programming, new technologies related to Big Data are constantly popping up on the market. One such technology is Scala, which is considered to be a successor to Java in the area of Big Data by many, like Java was to C/C++ in the area of distributed programing. This book aims to take your knowledge to next level and help you impart that knowledge to build advanced applications such as social media mining, intelligent news portals, and more. After a quick refresher on functional programming concepts using REPL, you will see some practical examples of setting up the development environment and tinkering with data. We will then explore working with Spark and MLlib using k-means and decision trees. Most of the data that we produce today is unstructured and raw, and you will learn to tackle this type of data with advanced topics such as regression, classification, integration, and working with graph algorithms. Finally, you will discover at how to use Scala to perform complex concept analysis, to monitor model performance, and to build a model repository. By the end of this book, you will have gained expertise in performing Scala machine learning and will be able to build complex machine learning projects using Scala. Style and approach This hands-on guide dives straight into implementing Scala for machine learning without delving much into mathematical proofs or validations. There are ample code examples and tricks that will help you sail through using the standard techniques and libraries. This book provides practical examples from the field on how to correctly tackle data analysis problems, particularly for modern Big Data datasets.