The Shadow Market
How Sovereign Wealth Funds Secretly Dominate the Global Economy
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Inside the super-rich, super-secretive, unregulated funds that are wresting control of world finance
The most potent force in global commerce today isn’t Wall Street, the multinational banks, or the governments of the G7 countries. In this brilliant and startling investigation, acclaimed business reporter Eric J. Weiner uncovers the real powers guiding our shaky recovery from the worldwide financial crisis and shaping the economy of our future.
Taking advantage of the current recession and the liquidity problems in the United States and Europe, cash-flush nations such as China, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and even Norway are using sovereign wealth funds and other investment vehicles to secure major holdings in multinational corporations as well as massive tracts of farmland and natural resources.
This is the Shadow Market, quietly controlling political agendas as well as the flow of capital in the West – and assembling gigantic investment portfolios that will form the power structure of tomorrow’s economy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For Weiner (What Goes Up), the shadow market an invisible nexus of wealthy nations, hedge funds, and private equity funds controls access to capital and natural resources, and by extension, the global economy. The author attributes this shadow market s rising influence to the secrecy surrounding its participants actions: since investing and business decisions are made behind closed doors, they are impossible to regulate. The book s lengthiest discussion is devoted to the ascendancy of China, whose current account surplus is fueling extraordinary growth in its exchange reserves and whose financial policies were a major contributor to the expansion of the U.S. lending bubble. Weiner is equally concerned with the losers in the world s new economic order, devoting significant space to the U.S. and Old Europe, both of which he considers to be poorly positioned to protect their interests in the next century. This informative, admirably lucid book is less concerned with exposing the shadow market s influence than with placing its emergence in the context of a larger geopolitical shift in power from the West to the East.
