Klaus P. Fischer - Böcker

Business finance in less developed economies cannot be analyzed or measured by the approaches utilized in countries, such as the United States and Great Britain, where stock markets can assess worth and channel capital with reasonable accuracy. Most economic theory dealing with business finance has been developed in precisely this latter environment. By bringing together economists from less developed countries with researchers from the United States and Western Europe, these essays break new ground by focusing on the unique problems of capital markets in the developing world.The problems of organizing securities markets and such capital market institutions as mutual funds are examined. The sources of financial capital and the interaction of state credit policies and the investment decisions and practices of the private sector are also analyzed. Together these essays provide developmental and business economists with provocative questions and will be of concern to all involved with economic growth in the less developed world.

In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America's great industrial achievements and admitted that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of production-especially in iron and coal, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America's superiority in the field of transportation, particularly the automobile. He loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. Hitler's personal train was even code-named "Amerika."In Hitler and America, historian Klaus P. Fischer seeks to understand more deeply how Hitler viewed America, the nation that was central to Germany's defeat. He reveals Hitler's split-minded image of America: America and Amerika. Hitler would loudly call the United States a feeble country while at the same time referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of imitation. Or he would belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time looking at the latest photos from the United States, watching American films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons. America was a place that Hitler admired-for the can-do spirit of the American people, which he attributed to their Nordic blood-and envied-for its enormous territorial size, abundant resources, and political power. Amerika, however, was to Hitler a mongrel nation, grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews.Across the Atlantic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his own, far more realistically grounded views of Hitler. Fischer contrasts these with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that caused Hitler, in the end, to see only Amerika, not America, and led to his defeat.

From the reviews of Nazi Germany "The best one-volume history of the Third Reich available.It fills a void which has existed for a long time and it will probably become the basic text for generations of students. Walter Laqueur "An indispensable, compellingly readable political, military and social history of the Third Reich. Publishers Weekly From the reviews of History of an Obsession. "This is truly a significant work, for Fischer gives a balanced account of a complex subject, making it painfully clear just how Germany became capable of genocide. Booklist Fischer writes with a clear mastery of both primary and secondary sources. Synthesizing a wide spectrum of literature into a fine, scholarly work. Library Journal. No decade since the end of World War II has been as seminal in its historical significance as the 1960s. That stormy period unleashed a host of pent-up social and generational conflicts that had not been experienced since the Civil War: intense racial and ethnic strife, cold war terror, the Vietnam War, counter-cultural protests, controversial social engineering, and political rancor.Numerous studies on various aspects of these issues have been written over the past 35 years, but few have so successfully integrated the many-sided components into a coherent, synthetic, and reliable book that combines good storytelling with sound scholarly analysis. The main materials covered will be the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies; the Civil Rights movement; the Vietnam War and the protest it generated; the New Left, student radicals, and Black student militancy; and, finally, the counter-cultural side of the 60s: hippies, sex and Rock n Roll.