The Deals that Made the World: Reckless Ambition, Backroom Negotiations, and the Hidden Truths of Business

Jacques Peretti, an award-winning investigative journalist, examines ten business deals that have transformed the modern economy. He argues that much of our world—from the food we eat to the products we buy to the medications we take—is shaped by private negotiations and business deals that few people know about. Peretti reveals how corporate executives built an entire diet industry, how PayPal conquered online payments through specific behavioral science, and how pharmaceutical executives marketed medications to healthy people. Over twenty years, he has interviewed CE Os of multinational corporations, politicians, economists, and scientists involved in decisions that altered our world. The book draws connections between seemingly unrelated events: how Wall Street's actions on food commodities helped spark the Arab Spring, and the link between the AIDS epidemic in 1980s San Francisco and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. Peretti addresses tech, finance, artificial intelligence, and other levers of power in a postglobalization environment, offering a way to understand the last hundred years and what the next hundred might hold.