David Goodnight
The infrastructure of global trade is invisible until it fails.Pipelines, ports, power grids, data centers, and the financial systems that fund them quietly sustain modern civilization. Yet the machinery behind them: the project finance structures, risk frameworks, export credit agencies, and capital markets that determine what gets built and what does not. This system remains poorly understood by most of the people who depend on it.Financing the World We Trade In pulls readers inside that hidden architecture. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience and over $3 billion in project financings, mergers, and acquisitions across more than 20 countries, David Goodnight explains how infrastructure projects are structured, financed, insured, negotiated, and brought into operation across the modern global economy.Most finance books explain one layer. This one connects all of them: from a garage inventor through technology commercialization, export credit support, and institutional project finance, to the global capital markets that ultimately hold the paper.What the book covers:• How lenders assess risk, why projects fail to secure financing, and what developers must do to improve financeability• Project finance fundamentals: FEL process, EPC contracts, cash-flow waterfalls, DSCR mechanics, construction risk, and completion guarantees• Export credit agencies, commodity-backed lending, letters of credit, and structured trade finance• Technology performance insurance and the financing gap between development and commercial deployment• Digital trade transformation: electronic bills of lading, tokenization, and AI in compliance and underwriting• Community and inventor finance: equity crowdfunding, CDFI, NMTC, Reg CF, Reg A+, and Reg D, with real case studies• AI data center project finance: GPU-collateralized facilities, ABS securitization, and the power demand surge reshaping infrastructure investmentWritten for builders, developers, inventors, traders, infrastructure professionals, and anyone seeking to understand the financial machinery behind the modern world.
