Book Reviews
Welcome to my book review section. In this section I will be posting occasional book reviews of finance oriented books that may be of interest and use to readers.
The Greatest Trade Ever
The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath
The Retirement Savings Time Bomb...And How to Defuse It
The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy
The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History
Far From Random: Using Investor Behavior and Trend Analysis to Forecast Market Movement
America's Great Depression
Currency Trading and Intermarket Analysis: How to Profit from the Shifting Currents in Global Markets
Crash Proof 2.0
This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
The Great Depression Ahead
The Myth of the Oil Crisis: Overcoming the Challenges of Depletion, Geopolitics, and Global Warming
The Crash of 2008 and What it Means: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
The Shack
Economics in One Lesson
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism
Robert J. Samuelson
Random House
4 out of 5 Stars
This was a great overview of the inflation of the 1970s. It is an easy read, and not terribly technical. To enjoy this book, you’ll want to have an interest in economics, but if you do, it does a nice job of filling a hole in the history books that are out there.
One of the points that Samuelson makes over and over is how difficult it is for the government to try to manipulate our economy. Economists tend to badly overestimate their understanding of the economy and those in leadership positions tend to end up in a kind of political group-think, which seems to inevitably lead to overestimating their ability to guide the economy to where they want it to go. This leads to bad decisions, over-manipulation and, eventually, bad economic results. Kind of scary when you realize how much the government is trying to manipulate our economy right now and how political many of those decisions are.
The book did seem to drag on at points, and I didn’t find his predictions of the future analysis of the “aftermath” of the 1970s nearly as interesting as his discussion of the actual history of the Great Inflation, but I definitely recommend the book.
Rick McCallister
June 27, 2010
Gregory Zuckerman
Broadway Business
Audiobook Version – Narrated by Marc Cashman
5 out of 5 Stars
This is the fascinating story of John Paulson, who made more than $20 billion from the credit and mortgage crisis of 2007–2008. One of his hedge funds returned more than 500% in 2007 and they all averaged a 440% return.
One interesting part of the book is how Zuckerman weaves in the story of a number of other investors who made the same trade as Paulson, but none were nearly as successful. The trade wasn’t easy or clear, and they were all swimming against the tide, so the stories of their trials and tribulations to the ultimate, almost unfathomable, end are very compelling.
I really enjoyed listening to how Paulson came on to the possibility of the trade and the process he and his company went through to research and put the trade on. The trade, incidentally, was mostly in credit default swap – a derivative security that, in this case, was insurance on sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. So if the mortgage-backed securities lost money, the insurance paid off.
I highly recommend the book, especially if you have any interest at all in the financial markets. While I listened to the unabridged audio book, I am sure the written book is an easy, well-written, enjoyable read.
Rick McCallister
April 13 2010
The Retirement Savings Time Bomb… And How to Defuse It
Ed Slott
Penguin Books
4 out of 5 Stars
Ed Slott knows his stuff. This book does an excellent job communicating some of the dangers with retirement plans and taxation. If you are concerned about the distribution of your retirement plan to your heirs, then I highly recommend this book, especially if you have large retirement plan balances or expect to sometime in the future.
If your retirement accounts are small, or you are just getting started with investing, then this is not the book to begin with. This book is about distribution much more than accumulation. Slott talks about rollovers, Roth conversions, techniques involving life insurance, estate and income taxes, and describes many severe mistakes that are all too common.
The only reason that I’m giving the book 4 instead of 5 stars is because of its length and detail. The book is much too long for any professional – the information is useful but could be 80% shorter, although it is a very quick read in its current format. On the other hand, the book is, I think, too general for most of the public, by necessity no doubt. Most of the general public should be working with a professional on these types of issues. If the layman is really interested in this topic and concerned about it, he or she should read, and will enjoy, the book. However, for most, I suspect that it contains more detail than the layman wants and is probably too general to do anything with. However, it may be very useful in giving one the ability to discuss the issues with a professional advisor.
Rick McCallister
March 30th, 2010
The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy
David M. Smick
Penguin Group
5 out of 5 Stars
David M. Smick is a global financial strategist who has worked with some of the leading figures in the economic world, such as Alan Greenspan and George Soros. He also founded and publishes the acclaimed quarterly The International Economy.
What impresses me about Smick’s perspective is that he knows and meets with some of the real movers and shakers of the global economy. So he brings much more than just academic experience—he brings real world connections and information to the reader. His book includes fascinating stories of some of those encounters, which make the book enjoyable to read and help the reader understand his points in more realistic terms.
The book talks about the volatile economic environment that we are in, tells us how we got here, and warns of some of the storms that may hit us in the future. Smick talks about the possibility of a bubble in China, Japan’s national savings, the problems with banks and investment bankers, and how globalization has created a “raging ocean of capital” that is now so huge, complex, and fast moving that it is almost impossible to predict its impact on the world’s economies.
I highly recommend this book if you’re interested in understanding what is happening in our world economy. It doesn’t provide any real answers to the risks we face, but it will certainly help the reader identify and foresee future risks and opportunities more clearly.
Rick McCallister
March 27th, 2010
The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History
David Hackett Fischer
Oxford University Press
3 out of 5 Stars
This book gives a history of price revolutions beginning in Medieval times, starting with the year 1180. Fischer describes four price revolutions, beginning with the medieval price revolution, the sixteenth century, eighteenth century and twentieth century. The book was published in 1996 and has not been updated to cover anything in the last fifteen years or so.
I found the book to be worthwhile reading for someone with a real interest in price history. However, as I read the book, I felt that somehow something was missing—Fischer did not include any of the history in the context of economic theory. At least to this reader, such a perspective would have better facilitated using the knowledge of history to understand where we might be headed in the future. Later, in his last appendix, Fischer describes his approach: “A primary purpose of this project is descriptive. One of its organizing assumptions is that a task of empirical description may be undertaken without an apparatus of theory. This idea breaks in a fundamental way with an epistemic orthodoxy that has dominated the disciplines of American social science since the late 1940s.” So, Fischer did this on purpose but I think the book would have been better had he not taken that approach. He did discuss economic theory in his conclusion but it was not a complete or sufficient discussion, in my opinion.
Nonetheless, Fischer does a good job with his narrative of the history of price revolutions. This is a lot of information to try to cover in one book and I think he did a good job of culling the information down to a readable and interesting book.
Rick McCallister
March 5th, 2010
Far From Random Using Investor Behavior and Trend Analysis to Forecast Market Movement
Richard Lehman
Bloomberg Press
2 out of 5 Stars
Lehman’s principal point of the book is that the markets are not entirely random and that technical analysis—particularly channels—can be used to help predict market movements.
He makes a few good and interesting points throughout the book. The chapter on specific behaviors that impact the market (“The Behavioral Phenomenon”) was interesting, but contained nothing new. Overall, I think this book could have been about one-third the length and have been just as effective. Parts of the book were repeated in places almost verbatim. While reading the first three-fourths of the book, I kept asking myself when he would get to the point.
I did not find that he was particularly convincing of his positions. The book is supposed to be about channels and market forecasting, but that content did not take up the majority of the book.
This book may be OK if you are new to the idea of behavioral finance and have an interest in technical analysis, but there are much more thorough books on both subjects.
Rick McCallister
January 30, 2010
America’s Great Depression
Murray Rothbard
The Ludwig Von Mises Institute
5 out of 5 Stars
This book should be considered a classic. Written in 1963, Murray Rothbard does an amazing job explaining why and what happened during the Great Depression. The economic history of the Great Depression is usually told through Keynesian eyes, but Rothbard adeptly lays everything bare.
The first few chapters are devoted to a kind of primer on Austrian economics—an excellent review if one is familiar with the concepts and an outstanding introduction if not. Rothbard spends the rest of the book on the 1920s, explaining how the boom of the era inevitably led to the Depression. Then, he walks through Herbert Hoover’s years as President. The book ends with the end of the Hoover years.
This book is particularly interesting given what is happening in our economy right now. The parallels between the decisions that the government made then and is making now are amazing. There are many points in the book where the reader could ask whether Rothbard is writing about the 20s and 30s or the 2000s.
Much has evolved in the world since this book was written, but almost all of the history lessons and Rothbard’s analysis of the actions taken remain relevant today. There are a few anachronisms in the book, and a couple of places where many readers may disagree with Rothbard’s position, but the book is still highly recommended for anyone interested in economics and history.
Rick McCallister
January 28, 2010
Ashraf Laidi
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
5 out of 5 Stars
If you’re interested in why currencies move the way they do, this is an excellent book to start out with. It’s written in a way that a layman can understand, yet a reader should definitely be very interested in the subject before tackling the book.
The book isn’t written for the active day trader, but helps the reader understand longer term trends in currency movements. Laidi spends a couple of chapters discussing gold and oil and their relationship to currency movements, and I thought these chapters were excellent.
He also walks through each of the last 10 years and explains movements of the major currencies. The explanations do a great job in helping the reader assimilate his suggestions on why currencies move the way they do.
I also appreciated his short explanations on a few of the different theories regarding currency movements. The explanations are brief and not enough to use to act on, but still provide an overview, or refresher, of the major theories.
I don’t think this book is only for currency traders, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is trying to actively manage his or her own money. If you are trying to make decisions regarding how and where to invest, from either a country/currency or asset class perspective, this book will help facilitate your decision-making process.
Rick McCallister
December 18, 2009
Peter D. Shiff
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
4 out of 5 Stars
“In effect, the U.S. government has committed the American public to the mother of all adjustable-rate mortgages.” What a great line about what the government is doing with our debt right now.
Peter Schiff is a very smart guy. I’ve seen him on numerous TV appearances and listen to his podcast often - he is very consistent and quick. The book is well done and easy to read. It’s written for the general public, so its high-level doesn’t contain a lot of supporting detail (unfortunately).
Schiff’s basic premise is that the U.S. doesn’t produce much anymore, and is borrowing from the world to live, mostly from Asia. He believes we will face severe inflation, and a dramatically falling dollar. It wouldn’t be a good idea to discount what he says – Schiff had his original book out before the 2007 melt down, and was in the press many times, predicting most of the problems that happened. You can easily find videos on youtube of him warning of the impending real estate and market crisis.
Schiff’s solution to the problem was and still is buying dividend-paying foreign stocks, mostly China, gold and natural resource stocks. His portfolios during the 2008 meltdown are reported to be have been down 40-70%. No doubt they’ve recovered significantly if not completely at this point (November, 2009). My problem with his position is that he says foreign markets are “the most conservative place for your money right now.” Schiff’s proven to be right so far about his macro view of what is happening in the world, but I don’t think most people wouldn’t call a 40-70% loss representative of a conservative portfolio.
In the long run, I think Schiff may be right about inflation and the dollar. The problem is, its not likely to play out exactly as he predicts so an investor should be careful about taking his investment recommendations lock, stock and barrel. Nonetheless, I highly recommend the book.
Rick McCallister
November 27, 2009
This Time is Different – Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff
Princeton University Press
4 out of 5 Stars
Obviously, the authors put a lot of effort and research into this book. The amount of data can be overwhelming and difficult to digest.
In the preface, the authors suggest that readers who are interested mainly in lessons of history for this latest crisis go directly to chapters 13 to 16 (the end of the book). I suggest that most people who are not keenly interested in a lot of detailed statistics over the last 800 years do exactly that. Economists or other professionals may be interested in reading through the rest of the book, as it contains fascinating data and analysis therein, but the text will be difficult to get through for most without a proper background. This is not because it is difficult or complex, but because the volume of data and charts makes it difficult to pick out the more important points.
The only reason that I gave the book 4 instead of 5 stars is because it isn’t really what it is marketed to be. In the preface, the authors tell the reader that the book contains mostly tables and figures, and is not just a narrative, which is fine and they do a truly outstanding job. However, you do not get that view from the advance reviews or even from just reading the jacket cover. The fact that so much of the content is contained in the tables and figures will require the reader spend quite a bit of time analyzing those charts to glean the relevant information. The content is great, just not as easy to get at as you might be lead to believe.
Rick McCallister
November 4, 2009
The Great Depression Ahead
Harry S. Dent, Jr.
Free Press
2 out of 5 Stars
This book was very disappointing. I remember reading Harry Dent’s The Great Boom Ahead back in the mid 1990s and being impressed with his analysis on demographics. In fact, his analysis of demographics impact on economies and markets is still insightful. The problem with his current book is that he throws a variety of other “stuff” into his analysis, polluting the basic message of the impact of demographics on our economy.
Dent writes about how his prior analysis failed to work out exactly as he had projected. Because of this, he found other “cycles” to add to the picture to attempt to explain the inaccuracies in his predictions. He two new main ones he adds and discusses are the 32–36 year Geopolitical Cycle and the 29–30 year Commodity Cycle, but he also adds in the 5,000 year Civilization Cycle (based on only two cycles!), the 2,500 year Empire Cycle, the 500 year Mega Innovation Cycle, the 250 year Revolutionary Cycle, the 20 year stock market bottom cycle, the 40 year Generational Cycle, the Decennial Cycle, the 4 year Presidential Cycle, a possible new 3.3 year cycle, the 8.6 year Armstrong Cycle, the Annual Cycle, and finally the Seasonal Four-Month Cycle. And, I may not have listed them all.
Of course, that raises a big question. Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt on all these cycles being accurate, if his predictions were wrong before because he missed certain cycles, how does he know he’s not missing other cycles that will make his new predictions wrong?
I’m sure that some of the cycles that he mentions do indeed exist. The problem starts with the fact that Dent is attempting to nail down exact times for when these cycles begin and end to such a precise level that he is bound to be wrong on many of them. Then, he tries to combine them all and predict stock market performance based on the cycles. I believe that his lack of success with some of the timing and magnitude of his other predictions ought to demonstrate fairly well to the reader how inaccurate his predictions might be.
I’m giving the book two instead of one star because it still contains some good demographic information and analysis. Unfortunately, the reader must be very careful about how the information is extracted and interpreted because of the other assumptions thrown in. Dent’s prior work demonstrated that his demographic work has long-term applicability in terms of market direction but not the timing or magnitude. However, the reader should beware of acting based on the conclusions that he draws in this book that relate to the additions of all these “cycles.”
Rick McCallister
October 5, 2009
The Myth of the Oil Crisis: Overcoming the Challenges of Depletion, Geopolitics, and Global Warming
Robin M. Mills
Praeger Publishers
Rating 4 out of 5 stars
Countless books, web sites, podcasts, articles and more exist that promote the imminence of peak oil. If nothing else, I highly recommend this book if you want to get the “other side.”
As is obvious from the title, Mills does not believe that peak oil will be coming anytime soon. It’s not that he doesn’t think it will ever happen; rather, he believes that it is a long way off and that we will have developed other energy sources well before peak oil becomes a major issue.
I found Mills’ presentation and discussion of the opposing viewpoints outstanding. Often, books never even touch on opposing viewpoints. Mills’ entire book revolves around a discussion of opposing viewpoints. He discusses not only why he believes the opposing viewpoint is wrong, but also presents his own beliefs.
Mills presents an unbelievable amount of supporting data. For the casual reader, the level of detail and support may be too much. For example, in chapter 5, he goes through 31 different countries or regions and breaks down the oil situation for each area, footnoting his data all the way along. For someone not directly involved in the oil industry, this information may be a bit much, but I can’t fault him for including it as others may appreciate the level of detail. The contrast is striking compared with other information that I’ve read from proponents of peak oil that presented almost no supporting data.
However, Mills is not always fair. At one point relatively early in the book, he basically says that peak oil is discredited because prior predictions have proven to be false. He goes so far as to compare proponents of peak oil to prophets of the end of the world, which is unreasonable. Another time, he overstates his case and says that while oil “prices have risen sharply … at least until 2008, the global economy sailed on almost untroubled. This points out the fallacy of claims by peak oil theorists and Neo-Luddites of the inevitability of economic collapse.” I am not convinced that the claims are false just because the economy was in a good state up to 2008. The year 2008 was not exactly a joyride and peak oil theorists will tell you that it will get much worse. My point is that just because it has not happened yet is not proof that it won’t happen in the future.
Mills did a convincing job discrediting Hubbert’s Peak and explaining how we have enough alternative forms of energy, and the time and resources to deploy them, to avoid the economic meltdown proposed by some. In the end I came away feeling like the doom and gloom that I’ve read from some peak oil authors is overdone. It’s difficult for someone not deeply involved in the industry to really know what’s right, however, and I suspect that reality lies between Mill’s position and the peak oiler’s position.
Rick McCallister
September 16, 2009
The Crash of 2008 and What it Means: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets
George Soros
Public Affairs
Rating 3 out of 5 stars
George Soros George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. He survived the occupation of Budapest and left communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. While a student at LSE, Mr. Soros became familiar with the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, who had a profound influence on his thinking and later on his professional and philanthropic activities. In 1956, Mr. Soros moved to the United States, where he began to accumulate a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. Today, he is Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC.
George Soros is well known as one of the most brilliant investors of all time. I was really looking forward to reading about some of his insights into what has happened and what might happen in the markets.
What you end up getting was a somewhat rambling case for “reflexivity.” In a nutshell, reflexivity says that 1) the markets are distorted because of the misconceptions and misinterpretations that people have of reality and 2) the biases created can actually affect the fundamentals. This is in stark contrast to the prevailing Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which basically states that because markets reflect all known information, they will tend towards equilibrium.
The above could be an interesting and fascinating discussion, especially from someone like George Soros. Unfortunately, the book is repetitive and drones on at times. Even though he calls himself a “failed philosopher,” it seems that he continues to hope that his philosophy of “reflexivity” will be his legacy.
Soros spends a small part of the book walking through some of his investment decisions at a very high level, but this discourse feels rushed and isn’t specific enough for the reader to really learn much about his thought process. He presents little actionable investment ideas or anything specific that someone could walk away with in terms of what to watch for in the markets.
In contrast with EMH, I agree with Soros that reflexivity is a new paradigm. I’d also agree that EMH has been taken to the woodshed in the last two years and doesn’t reflect reality in its entirety. Soros says that EMH has been “truly discredited.” However, as much as he knocks EMH, at the end of the book he admits that current models may be useful in modeling “near equilibrium” conditions.
In the end, I think the book could have been one-third its length, and then I would have rated it much higher. Given the success that Soros has had, I can’t imagine any investor brushing aside what he has to say; I just wish that he had been more concise and specific.
Rick McCallister
August 12, 2009
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Paul Krugman is the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. He writes a tice-weekly op-ed column for the New York Times and a blog named for his 2007 book, The Conscience of a Liberal. He teaches economics at Princeton University.
Maybe I didn’t read the critical reviews closely enough before buying The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, but this book wasn’t quite what I expected. Paul Krugman is a well-known liberal who also wrote a book, that I haven’t read, called The Conscience of a Liberal. I expected The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 to spend a lot of time beating up conservatives and pushing Krugman’s own opinions. It did that to some extent, but turned out to be mostly a good history book on various recent economic crises. Krugman includes a discussion of the Latin American crisis of the 1980s, Japan's crisis that began in the early ‘90s and really continues to today, and Asia’s crash of the late ‘90s. He does a nice job relating those crises to the crisis that we are in today, and includes a discussion of hedge funds, Greenspan’s impact, and the shadow banking system.
There were a few interesting comments in the book that surprised me. Krugman uses a babysitting co-op example from the 1970s to help explain some economic concepts. It is a useful and helpful analogy. But, to my amazement, he says, “And so the co-op’s story ought to inoculate us against fatalism and pessimism. It seems to imply that recessions are always, and indeed easily, curable.” (emphasis mine) He uses the word “always” strongly in that context based on an extremely simple analogy. It is quite a stretch to draw such a strong conclusion from a simple analogy. Another quote that I found surprising was with respect to Japan’s crisis, “…why not just print enough money to keep spending up so that the economy makes full use of the capacity it has?” I can think of many reasons not to do this, such as the debt load created, inability of congress or the fed to reign in spending or money,e tc. He certainly knows the same arguments and probably disagrees with them; unfortunately, he doesn’t bother to address them. He just leaves that statement hanging there. I found that disappointing, as I would have liked to have read his arguments.
While I didn’t agree with all of Krugman’s conclusions, I liked the book. Most of it told of historical events, and while he threw in his analysis and conclusions, and took a few potshots at conservatives, I believe that anyone from any political or economic persuasion should enjoy reading it. It is thoughtful, well written, and easy to read. It is not written as a textbook, but in a style that anyone can read and enjoy.
Rick McCallister
July 25, 2009
Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy
Stephen Leeb
Hatchette Book Group
Rating 2 out of 5 stars
Stephen Leeb is the publisher of newsletters that have a combined readership of 300,000 subscribers. He also serves as the editor of The Complete Investor newsletter. Leeb earned his BS from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, MS in math from the University of Illinois, and PhD in psychology from the University of Illinois during the same year.
Let’s hope that Stephen Leeb’s doomsday scenarios don’t play out very soon. The problem with this book is that he says they will, but he fails to make his case with facts and figures.
Leeb’s basic point is that the world is running out of its finite natural resources more quickly than we think, not in small part because of the tremendous growth coming out of the emerging markets. This may well be true, but the reader will have a very difficult time deciding for himself or herself based on the evidence presented – because there just isn’t much. As I read the book, I felt like I was sitting at a dinner table with smart, well-read people who had thought through these issues but were just bantering back and forth about how things might turn out. “Imagine if this happened… no, but what if this happened… yeah and then this would happen...” So those things may be true, but at the dinner table, they weren’t able to produce the evidence for their arguments.
I found it a bit odd that Leeb uses his own newsletter as the source for many of the charts and figures that he did present. Somehow, that doesn’t seem kosher to me. If he edits the newsletter, where did the newsletter get the data?
I don’t think that Leeb is a kook with crazy ideas. Everything he said may well be right on. That our finite resources will become very scarce and expensive is logical. That the growth of China and India is contributing dramatically to that problem makes plenty of sense; I just wish that he had presented his concerns with more data to allow the reader to judge the accuracy of his scenarios.
I read the last section of the book, titled “Investments for a Chaotic World,” with great interest, and I felt that he did this section very well. Here, Leeb presents his investment recommendations (gold being his top choice). They seem well thought out, and he presents some very specific choices , including specific stocks, ETFs, and commodities.
I found the book interesting and easy to read. If you’re looking for investment ideas with respect to resource shortages, I recommend the book. Overall, however, I’m only giving the book two stars because of the lack of support in his presentation. For someone to take any of his investment recommendations based on only the issues as presented in the book would take a huge leap of faith.
Rick McCallister
July 16, 2009
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson
Penguin Press HC
Rating 4 out of 5 stars
Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
I don’t think it’s possible for a history book to be as compelling a read as a good novel, but this book by Niall Ferguson gets very close. I found the book hard to put down at times, as I was engrossed in his telling of different phases of our world’s financial history. What makes the book fascinating is how he looks at major world events through a financial lens, explains how financial changes, innovation, and even stagnation contributed to, or sometimes were the major causes of, worldwide social and political developments.
A perfect example is how John Law – a convicted murderer, professional gambler, and possible spy – convinced the French to reform its finances in extreme ways. Eventually, Law took control of the entire French economy – and destroyed it. Hearing how he did it was interesting enough, but the destruction was so severe that France never recovered. Ferguson believes that Law’s actions may have led indirectly to the French Revolution.
While he mentions earlier periods, details fail to really emerge until the 14th century, and even then most of the book focuses on the 19th century and onward. This makes sense because this is when more financial innovation began. The book spends more time on the last 50 years, maybe even the last 20, than any other period. Which brings up one of the reasons I gave this book only 4 stars – the book was apparently written to accompany a TV series, and after reading it you will notice its disjointed nature. There are gaps and some of the chapters are somewhat oddly constructed. Knowing that the book was to accompany a series of TV shows indicates why Ferguson wrote it that way; unfortunately, doing so somewhat reduces the quality of the book.
The only other complaint I have is with the afterword, which Ferguson titled “The Descent of Money,” a play on Darwin’s “Descent of Man.” The entire afterword tries to draw parallels between biological evolution and the evolution of the world’s financial system. It’s an interesting analogy, but Ferguson pushes it too far and spends too much time trying to explain why they are similar but not the same.
In the end, that’s a minor complaint. I highly recommend the book, and I believe that anyone with an interest in history – financial or not – will enjoy the book immensely. The book is targeted at the layman, and it is a fun and easy read for someone with no financial background at all. The financial professional shouldn’t shy away from this book either, as it is one of those books that everyone can learn from.
Rick McCallister
July 8, 2009
A New History of the Great Depression
Amity Shlaes
2007 HarperCollins Publisher
Rating 4 out of 5 stars
Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg.
Rather than using figures and charts, Amity Shlaes tells the story of the Great Depression by following some of the greatest political figures of the period. The only downside to the book is that her rapid-fire name-throwing at the reader can be difficult to follow. Nonetheless, the book is a fascinating look at the politics of the Great Depression and how they impacted the country.
The Great Depression isn’t a terribly good parallel to today, but it’s somewhat scary to see that some of the mistakes made then are being made, or at least are being talked about, today. Shlaes emphasizes how the government’s rally against business and against the wealthy, and its takeover of certain private functions, drove the country into a deeper and much longer depression than may have been otherwise. She quotes FDR in 1931 saying that people “look to us for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of the national wealth.” Their understanding of economics was not as great as it is today; let’s hope that the practice of economics has improved as well.
Shlaes doesn’t state much of her opinion in the book, but she is well known as a conservative economic commentator and this is apparent throughout the text. I found the book reasonably balanced, but believe that she chooses quotes and stories that back the positions she believes in. She often states as fact the thoughts and feelings of the figure that she’s discussing—one can only hope that she’s accurate. The way she quotes and tells the vignettes, however, is what makes the book fascinating. One quote was from Will Rogers upon the first election of FDR: “The whole country is with him… If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘well we at least got a fire started anyhow.’” Sounds a lot like the national feeling when Obama was elected (granted, FDR had a much higher percentage of the vote than Obama did), and we now see some of the biggest changes in government now since FDR swept into office.
If you’re interested in economics, the Great Depression, or in our current economic condition, I recommend the book. It’s a different look at the Depression period, fun to read, and impossible not to learn something new.
Rick McCallister
June 27, 2009
Wm. Paul Young
2007 Windblown Media
Rating 5 out of 5 stars
This book has nothing to do with finance. As such, I’m not going to discuss the book here, except to say that it was an incredible book. The first few chapters are tough, because they involve the death of a little girl, but once you make it past that it part, the story takes on a different tone. The book is about the nature of God and our relationship with him. Read it, it could be life changing.
Rick McCallister
June 11, 2009
 About Us
|