"Lowenstein doubts the Federal Reserve Act could be passed in today's volatile political climate, but he provides an unusually lucid history of our nation's central bank."
"A well-delineated chronicle likely to cause readers to ask who put the clowns in charge of the circus, and why aren't they confined to prison cells."
A veteran financial/business journalist examines the past three years of economic collapse, chronicling actions and inactions from dozens of villains and a few heroes.
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"A chilling anatomy of one bad decision followed by another—and another."
Lowenstein (Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing, 2004, etc.) probes a dangerous miscalculation made by American private and public enterprise: laying off responsibility for workers' pensions and retirement health benefits on some unspecified future.
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"Are there any lessons to be drawn? Yes, many. But as long as the culture 'tolerates lying, even in seemingly marginal ways,' Lowenstein suggests, the great humbling of 2002 may foretoken worse to come."
A wide-ranging examination of the stock-market boom of the 1990s and its resounding crash.
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"With a lucid style and a sense of humor and amusement, Lowenstein guides us through the thickets of high finance in the computer age."
An entertaining and informative history of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the hedge fund whose 1998 collapse rattled the financial markets.
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A blue-chip biography that not only brings Warren Edward Buffett to vivid life but also pays detailed tribute to the integrity, patience, and acumen that have made the low-key Nebraskan arguably the greatest investor ever. While Wall Street Journal correspondent Lowenstein was unable to secure Buffett's cooperation, the Midas-touch money manager did not actively oppose the project. Accordingly, the author was able to produce a well-rounded portrait of Buffett with help from his family, friends, and colleagues, as well as the public record. A son of the heartland (and a US congressman who represented a staunchly Republican district in Omaha), the future financier was precociously numerate and interested in the stock market from an early age. At Columbia University's graduate school of business, he studied under Benjamin Graham, an idol whose securities-analysis doctrines remain valid in a global-investment arena where professionals have a range of theories that owe more to computer assistance than common sense. Back in his hometown, Buffett (who turns 65 this year) employed Graham's bedrock principles of value to amass small fortunes for himself and those with enough faith to commit to his private partnerships. Lowenstein provides a coherent account of how Buffett went on to make his current fiefdom (Berkshire Hathaway) the most expensive equity on the New York Stock Exchange, thanks to sizable, shrewdly timed positions in American Express, Capital Cities/ABC, Coca-Cola, and other immensely rewarding issues. Covered as well are Buffett's precious few errors, e.g., a substantive stake in scandal-ridden Salomon Brothers. Nor does the author shy away from Buffett's nontraditional stylenotable, among other matters, for a live-in mistress and cordial relations with an earth-mother wife from whom he is separated but not divorced. An engrossing, diligently documented audit of a billionaire who gained great wealth the old-fashioned way, i.e., by earning it. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
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