An exposé that might lead readers to stash their savings under a mattress.
A relentless exposé of the 200-year-old banking enterprise.
During the early decades of the United States, after the colonies broke away from the British, the Founding Fathers engaged in lengthy, heated debates about the wisdom of creating a central bank under the aegis of the government. One of the entities that eventually emerged from these debates was what we call Citibank or Citigroup. Freeman, assistant editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, who used to be investor advocate at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and McKinley, a consultant and attorney, maintain that despite its facade of solidity for two centuries, the bank has experienced repeated massive failures only to be rescued each time by wealthy private investors and/or the federal government. Before the phrase “too big to fail” became all-too-familiar in the 2000s, it described a widespread perception within the circles of the wealthy during the 19th and 20th centuries. Moving the story along, the authors salt the narrative with colorful characters who have controlled the institution from top to bottom—e.g., Moses Taylor during the Civil War era, Frank Vanderlip before and during World War I, Charles Mitchell during the Great Depression, Walter Wriston (1967-1984), and a cast of miscreants who contributed to the 2008 financial crash. Throughout the book, the authors also profile members of Congress, Federal Reserve Bank governors, and others outside Citi. Unfortunately for millions of investors, even the smart, well-intentioned regulators turned out to be ineffectual at ameliorating the widespread chaos caused by Citi and similar financial institutions. The boom-and-bust cycles chronicled by Freeman and McKinley accumulate in chapter after chapter until it seems that Citi executives and government regulators were little more than a procession of villains. Readers may feel hard-pressed to identify even one hero in the book.
An exposé that might lead readers to stash their savings under a mattress.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266987-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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