There’s much for the alarmist here but food for thought for the calm investor, too.
Can owning a Chagall keep the wolf from the door? In a time of a predatory capitalism that is beginning to feed on itself, that and a knowledge of complexity theory might get you more than a cup of coffee.
Granted, financial consultant Rickards (The New Case for Gold, 2016, etc.) has been crying Ragnarök for a long time. Even so, the subtitle of this latest may be a touch more breathless than the contents really call for. Never mind that the author does indeed urge on his readers the thesis that the elite, whoever they may be—George Soros, to be sure, but Christopher Dodd?—have three things on their agenda: “world money, world taxation, and world order.” The conspiracy theory stuff never goes away, but when Rickards’ text settles down into its nerdier tropes, it gets interesting, if a little daunting. The author argues that the complex global financial system is now largely immune to analysis by the static tools of classical economics; “complex systems,” he rightly remarks, “behave in a completely different manner from equilibrium systems.” Number crunching begins to look like a secondary tool to the wind-reading skills of psychological forecasting: who’s going to freak out first, and when? Examining such things as Bayesian probability (the “theorem is messy, but it’s still better than nothing”), scaling metrics, and density functions, Rickards makes a good case to get smarter to how people actually think, which is seldom logical and seldom smart. He concludes, in the more sober and less conspiracy-minded portion of this double-edged book, with a view of what a well-structured, wealth-preserving portfolio might look like in a time when wealth creation is ebbing but wealth extraction—from your pocket, that is—is rising. Among its components are bonds and land, of course, but also, not surprisingly, “physical gold and silver…(coins and bars, no numismatics)” and, more surprisingly, museum-quality fine art.
There’s much for the alarmist here but food for thought for the calm investor, too.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59184-808-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
A weird mixture of personal narrative and straightforward advice.
A 1951 Princeton thesis and 25 lectures from the founder of the Vanguard Mutual Funds.
Bogle illustrates the tenets of his successful investing career in this collection, the first in the Great Ideas in Finance series. Three basic rules guide his work. First, investors should be aware of the costs of investing: since mutual funds charge an annual management fee that ranges from one percent of assets to over two percent, the difference of a percentage point compounded over many years adds up to a lot of money. Second, investors must be willing to invest for the long term: commissions on multiple trades and taxes on short-term gains eat away at profits. Third, investors should buy index funds (like Vanguard): index funds buy stocks in the same proportion as the S&P 500 or the Wilshire 500 indices and, with America growing perpetually, index funds will capture this increase. Index funds also have lower costs because of less required management and less trading. This advice—buy index funds, invest for the long term, and watch costs—is included in 24 of the 25 lectures. The one exception discusses organ donation: Bogle, the recipient of a heart transplant in 1995, writes of his experience and then tells the story of Nicholas Evans. A seven-year-old American boy, Evans died in Italy in 1995, and his family donated seven of his organs to Italian children—a story of American kindness in a dark hour. And Bogle’s college thesis (“The Economic Role of the Investment Company”), while it may have been cutting-edge in 1951, is rather quaint today.
A weird mixture of personal narrative and straightforward advice.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-07-136438-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
Though this book will probably tell you more than you really want or need to know about the malpractices and deficiencies of...
An angry, disturbing look at American labor unions that examines the reasons they have so often failed their members and society generally.
Why have America’s unions lost so many members, not kept labor standards from declining and been unable to exercise real political influence in recent decades? Fitch, himself a union member, has a one-word answer: corruption. In great, occasionally numbing detail, he chronicles key events and characters that have shaped American unions from the end of the 19th century to the present. It’s a chronicle rife with bribery, theft, violence and betrayal, often of union members by union officials. Fitch focuses not only on criminal corruption but on nepotism and favoritism that help keep self-serving, incompetent union officials in power and foster feudal-like organizations in which sub-bosses owe their primary allegiance to the higher-ups. Such organizational structures, according to Fitch, have kept American unions inward-looking and ineffective when it comes to getting the kind of benefits available to all workers, union and non-union, one finds in Western Europe, where a more inclusive political unionism prevails. In his critique, Fitch finds no heroes. He knocks labor icons like Ron Carey and Andy Stern; finds serious fault with public as well as private unions; trashes would-be socialist reformers as ineffectual when not actually corrupted by the institutions they seek to reform; and mocks leftist intellectuals he believes are blinkered when it comes to the realities of American union behavior.
Though this book will probably tell you more than you really want or need to know about the malpractices and deficiencies of specific union locals, it boasts a slew of keen insights and stands as an important read for anyone who cares about the future of organized labor in America.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-891620-72-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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