Told with wry humor and an insider’s view: one can’t help but wonder how these wildcatters occupied themselves before 1994.
All about Internet stock traders—those weirdo workaholics who make money, lose money, perpetuate scams, uncover scams, spend hours sending endless (often pointless) e-mails, live at their keyboards, and never seem to make enough to retire and get out of the business.
Wall Street Journal reporter Emshwiller profiles some of the major players and their legions of followers in this new cyber-reality. Tokyo Joe, a Korean restaurateur, runs an online investment club (the “Societe Anonyme”) and peppers his e-mails with stories of drunken adventures at Manhattan strip clubs. The Georgia Bard, a south Georgia poet with five self-published volumes, is a skilled practitioner of the “pump and dump” (which Emshwiller defines as the “art of convincing others that a stock is a great investment and then selling your shares when fools start to buy”). At the opposite end of the spectrum are the “short-sellers,” who profit from a fall in stock price. Anthony @ EQuity, a renowned short-seller, specializes in distributing negative material on particular stocks in the hopes of driving the prices down. In order to protect himself from angry investors who are left stuck with stocks he “shorted,” Anthony lives with a German-trained killer guard dog and carries a .40 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. Through it all, the suits at the Securities and Exchange Commission, who regulate the markets valiantly, struggle against the odds to keep up with the new developments, stymied in part by the general lack of interest in white-collar crime and in part by their own ignorance of this new world. Specially trained volunteers (called the “cyberforce”) help Federal agents keep abreast of suspicious occurrences in trading chat rooms.
Told with wry humor and an insider’s view: one can’t help but wonder how these wildcatters occupied themselves before 1994.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019620-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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