A lively contribution to an ongoing debate that features the unforeseen as much as the deliberate.
CNBC business reporter Kelly (Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Sterns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street, 2009) takes on the world of commodity traders and the controversies swirling around it.
The author profiles a world in which large-scale bets on market volatility and careful calculation of hedged positions are often upset by unexpected developments: geopolitical or other kinds of crisis, human overconfidence, bad luck, etc. Kelly introduces many world-class market movers, including Marc Rich, the longtime fugitive and former owner of trading company Glencore, and Gary Cohn, the president and COO of Goldman Sachs, which was investigated for manipulating supplies of aluminum. The dizzying rise of oil prices in the late 2000s and their equally precipitous slide provides a frame in which Kelly takes up the question of whether commodity trading is speculative and/or beneficial. Traders like London hedge fund operator Pierre Andurand move billions of dollars with their intuitive bets and lead excessively lavish lifestyles. The author provides insight into the various levels of the world of commodities, from raw materials production to futures contracts and the derivatives based on them. Kelly chronicles efforts to regulate these markets—especially during Gary Gensler's tenure at the Commodity Futures Trade Commission—and she also details the depths of continuing opposition. Especially intriguing is the underlying narrative regarding the persistence of the chaotic feedback from the combined effects of disparate individuals, markets and events. “A true knack for wagering on the price vicissitudes of crude, copper, or cotton remain[s] a profitable skill in almost any environment—especially when only a handful of individuals in the world [can] really do it well and on a large scale.”
A lively contribution to an ongoing debate that features the unforeseen as much as the deliberate.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59184-546-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A provocative look at a rising industry that may soon change the nature of the world’s too-busy roadways.
Tired of paying hefty insurance bills and parking fines? A self-driving car may be the flying car of our near-future dreams, as this all-for-it account makes clear.
Given that Burns is a former General Motors executive with responsibility for R&D, as well as an adviser to Waymo (formerly Google’s Self-Driving Car Project), it stands to reason that he’d be a fan of the autonomous car. Some of this book is the usual by-the-numbers, back-slapping, you-are-there reporting from the front lines of the lab and test track, as when the author writes of one robotics experimenter, “Whittaker was another big guy, an inch or two taller than Urmson at about six-foot-three, with shoulders that look like they’d brush the sides of interior door openings.” The pro forma stuff notwithstanding, though, Burns and co-author Shulgan provide a series of winning arguments for why we should be wanting to see self-driving cars on the road. Despite well-publicized failings, for instance, they will lead to a substantial decrease in accidents and fatalities—and given that road fatalities are climbing after years of steady decline, that makes a good starter. Burns also notes that automobile ownership is inherently inefficient; at most, the average driver uses a car for 5 percent of a waking day, and “when we do drive these vehicles, they’re terribly inefficient,” with only about a third of the chemical energy used to drive them translating into kinetic energy. The author argues that the business of motorized transport is the most disruptable on the landscape, and while the writing is too often like traveling down a potholed road, the reasoning is sound, and the thought of not having to look for an empty parking space seems payoff aplenty for entertaining this modest proposal.
A provocative look at a rising industry that may soon change the nature of the world’s too-busy roadways.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266112-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
An illuminating if impressionistic appreciation of the Overseas Chinese, mainland ÇmigrÇs who down through the ages have become an economic force throughout Southeast Asia and beyondnotably, on North America's West Coast. Historian Seagrave (Dragon Lady, 1992, etc.) traces the emergence of these industrious expatriates back to the 11th century b.c. when the long-lived but repressive, puritanic, and anti- business Chou dynasty first drove the country's merchant class from the capital cities of the north. Forced to resettle in the less civilized regions of the Middle Kingdom's southern coast, the internal exiles began venturing offshore. In time, they established commercial beachheads that have survived civil strife, colonialism, world wars, and xenophobia in every country of the Pacific Basin save Japan and Korea. In round numbers, the 55 million Overseas Chinese (including those in Hong Kong and Taiwan) have a GNP estimated at $450 billion per annum, and their liquid assets probably top $2 trillion. In the course of his anecdotal narrative, the author makes a number of intriguing points about the prospering, nepotistic Overseas Chinese (for whom networking is a way of life). By way of example, a significant portion of their money has been (and continues to be) earned in the drug trade and other of the world's older professions. Nor do they shy away from bribery, partnerships with public officials, or other forms of corruption long outlawed in Western marketplaces. By Seagrave's convincing account, moreover, the loyalties of these secretive and disciplined DPs are essentially parochial, i.e., to ancestral villages and dialect communities rather than to the Chinese government. In the author's informed opinion, this pragmatic lack of allegiance could keep them from returning to the mainland in any great numbers regardless of what the future holds for the Communist regime still clinging to power in Beijing. A savvy observer's episodic briefing on an ethnic group that bears watching in a world economy no longer constrained by sociopolitical frontiers.
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14011-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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