All-inclusive yet jargon-free and easy-to-navigate investment advice.
An encyclopedic financial reference offers tips for the common investor.
Authoritative information about stocks, bonds, and other investments is not necessarily hard to come by. But it is challenging to find in-depth details about virtually every investment vehicle in one place. This third paperback edition is exhaustive, containing current material about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other investments, including life insurance, annuities, unit trusts, and commodities. That is merely the contents of Section I; Section II covers IRAs, 401(k)s, employee stock options, rental real estate, and more, including a review of such areas as gift and estate taxes, living trusts, and wills. There are several aspects of the book that make it valuable, not the least of which is the credentialed author. As an “Enrolled Agent,” a designation licensed directly by the Internal Revenue Service, and someone who has 40 years of experience with tax returns and audits, Chute is uniquely qualified. The 400-plus pages are intelligently organized into two sections (“Investments” and “Life Planning”) and seven parts (“Equities,” “Bonds,” “Mutual Funds,” “Other Investments,” “Financial Planning,” “Death & Taxes,” and “Other Important Financial Considerations”). Just as helpful is the organizational scheme employed for investments; for each type, the author includes a clear, nontechnical description followed by short but illuminating discussions of specific areas: Planning Tips, Taxes, Legal Compliance, Successful Strategies, and Pros and Cons. To these, he adds a section that may represent what sets this book apart from similar reference works: “Horror Stories.” These anecdotes, mostly of a buyer beware nature, are sometimes sad, sometimes amusing, and always engaging. Whether it’s about a “Reckless Internet Trader,” a fraudulent real estate deal, the hidden risks of high-yield mutual funds, or securities fraud, Chute’s tales are cautionary, enlightening, and entertaining. In addition, he provides helpful information, such as bond ratings, and financial examples along the way. The book’s material has been updated to account for the most recent tax act, which went into effect in 2018. While the appendices of stock and bond certificate photographs are only mildly intriguing, a “Glossary of Investment Terms” is quite useful.
All-inclusive yet jargon-free and easy-to-navigate investment advice. (appendices, glossary)Pub Date: June 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73288-553-0
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.
A book-length assertion that capitalism’s woes can be traced to government interventionism.
Sharma, an investments manager, financial journalist, and author of The 10 Rules of Successful Nations, The Rise and Fall of Nations, and other books, opens with the case of his native India. The author argues that it should be in a better position in the global marketplace, possessing an entrepreneurial culture and endless human capital. The culprit was “India’s lingering attachment to a state that overpromises and under-delivers,” one that privileged social welfare over infrastructure development. Much the same is true in the U.S., where today “President Joe Biden is promising to fix the crises of capitalism by enlarging a government that never shrank.” Refreshingly, Sharma places just as much blame on Ronald Reagan for the swollen state that introduced distortions into the market. Moreover, “flaws that economists blame on ‘market failures,’ including wealth inequality and inordinate corporate power, often flow more from government excesses.” One distortion is the government’s bloated debt, as it continues to fund itself by borrowing in order to pay for “the perennial deficit.” As any household budget manager would tell you, debt is ultimately unsustainable. Wealth concentration is another outcome of government tinkering that has, whether by design or not, concentrated wealth into the hands of a very small number of people, “a critical symptom of capitalism gone wrong, both inefficient and grossly unfair.” Perhaps surprisingly, Sharma notes that in quasi-socialist economies such as the Scandinavian nations, such interventions are fewer and shallower, while autocratic command economies are doomed to fail. “[T]oday every large developed country is a full-fledged democracy,” he writes, and the more freedom the better—but that freedom, he argues, is undermined by the U.S. government, which has accrued “the widest budget deficit in the developed world.”
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781668008263
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to...
A French academic serves up a long, rigorous critique, dense with historical data, of American-style predatory capitalism—and offers remedies that Karl Marx might applaud.
Economist Piketty considers capital, in the monetary sense, from the vantage of what he considers the capital of the world, namely Paris; at times, his discussions of how capital works, and especially public capital, befit Locke-ian France and not Hobbesian America, a source of some controversy in the wide discussion surrounding his book. At heart, though, his argument turns on well-founded economic principles, notably r > g, meaning that the “rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy,” in Piketty’s gloss. It logically follows that when such conditions prevail, then wealth will accumulate in a few hands faster than it can be broadly distributed. By the author’s reckoning, the United States is one of the leading nations in the “high inequality” camp, though it was not always so. In the colonial era, Piketty likens the inequality quotient in New England to be about that of Scandinavia today, with few abject poor and few mega-rich. The difference is that the rich now—who are mostly the “supermanagers” of business rather than the “superstars” of sports and entertainment—have surrounded themselves with political shields that keep them safe from the specter of paying more in taxes and adding to the fund of public wealth. The author’s data is unassailable. His policy recommendations are considerably more controversial, including his call for a global tax on wealth. From start to finish, the discussion is written in plainspoken prose that, though punctuated by formulas, also draws on a wide range of cultural references.
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high—and is only bound to grow worse.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-43000-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
