Plodding

Some interesting historical perspectives but style generally ponderous, reiterative and attention to"calibrating" the equivalent massive depreciations into current fiscal terms distracting. Regret I gave up reading it half way through.

A superfreak buy

Who does sell better services for less money - pimp or realtor? (it seems that a pimp provides higher income and more security and takes lower margin than a realtor)<br /><br />What tehcnological invention was the"environmental savior" in 1900's? (it was the car [+the electromobile] - because"a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people's basements" back then in NYC and other big cities)<br /><br />..and a lot more insights, absolutely worth of buying :)

at best, fatally flawed

I'll be giving my copy away. Not selling it; giving it away.<br /><br />If you've read it, then that should give you some idea of how I feel about it. I don't value it enough to keep it, for sure.<br /><br />How do I get here? Well, I start by seeing an argument which the authors apply effectively on one page, entirely ignored on another, where it would have a major impact (the section on Death Row, if you've read it). So, it's not rigorous.<br /><br />That lack of rigour, coupled with the authors' systematic and irritating pumping of economics as a wonderful discipline with all sorts of stuff to offer the world... is that really the best they can do?<br /><br />I could go on, but I don't think the book is important enough to justify the time and effort.<br /><br />The same applies to its sequel, except that that is less honest.

I'm short your house

An exceptionally readable account of the small group of US hedge fund managers who placed massive bets against the US housing market. <br /><br />I started the book wanting to hate these guys but Michael Lewis paints a pretty sympathetic picture of these small group of mavericks who were warning against the overheating of the US housing market for several years before the balloon went up. The real villans of the book are the big firms - Goldman Sachs etc - who have somehow escaped largely unscathed. <br /><br />Lewis is very well connected and was able to interview many of the key players and weave these into a gripping story, a page turning financial thriller.<br /><br />And"I'm short your house"? That's how one trader (who was betting against the housing market)ended a furious row with another trader who thought the goods times would keep on rolling.

Must HAVE to pass CSCS test

I was generally in impressed with amazon of the handling for my order for this book. This is why<br /><br />1.) I recieved the book one day Prior to estimated delivery date which is tomorrow.<br />2.) The packaging was good in the cardboard sort of box.<br />3.) The descriptiom of the book is what new which i got it was in best condition not in battered or anything like that.<br /><br />For the book.<br />1.) It's a must have for the cscs test it properly detailed it covers alot 26 modules.<br />2.) It's very straight forward read and questions.<br />3.) There is also contains heating,ventilating,air conditioning and refrigeration test questions and many more.<br /><br />I hope my review was helpful

Good but is it accurate

When I read this book I thought, wow pretty interesting, but then on reflection, I thought well the author has been very pleasent to everyone and no one was really portrayed in a bad light - which I now presume is to enable him to get interviews from people in the future..... I later read The Big Short and thought, like Michael Lewis says - if a one eyed asperger doctor can predict this event coming then surely the CEO's of those massive banks should have been able....which made me think this was simply a bit worthless, other than to portray those poor rich bankers in a sort of 'hey we tried to save the world' kind of way... Read it if it is your thing but remember I think the author had alterior motives when he wrote it

Rich Dad Poor Dad

I absolutely love this book. Robert Kiyosaki put makes the reader realises that most of us have the poor man's mentality, we have been conditioned to work hard and pay taxes. Kiyosaki tells us how the rich think and how to think like a rich person. He has also created a board game called Cashflow which is excellent, my kids love it and can already wipe the floor with me. In order to win the game you have to think like a rich person to get out of the 'ratrace' into the 'fastlane'. Hopefully the skills learnt in this game will translate to their thinking in real life.

Great book

<br />This is the best book you can buy as a beginner this will give you the knowledge you need to start off <br /><br />I think a second book would be a decent idea where more can be said on picking and analysis but great book <br /><br />

Book Review

A very thought provoking script with informative text on the current crisis in finance being explained.<br />A good read.

Warren Buffett's investment strategy.

<br />In this book, you won't find any information with regards to getting rich quick. Instead, you'll find solid long-term advice on growing your portfolio in a conservative manner, and this involves a significant level of security and balance sheet analysis.<br /><br />Briefly, it means avoiding the tech sector and other areas of high risk, instead focusing on companies with low P/E ratios, solid and transparent balance sheets, and consistent results. Additionally is advised that if you don't have the time to do due diligence, investing in index-based funds can be an easy long-term strategy, as these often outperform even very good mutual fund managers.<br /><br />The classic book is coupled with a more modern commentary on the dot-com implosion. Although it's entertaining to re-live these vivid days, I'm not sure it adds all that much value to the overall book, and possibly could have been left entirely out.<br /><br />

Interesting ideas shared in a conversational fashion

The fact that the two authors are both distinguished scientists at first put me off this book. I suspected that it would be weighty and academic. I'm glad I perservered with the book though. The authors collect lots of evidence that human beings are rather flawed. We don't make very good decisions (e.g. we smoke, we overeat, we don't save enough money etc) but can be guided by 'nudges'. A clever and entertaining book.

Empirical analysis of previous debt crises through 8 centuries.

<br />It's a fairly dry read, though not overly technical. With the exception of the Great Depression, it doesn't drill too far into any particular prior crisis, but then if it had, it would have been 30,000 pages instead of 300.<br /><br />Three types of crises are identified - external debt, domestic debt, and banking crises. Of the three, banking crises are identified to be the worst.<br /><br />Common denominators leading up to banking crises include liberalization of laws, high capital mobility, and large capital inflow. We had all of those leading up to the current crisis. It furthermore points out that the effects of banking crises include a sharp reduction in tax intake, bailouts, stimulus, and large deficits - we've also had all of those.<br /><br />Two things in particular that should make everyone take notice of this work - the authors find that typically, countries do NOT grow out of their debts, and since the wide-scale introduction of fiat currencies, inflation has been the weapon of choice in this fight. Since the average banking crisis lead to a debt increase of 86% - which is not out of line with what we can expect at the end of the current - and since we live in a society dominated by fiat currencies, should we expect inflation?<br /><br />However, all throughout the book, I just couldn't help myself thinking that this time really IS different. With the exception of the Great Depression, not once has a crisis hit with anywhere near the kind of global impact we currently experience. And since most of the issues still persist - deficits are worse than ever, banks are still in deep trouble, and tax revenue continues to drop - I can't come to any other conclusion that this crisis will be felt for a long time to come.<br /><br />Definitely worth a read.<br />

Overall, it's not that bad

At the first glance, I did believe that the experience of reading this book would not be very bad because it is just one of the numerous casual readers on economics after all. Also, I am quite a keen reader on this subject to a certain extent, so I believe I can withstand any odd approach (unless it is extraordinarily odd). <br /><br />In total, I can say the book is ordinary, well-written, well-organized, etc, but not that exciting at all, at least not as exciting as the preface has told me. I am a little bit disappointed actually. The topics covered, Ricardian rent, perfect market, efficiency, asymmetric information, etc, are quite common nowadays. Even go back in time to when this book was written, 2006, these topics are not that unusual at all. When being taken into comparison with Freakonomics, it is definitely not freak either.<br /><br />Despite the not-that-exciting content and several oversimplifications, this book remains a so-so reader that deserves reading if and only if you haven't ever studied economics or haven't studied it for long. Overall, it's not that bad, but also not that exciting.

Excellent if you are starting out..

I bought this book along with another book on derivatives - I'm a developer with little previous experience of the finance markets, but thought this author warranted the effort of my adding a review.<br /><br />I found this book really useful to get an overview of what happens in the city (and why). Now I can move on to other books which detail actual financial products with an understanding of the bigger picture.<br /><br />What I really like about this book is the fact that the examples are simple enough to grasp the concept, and that the information given in each chapter builds on previous chapters, so you can see where a concept fits in to the 'workings' of the city.<br /><br />As a developer who doesn't know the ins and outs of finance, but needs to have an overview in order to his job, this book was fantastic.

"Are you angry that the world is so unfair?"

"Are you angry that the world is so unfair?" Thus asks Niall Ferguson at the beginning of his"financial history of the world" in six chapters. Normally, the hardback is bought instead of the paperback (if only so that I can more easily insert suitable press cuttings), but this is a review (written in May 2010) of the updated 2009 paperback edition. The paperback takes a little into account of the dramatic events that took place in the world's financial markets after the 2008 hardback was published. Ferguson believes that,"today's crisis is in some measure to be explained by ignorance of financial history - and not only among ordinary people" like you and me. Ferguson writes that,"One purpose of this book ... is to offer the lay reader an introduction to finance and, in particular, to financial history." Its chapters mirror but expand upon the content of the accompanying TV series.<br /><br />In his introduction, Ferguson soon employs those witty turns of phrase that mark him out as a historian who has the power to communicate his ideas directly, although some of these phrases do border on the artificially contrived, such as"money is the root of most progress", and"the ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man".<br /><br />This is a book about and for believers in the global capitalist system. Ferguson, like Andrew Roberts and others, is a disciple of Norman Stone, an adviser of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and defender of the right. A communist, a socialist, a Buddhist, an environmentalist would probably have written a completely different book. There is no disputing the part that money has played in history, but there is an implied assumption that it has ultimately been for the good - again,"money is the root of most progress" - and that it is better in private hands. When he says at the beginning of the third chapter,"It is the company that enables thousands of individuals to pool their resources for risky, long-term projects that require the investment of vast sums of capital before profits can be realized", he seems to have forgotten that the state can do this too - and is often the only player who can do this at least risk. Indeed, there is a missing chapter in this book, an elephant that is barely noticed in the room: taxation.<br /><br />Despite Ferguson's best intentions, I found the book to be rich in history but short on explaining economic theory. For example, in the first chapter, we are told that"other things being equal, monetary expansion will merely make prices higher." We all probably know that printing money causes inflation, but we lay readers are obliged to accept this without any supporting reasons. The clever use of the money game made later in the same chapter could have been employed to good effect here too. In chapter two, he demonstrates the link between bond prices and interest rates, and between bond prices and inflation, but does not elaborate on the triangle thus created.<br /><br />And even the history can be confusing, leaving questions unanswered. For instance, if Christians were barred from charging interest, leaving the job to the Jews, what were the three Florentine houses of Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli doing lending money in the fourteenth century? Ferguson then goes on to mention the scrapping of the usury laws in Britain in 1833: what usury laws? But there was much here that I learned anew, such as the true definition of the `rentier'; and much was usefully confirmed that I instinctively knew already, such as that those who would suffer most from a French victory over Britain would be those very British rentiers who comprised such a small minority of the population:"What ended their domination was not the rise of democracy or socialism, but a fiscal and monetary catastrophe for which the European elites were themselves responsible ... the First World War." Another unanswered question, seemingly left hanging in the air, is why the British take out so much insurance compared to the rest of the world.<br /><br />There are some highly questionable views expressed. For example, were the Crusades really"as much about overcoming Europe's monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity?" (In fact, neither: recovery of the Holy Land was their prime directive.) And it is unfair to blame Germany's Weimar politicians for hyperinflation, for they had signed an armistice, not a capitulation. Reparations were not, from their point of view, inevitable. And was not Salvador Allende democratically elected to the Chilean presidency? (I'd be interested to know how the private pensions of the Chileans have fared recently.) As for the 1997 Asian financial crisis, well Ferguson takes an anti-Stiglitz and anti-Krugman line.<br /><br />As for our present problems, there is no admission of errors made in opening up credit markets in the Reagan-Thatcher years, and no appreciation expressed about the development of global finance becoming increasingly detached from societal norms. Ferguson would probably reply that the ethics of finance is not the subject of his book, but I felt that a vitally important area had been not only marginalised but left out altogether.<br /><br />But Ferguson mitigates his downside by being also playful with the reader. Again, his witticisms - how the Medici were originally"notable for low violence than for high finance", or how"in a securitized market (just like in space) no one can hear you scream" - made this reader smile rather than wince. And Ferguson finds ironic humour in the most disastrous of contexts. Thus, in a footnote in chapter four he includes some vital small print in the house insurance contracts of people living in New Orleans, small print that is designed to bamboozle by employing a double double-negative. Watching the TV series, I railed against his assertion that insurance only really began in eighteenth-century Scotland, but I am pleased to see that the book has space to show earlier forms.<br /><br />The twenty-page afterword on `The Descent of Money' is a disappointment. Ferguson waffles here in an attempt to equate financial systems with evolutionary biology. It is quite unnecessary, completely problematical (and at least admitted to be so), and, if truth be told, not very interesting. Acknowledgements, notes, and an index bring up the rear.<br /><br />

A charlatan

This twerp thinks that Richard Dawkins is a charlatan - which is proof that Taleb himself is a charlatan.<br />The rest is just pop politics, guff economics and pomposity.

Excellent!

Informative and fascinating. An essential read. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

It is all about credit default swaps

It is all about credit default swaps<br /><br />It is difficult to make financial coups exciting particularly when you know the outcome. There has been an industry in recent years highlighting business and how to make money.<br /><br />No one had heard of John Paulson and the book does not show one photograph of him so we still don't know him by sight.<br /><br />I am always interested in how people make money particularly if it is an unusual way. What could be more unusual than betting against the general trend at the time that the housing market would get better and better and by making such a bet make billions of dollars.<br /><br />It is beyond the comprehension of mere mortals that such a system exists let alone that someone would think it was a good idea.<br /><br />This is the story of such a person<br /><br />The recession started because the smart financial brains had come up with a whole new slew of products that they claimed to understand that that in the end they did not understand and sold them off as triple A rated investments.<br /><br />It is really emperor's new clothes everyone wanted to believe it was true so anyone who tried to blow the whistle was poo poohed as being wrong. John Paulson was such a person.<br /><br />To fox both the wary and the unwary the first thing you do is create a whole new vocabulary to describe things<br /><br />Calling it a second mortgage that like hocking your house but call it equity access and it sound more innocent.<br />They created structures that allowed them to take piles of risky mortgages and created shiny AAA rated investments. They had created gold from dross. They securitized all these mortgages and no one knew what they were.<br /><br />The story is about Paulson and he was a lack lustre performer but he had a mission. He encouraged his employees to eat healthy and he said if I can stay alive longer I can compound my wealth longer ."" He was joking and yet he wasn't"<br /><br />When Paulson realised what was happening he went in search of an insurance product that would pay out if the market crashed. This was very unpopular as traders like to bet that the prices will go up not down. It was regarded as unpatriotic to bet against the economy doing well.<br /><br />These financial instruments had fooled everyone that everything was OK.<br /><br />When he did this he was pilloried as people told him that there were a lot of smart people on the boards of these companies and that they would have smelt a rat if there were one. The impressive thing about Paulson was that he stuck at it against so much contrary advice.<br /><br />It would have been easy to have caved in and gone with the herd.<br /><br />Once the sub prime mortgages started to fail he was making hand over fist. He made 1.25 billion in a single morning 250 million more that George Soros made betting against the pound sterling.<br /><br />Even when things started to go wrong AIG said they could not see us losing $1 on any of these transactions.<br /><br />Money drove John Paulson but he wished to be recognised as one of the investment wizards an objective that long eluded him over the years as he toiled in obscurity in 2007 George Soros rang him. Paulson had made 12 billion at that point, He gave Soros a tutorial .<br /><br />The facts are well set out the difficulty it to make the characters live off the page as they are essentially very ordinary dull people. Nothing much to distinguish them<br /><br />Not a thrill a minute but a worthy effort and an important story to tell and for people to read who are interested in how money works.

Fun popular psychology aka behavioural economics

Ariely does a good job of writing a readable account of some popular psychology, riding the current buzz of behavioural economics. The two good aspects of the book in my opinion are the strong belief in the experimental method and the amusing examples used.<br /><br />So if you are new to the field and want a relatively easy introduction, without the need to understand complex psychological phenomena, Arieli is likely to be a good choice. The examples have been carefully chosen to cover the most common / interesting examples from everyday life and it was written primarily with an Anglo-Saxon (and within that tilt to American) audience in mind. <br /><br />I assume that few readers who are seriously interested in either behavioural economics or psychology more broadly will read Ariely for anything more than amusement value, so a four star rating is in order. For a reader looking to understand the mechanisms described in more depth, or potentially to design policies taking the principles described into account, the book is likely to fall short. In some cases Ariely does not provide sufficient detail to allow the reader to draw their own conclusions on the validity of the experiments described, in others he simplifies / does not do a thorough enough due dilligence on the cases provided (the taste example with Coke and pepsi being one case) to be able to provide the reader with a reasonable answer. While this is unlikely to detract much from the readability in general, some more academically minded readers might start doubting other cases where he provides little info as well.<br /><br />As far as writing goes, an easy 50 pages could be saved if the book did not often adopt the game show style of building the suspense before providing the relatively obvious answers - something that starts grating towards the end. <br /><br />All in all a 5/5 for using mechanisms to get as wide a readership as possible for some very sound concepts, and perhaps a 3/5 in actually adequately bringing across necessary scientific rigour or drawing conclusions, which will get readers to act differently.

Compulsory reading!

I have read hundreds of books on history and I rate this as the best I have read. This should be Book Number 1 for pupils considering taking history as a GCSE subject and for anyone interested in any era of history. I wish there was a version written for my children currently at primary school...now there's an idea...