A review of The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). One of the freshest and most important contributions in many years to the public discourse about the future of the United States.
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Michael Lewis has been getting a beating lately by just about everyone who mentions his name in the news. His latest book, Going Infinite, presents a balanced picture of the failed cryptocurrency trader Sam Bankman-Fried. Some imply the book is essentially a whitewash. But just about everyone else...
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A review of The Fear Index, by Robert Harris. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Set in Geneva, this taut thriller takes the reader into the world of a brilliant American scientist, Dr. Alexander Hoffman, who has developed mathetical formulas that make billions in profits for his hedge fund.
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As you may recall, a Wall Street investment advisor named Bernard Madoff was arrested in December 2008 for having operated the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Prosecutors estimated the fraud amounted to $64.8 billion, the sum of the accounts of his 4,800 clients. As of 2020, the account-holders...
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When I first became aware of the stock market in 1960, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 679. By the beginning of 2022, the index had topped 36,000. Even discounting inflation, today’s Dow Jones average is five and a half times as high as it was just over 60 years ago. Of course,...
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World War I French statesman Georges Clemenceau is said to have proclaimed that “War is too important to be left to the generals.” He never said exactly that, but close enough. Well, I’m convinced that money is too important to leave to bankers and economists. I recognize that...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Most of us Americans are taught in school that the stock market crash on Wall Street caused the Great Depression. Beginning on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, we’re told, the Depression didn’t properly end in the United States until the mobilization...
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Following Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail and arriving on bookshelves the same month as Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, Vanity Fair writer Vicky Ward faced an uphill slog with the publication of The Devil’s Casino. Thousands of readers no doubt assumed the book was one more of...
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Today, many Americans puzzle over why the Great Recession happened. Amazon lists more than 1,000 books on the subject. But readers today might benefit from taking a longer view. Because, as Frederick Lewis Allen told the tale in The Lords of Creation nearly ninety years ago, the conditions that...
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The Industrial Revolution came late to the United States, but when it started in earnest following the Civil War its impact on American society was nothing short of revolutionary. Suddenly, an institution called the corporation assumed an ever-greater role in the life of the American people. Its...
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A decade after the onset of the Great Recession, economists, financiers, historians, and politicians still debate its causes. It’s widely agreed that the recession was triggered by the massive Wall Street crash of 2008 and that it constituted the greatest threat to the stability of the world...
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Fifty-five years ago I became a speculator in New York City. Which means that what did helps explain what’s wrong on Wall Street. I was suffering through graduate school at Columbia University at the time and found it much more enjoyable to watch the ticker tape in a broker’s office rather...
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For decades, economic scholars have commented on the dangers inherent in the growing concentration of wealth in Western society. Though misleadingly referred to as “income inequality” in the new media, this critically important topic actively entered public debate in 2011 with Occupy...
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If you want to understand the depth of corruption that prevails on Wall Street, a good place to start is New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar’s admirable new book, Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street. A loathsome...
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The unexpected emergence of Donald Trump as a major-party candidate for the White House has triggered a great deal of punditry about how the Republican Party managed to put forward such a bigoted and ignorant champion. Speculation has swirled around the nature of the political forces he...
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One of the conspiracy theories popular on the Far Right is that Franklin D. Roosevelt engineered the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to ensnare the US in World War II. Like so many Right-Wing fantasies, this story is nearly 180 degrees distant from the truth. (OK, many Left-Wing fantasies are,...
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When we conjure up images of our greatest American Presidents, a handful of names invariably comes up: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, of course; Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, too; perhaps Theodore Roosevelt as well. Today many of us would add one or more from among those who...
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Hope King ran her review of Chaos Monkeys on CNN Money under the title “New book compares Facebook’s culture to fascism but fails to prove it.” The subtitle is equally revealing, concluding that the book “reads like four year’s worth of Medium posts from a scorned...
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Recent events have made us all aware that police officers sometimes act outside the law, not just in fiction but in reality. But what about their bosses and their bosses’ bosses? And the judges, attorneys general, and Justice Department officials who are supposed to oversee the...
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Blame for the widening gap between rich and poor and America is typically laid at the feet of the Republican Party, chiefly through the actions of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Without question, these two men, and their right-wing collaborators in Congress, bear a lot of...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.