A helpful analysis for anyone who wants to know how the world got into the present financial mess, which issues need to be...
Will the rules of international finance be replaced; if so, what will be the terms? Economist columnist Coggan (Guide to Hedge Funds, 2008, etc.) tackles these questions and others in this comprehensive treatment of money and debt.
As an award-winning financial journalist, the author writes for the layperson, refusing to shelter behind the jargon of the dismal profession. Further, he doesn’t claim to know with certainty how the current crisis will play out. Coggan states forthrightly that the confusing mess in which we currently find ourselves—initiated in 2007-08 by subprime mortgages—is not just another upheaval in American finance but the end of an era, a major turning point. He does not think there can be a return to the status quo because the promises to pay made in earlier times cannot be honored. The author situates his conclusion in a discussion of the longer-run history of booms and busts of monetary systems, and their related structures of indebtedness. The extremes in this series included phases associated with the word “bubble”—e.g., the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles—and the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany. The rapid expansion of paper credit secured only on promises to pay from the proceeds of anticipated future growth caused crises when they outran the possibilities of growth. As a result, leaders reacted with draconian austerity to rebalance financial excess, often with gold-based monetary systems. Unfortunately, the United States has fallen from its once-lofty perch. “The US,” writes the author, “so long the dominant power, is watching nervously in its rear-view mirror as China catches up. In short, the confidence needed to borrow and lend is diminishing.”
A helpful analysis for anyone who wants to know how the world got into the present financial mess, which issues need to be addressed and what the consequences might be.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61039-126-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Poignant and funny.
A middle-class couple in “car-honking, no-YOU-shut-up Brooklyn” embarks on a three-year mission to seek the permanence of home ownership.
Journalist Williams loved her Carroll Gardens rental, but felt pressured as homeowning friends with appreciating equity ridiculed those who didn’t invest in real estate, asking, “What will it cost six months from now?” With limited savings for a down payment, the author and her husband desperately started looking for houses in Brooklyn, but in their price range found only dilapidated, termite-ridden buildings near highways and unsafe neighborhoods. Williams bitingly describes the search, reliving the hysteria at the height of the 2003–06 real-estate bubble: “Open houses are crowded and competitive, with brokers entertaining multiple suitors like Scarlett O’Hara at a party.” Without much of a plot engine to propel a repetitive, mostly unfulfilling search, the author opts for plumbing the psychological depths of her emotional history, explaining her tenacious need for a house and security in confessional, tell-all prose. Abandoned by her husband when she was six-months pregnant, Williams’ reluctant mother is a chronic worrier and inappropriate confider who says things like, “You have no idea how incredible it is to have grandchildren…It’s so different than what you feel for your own child.” The author shows New York rapidly becoming affordable only for the extremely rich, while the middle-class gets squeezed out to the suburbs. Along the way, she patiently explains such real-estate idioms as staging, no-doc mortgages (“a lending version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ ”) and interest-only loans. Although the author’s mantra was to go for what you want, no matter how unobtainable it seemed, eventually she compromised and settled for a lower-priced home in Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, close to the Cloisters and a beautiful park.
Poignant and funny.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5708-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The occasional distractions of pop-business cheerleading notwithstanding, if the book evokes a few creative ideas, it will...
Why think outside the box? Write business consultants Coyne and Coyne, “the key is to find just the right box in which to think.”
Readers may not have known that a famed Broadway producer, responsible for such hits as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, was also the father of the corn maze, an idea whose time, it seems, had come when he hit on it back in the ’90s. Corn mazes are now a big draw in some parts of the country, though the authors must be using faulty stats to set the number of visitors at twice that of the Grand Canyon. Why couldn’t we think of that contribution to American civilization? We can, write the authors—it’s mostly a matter of learning how to ask lots of questions that might generate the desired answer, which presumably is to hit it rich, in the manner of the “Z-1-4” (“zero to $1 billion within 4 years”) businesses they profile here. Enter “Brainsteering,” a gimmicky but, at least on the face, effective method for “consistently generating breakthrough ideas.” It would steal the authors’ thunder to describe this method too closely, but let’s take, for instance, their thoroughly useful series of questions meant to help pick out a welcome gift for the person who may have everything: “What was their favorite toy, hobby, or activity during the period of their life on which they look back most fondly?” “What event or accomplishment in their life are they most proud of”? The authors pepper their narrative with such idea-sparkers, with an appendix that is worth the cover price, and introduce acronym-tagged concepts that seem as if they ought to bear fruit, as with the notion of a “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive” system of investigation.
The occasional distractions of pop-business cheerleading notwithstanding, if the book evokes a few creative ideas, it will have done good service.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-200619-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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