BUYING GUIDE.
It’s that time of year when we look both ways: ahead and backward. Here are several books our editors and writers have chosen that examine how we got to where we are and how to move ahead. In business, books include "Aftershock," about the next economic bubbles to pop, "Common Sense on Mutual Funds," an updated edition of a 10-year-old investing tool, and "Broke," about measures the U.S. should take to prevent its ultimate collapse. We’ve also got a nonfiction look at the art of counterfeiting and Sue Grafton’s latest mystery, in which the past and present meet in deadly fashion.Aftershock
Protect Yourself and Profit in the Next Global Financial Meltdown
By David Wiedemer, Robert Wiedemer and Cindy Spitzer
Reviewed by Jami Makan
Here’s a grim forecast: In the next several years, America’s economy will face double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates. The stock market will probably crash, the dollar will collapse and the federal government will run out of money.
These claims might seem outlandish, but David Wiedemer, Robert Wiedemer and Cindy Spitzer believe that a series of large, interconnected bubbles are about to pop. These include the stock market and household debt, discretionary spending and the U.S. dollar and our government’s finances. In brief, the recession has only just begun.
Their advice? Short the stock market, invest in gold and euros and dump those pricey collectibles while you still can. Some business owners should even consider selling off their businesses while workers should switch careers to recession-proof fields (such as health care). Whether these bold recommendations are sound is debatable, but they’re bound to spark conversation.
At the same time, anyone who’s been hit hard by the downturn might welcome a little more modesty from these authors, who constantly hawk their newsletter and research services and remind us again and again that they predicted a real-estate crisis and market crash as early as 2006: “Basically, we nailed it.” Got it the first time, thanks. Nevertheless, surrounded as we are by growing talk of recovery and news about “green shoots,” it’s still refreshing to consider the different perspective that Wiedemer, Wiedemer and Spitzer offer here.
Common Sense on Mutual Funds
By John C. Bogle
Reviewed by Robert J. Hughes
The common sense that John C. Bogle offers in his new book is pretty much what he offered a decade ago when he first published this guide: Do your research and take your time before investing. He still advises the basics (such as not ignoring taxes on investments) in this updated 10th anniversary edition, but also puts into perspective many of the things he first wrote about when the markets seemed on the verge of rising as high as 36,000.
As founder of the giant mutual fund company, Vanguard Group, Bogle writes what he knows: how to steer one’s way through mutual funds and the numbing variety of investment alternatives available today. His is a clear and readable style, and Bogle helps make still somewhat-arcane terms such as quantitative investing understandable.
He compares what worked then and what didn’t in the markets (and his advice). And he is willing to correct himself: “A decade ago…I asked the wrong question: ‘Did the professional investment advisers outpace the market’” The question should have been whether they made money for their clients. His answer: “Far less than they claim.”
This is a textbook for the everyday investor, as well as the investment advisor, even if at 600 pages it’s not exactly casual reading. But it is a well written, accessible and useful guide to everything from long-term investments to indexing, to technological change and even entrepreneurship.
The Art of Making Money
The Story of a Master Counterfeiter
By Jason Kersten
Reviewed by Alexandra Scaggs
In "The Art of Making Money," journalist Jason Kersten outlines the life of Art Williams, Jr., who made millions of dollars. Really made it. As in manufactured.
Kersten spoke extensively with many of those involved in abetting and uncovering the counterfeiting operation (except for the close-lipped Secret Service, which gave just one early interview) to piece together what motivated Williams to use his considerable skill and determination for crime.
Williams was a frustrated social outcast (troubled youth, difficult family) who grabbed the opportunity to enter the business, courtesy of a mentor called Da Vinci. He printed millions of dollars of cash and lived the high life with just one short stint in jail, for robbery. But when Williams sought out his alienated father and family, he learned how much trusting the wrong person could cost.
Kersten deftly explores the complicated ties and drama within the Williams family, and refrains from judging Williams Jr., despite the man’s relapse into counterfeiting after he had sought to go straight through security consulting.
Such human failings make "The Art of Making Money" less fun than a romp like "Catch Me if You Can," but it still provides great insight into a the mind of a skilled career criminal.
Broke
What Every American Business Must Do to Restore Our Financial Stability and Protect Our Future
By John B. Mumford
Reviewed by Robert J. Hughes
What do you think of having 18- to 24-year-olds providing a mandatory paid public service to help clean the environment? Or imposing a 2% fee on every financial transaction until the $51-plus trillion in public debt is repaid?
Those are just two of the solutions that John B. Mumford proposes in "Broke," a book-cum-manifesto in which he warns that Americans have placed too much trust in self-serving business leaders and politicians, leading to what he believes is creeping socialism and which, ultimately, will lead to our economic collapse.
Mumford doesn’t pull punches, which is the point: “No one wants to hear bad news,” he writes of us Americans. He outlines a long list of where we’ve gone astray, and offers what he believes are prescriptions for recovery.
Mumford makes many valid points: Most people, in and out of finance, might agree that such financial instruments as derivatives “continue to constitute one of the significant risks to both the United States and the world economy in an age of massive public debt, adverse demographics, failed accountability, poor reporting and regulatory blindness by politicians.”
His solution to this problem in particular? Among others, replacing derivatives (and high-risk credit default swaps) with more stable insurance or risk hedges. Whether anyone in business is likely to listen to Mumford’s suggestions is debtable. In any event, this is a lively, sometimes alarmist, but very readable look at just where we are and one man’s suggestions for how to steer a path toward a more secure future.
U Is for Undertow
By Sue Grafton
Reviewed by Robert J. Hughes
This is the 21st entry in Sue Grafton’s fine series of detective novels whose titles follow an alphabetical pattern (starting with "A Is for Alibi" way back in 1982). What began as perhaps a titling gimmick has turned into an engaging character study of detective Kinsey Milhone, a vivid evocation of coastal California and an exploration of American life.
That would be American life about 20 years ago. Unlike most detective-novel series, which exist in a continuing present with protagonists who never grow old, this series takes place in a continuing past. Each novel starts a month or two after the previous one ends. So Kinsey Milhone is now working in the late 1980s, and Grafton is writing, essentially, near-contemporary historical novels.
Her latest goes even further back in time, as Milhone investigates the disappearance of a little girl in 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, when the counterculture spread its fragrant pot-infused wings. Kinsey is approached by a young man who claims to have witnessed the burial of a body, perhaps that little girl’s, when he was six years old.
The engrossing narrative shifts between events of the mid- to late-1960s and Kinsey’s 1988 present. Readers can piece together the complicated but believable plot strands from the two eras while Kinsey herself does, and Grafton’s expert storytelling melds with the richness of emotional detail she provides her characters. Here, as Kinsey unravels the mystery of the little girl’s disappearance, we meet a variety of fractured families, including Kinsey’s own, driven apart by greed, misunderstanding or insensitivity and sometimes united by love and forgiveness.
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