Crisis Economics



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Hardcover
368 pages
ISBN 9781594202506 Published May 2010
Penguin Press
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Crisis Economics
A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
By Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm 

Related Blog Posts
Bloomberg Picks 30
Posted Nov. 19, 2010 9:02 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Here's a list we missed late last month. Though the post is rather cryptically titled Hellhound Bites Citigroup, Schwarzman Finds Gold Mine: Top Business Books, Bloomberg's James Pressley explains exactly why they put the list together:

With so many business books being published each month, we’re often asked for recommendations. Here are 30 of our favorite hardbacks published this year.

I've taken out the author's brief descriptions of each book (head on over to the original post for those), and have taken the liberty to break the books up into a few categories. You'll notice while perusing the titles that the list tends toward larger narratives (many of the financial crisis), biographies and financial history, which I'm a big fan of, and I think makes a lot of sense for Bloomberg and its readers.

A quick note: Many of the books I put in the "Economics" category are, at least in part, about the economic crisis. The books I chose to list in the "Economics" category are those that offer a detailed prescription to the crisis, rather than just documenting the causes and events of it (not that the latter is a lesser task). The books in the "Economics" category were also, by-and-large, written by economists, while those in the "Histories & Narratives of the Economic Crisis" were written by journalists and participants on Wall Street.

Histories & Narratives of the Economic Crisis

Economics

Financial History & Biographies

Other

Looking over the list, I'm reminded once again what a good year this has been for business books.

If you're an entrepreneur looking for ideas or nuts-and-bolts books on business, this list may not be a great help to you (We'll provide you one that will be on December 15th). But if you're an investor in or student of markets and business, it doesn't get much better than this.



Friday Links
Posted June 4, 2010 10:06 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

We have two weeks of links to catch up on, folks. So tighten up your broadband and lets get down to it.

➻ Bestselling author and current president of the author's guild, Scott Turow, Tattered Cover Lead Buyer and board member of the ABA, Cathy Langer, and President of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Jonathan Galassi, all appeared on The PBS NEWSHOUR last Thursday with Jeffrey Brown to discuss "new gadgets, new habits, and the ancient craft of storytelling." (You can watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript here: Publishers, Writers Assess the Digital Frontier of the Written Word.) Speaking of eBooks, Cathy Langer offered this:

I think it's hard to say yet. It's really hard to measure what impact it's had on—on the overall sales of physical books.

I am, again, an eternal optimist. And I think it might even expand the market. We know that people are buying the physical book and the e-book. There's talk about bundling, which means you can buy both at the same time.

The fact that any record album or hardcover book is sold in this country anymore without a free (unique) download code accompanying it just baffles me. I know that the buyer of the analogue material might just give that digital version to a friend, but if so, I think the chances are pretty good that they would have shared the physical book with that friend anyway, so I don't think they're losing a sale by doing so. I think it may also draw some book lovers back into actual bookstores to pick up the physical copy of the book they want to download. Any thoughts? There are a lot of people in publishing that are much, much smarter than I am, so there has to be a good reason (or many) that they're not doing this? No?

(Another recent NEWSHOUR conversation you may enjoy is Jeffrey Brown's interview of Derek and Sissela Bok. They are intellectual giants that have been married for 55 years and will both be releasing books on the topic of happiness this year—The Politics of Happiness and Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science, respectively.)

➻ As Sue Halpern writes in The iPad Revolution, her New York Review of Books article:

You don’t have to be a technophobe or a Luddite to dismiss out of hand the idea of reading on a machine. Maybe it is muscle memory, but there is something deeply satisfying about a “real” book, a book made of pages bound between hard or soft covers, into which you can slip a bookmark, whose pages you can fan, whose binding you can crack and fold as you move from beginning to end. E-books, by contrast, whatever platform delivers them, are ephemeral. Yes, you can carry thousands of them in your pocket, but what will you have to show for it? What will fill your bookshelves? Then, one day, you find yourself housebound, and Wolf Hall has just won the Booker Prize, and you download a sample onto your iPhone, and just like with a book printed on paper you are pulled into the story and are grateful to be able to keep reading, and your resistance disappears, and you press the “buy” button—it’s so easy!—and that is how it starts.

➻ Still, one just doesn't collect codes and electronic files in the same way one does physical books. And if collecting is your thing, or you're looking for a guide to beginning a collection, Flashlight Worthy has compiled a list of The Best Books about Book Collecting, books which themselves may or may not be collectible. I highly suggest A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Brasbanes, which made the list, and would add one more recommendation:This Book Collecting Racket by Harry W. Schwartz (the man who founded the bookshop that 800-CEO-READ grew up in).

➻ Juliet Schor, author of the recently released Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, was interviewed by Kai Ryssdal on NPR's Marketplace. She discussed some of the larger ideas in the book, including the amount of time we put into the formal economy and the beauty and economic efficiency of the many small actions occurring outside of it.

One of the things we see is that the people who have begun to live like this have more time affluence in their lives and are able to do a wide range of things that are really creative, productive kinds of things that you can do if you don't have to spend every waking hour at your formal job.

[...]

The advantages of the large scale are disappearing. [...] It used to be that you needed a giant warehouse to put a computer in, now you need a lap. A huge message of my book is small is beautiful, let's try and shift this economy in the direction of the small scale. That's going to be a more resilient economy.

I highly suggest you pick up her book. If you'd like a preview, download her ChangeThis manifesto: Plenitude: A Statement On Economics, Ecology & True Wealth.

➻ Let's now move back to the latest New York Review of Books. In At the Heart of the Crash, Jeff Madwick reviews Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, writing that "Lewis’s deep burrowing gets to the essence of Wall Street companies blinded by easy, short-term profit and uninhibited by any moral scruples or external government watchdogs." Madwick also gives a paragraph to Crisis Economics and the remedies the authors propose therein:

Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm would require that all derivatives, such as credit default swaps, be traded openly. They would consider prohibiting CDOs altogether on grounds that these derivatives are far too risky and complex. They would demand that investors pool funds to finance credit-rating agencies, removing the major conflicts of interest that derive from issuers paying for their ratings. They would also break up Goldman Sachs and the other big banks into relatively small pieces.

And in The Food Movement, Rising, Michael Pollan covers five books:

Pollan writes:

Cheap food has become an indispensable pillar of the modern economy. But it is no longer an invisible or uncontested one. One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I should say “movements,” since it is unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high.

As Pollan states, "It's a big lumpy tent," which sounds delicious.

➻ The American Management Association has a podcast online with Scott Singer, author of How to Hit a Curveball: Confront and Overcome the Unexpected in Business. Scott says "It's not so much how hard you get hit or how hard you can hit back, it's how resilient you can be ... "

➻ Moving from the beloved baseball metaphor to the trusty train, we head over to The Rumpus. In his review of Book Expo America, Nobody Knows the Way to BEA, Ari Messer writes:

One reason many of us stick with this business, if you can even call it a business (it’s more like a practice, really), is a perhaps pathological obsession with voice, with helping authors find their voices and with encouraging others to listen. But books aren’t an announcement, books are the train itself, the place where mind meets body, the moment when it doesn’t seem to matter that both will come to pass. If the train ahead of us is delayed, can we outrun it and reach the next one? Or is that a death wish?

➻ Because I love Umair Haque's writing, I want to share the concluding line of his recent article on Rebooting Prosperity in an Age of Austerity:

Seen through the Cyclopean eye of economic evolution, a great meteor crashed in 2007 — and those who can't reboot prosperity are a bit like the poor, straggling dinosaurs who survived yesterday's great meteor crash (hello, BP): they're living on borrowed time in this Age of Austerity, in a world being furiously reshaped.

His reasoning skills are as solid as his writing, and I would highly suggest you read the full article to see what he's talking about.

➻ Any Metropolis fans out there? If so, today marks the global release of the restored version of that classic film, which contains lost footage discovered in 2008 in Buenos Aires. As Roger Ebert writes:

The opening shots of the restored “Metropolis” are so crisp and clear they come as a jolt. This mistreated masterpiece has been seen until now mostly in battered prints missing footage that was, we now learn, essential.

➻ "What a life I lead in the summer."




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