Sand. Salt. Iron. Copper. Oil. Lithium. These, not petabytes or algorithms or innovative ideas, are the building blocks of human life as we know it. At least that’s what Ed Conway, author of Material World, tells us.
De Leus and Gijsels, both originating in the world of institutional brokerage identify the five principal trends affecting investments in the near future. The two take turns writing chapters so that the book is a straight man/funnyman show, with the straight man providing mostly sound, conventional analysis and the funnyman interviewing dead economists and Fed chairmen not yet born.
Will the energy transition, from fossil fuel to other sources of energy, happen? It seems almost sacrilegious to suggest that it might not, or that the transition will be halting and incomplete.
Capitalism has had an even better run recently, with the globalization of prosperity.
Suppose everything we believe about carbon and climate is wrong?
Should retail investors partake of the very attractive yields promised by private credit fund managers?
The Age of AI (And Our Human Future), by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, is keenly relevant.
Pulak Prasad is a successful investor in the Indian market, where he grew up. But he is also an amateur evolutionary biologist. His new book illustrates a powerful – and often money-making – link between the disciplines of investing and evolution.
Technological progress in the last two centuries, and especially in the recent past, has been nothing short of amazing. So why are we so unhappy? Why aren’t we all rich?
Should investors build their own portfolios of bonds, or buy shares of bond funds? Is there an economic difference or just one of appearance? Are directly held bonds safer because they mature, and you get your money back? How should one decide?
The recent embrace of so-called liquid alternatives by ordinary Americans seeking to fund their retirement is deeply troubling.
Rather than feudalism, we are headed toward hyper-capitalism, where each person is an entrepreneur constantly selling his or her services to the highest bidder.
Few would disagree that the period from 1870-2010 saw immense technological advancements that improved our quality of life. But, according to Bradford DeLong, far fewer advances lie ahead, and societies should adapt by “slouching” away from a free-market system. He’s wrong on both counts.
Super-bubbles in the asset markets, the rise of populism, and inequality are among a host of societal problems caused by low interest rates, according to Edward Chancellor. He explains why in his provocative new book, The Price of Time.
Will artificial general intelligence (AGI) transform the experience of being human, opening up possibilities of knowledge, achievement, and prosperity that we can now barely conceive? Or is AGI an existential threat to humanity, something to be feared and restrictively confined?
Who would want to be tasked with investing their own and other people’s money in companies run by weirdos and jerks? But that turns out to be one of the most important skill sets shared by successful venture capitalists.
In an ambitious new book, the economist Andrew Smithers rejects core “Newtonian” principles of economics, replacing them with radical departures from conventional wisdom. But as I will explain, some of Smithers’ theories fail meet the standard of empirical verification.
Will the cloud drive massive increases in productivity and wealth – as the internet did before it? That is the central question asked by Mark Mills in his stunning new book, The Cloud Revolution.
We shouldn’t read too much into pop sociology, especially when investing other people’s money. William Strauss and Neil Howe built a following by studying substantive differences among generations: Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen X and so forth. But that view is mistaken, according to Bobby Duffy.
We mix up logic with emotion, data with information, and information with wisdom. Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality, is a step-by-step guide to unmixing these and using hard-headed logic to arrive at useful conclusions.
The greatest economic challenge of the second half of the 20th century was over how to fight the crippling inflation of the 1970s. It pitted the monetarist Milton Friedman against the Keynesian Paul Samuelson, and the debate between the two shaped economic thinking and policymaking to this day.
After tens of thousands of years of living at a subsistence level, how did the world suddenly become so rich?
Having suffered through the worst pandemic in a century, we are keenly attuned to catastrophe. Few people are better equipped to document the history of catastrophes and our response to them, for better or worse, than Niall Ferguson.
The saga of local public health officials tasked with fighting epidemic disease, and their clashes with national health authorities who didn’t care, was a perfect recipe for putting readers to sleep. But Michael Lewis made it into high drama.
What do financial folly and religious frenzy have in common?
Powerful demographic trends will cause higher inflation and interest rates, and a reduction in inequality as labor reclaims its bargaining power in the global economy.
In a fascinating little book, The Psychology of Money, the investment manager Morgan Housel provides more useful self-help advice than most authors who explicitly set out to do so.
Ever wonder why Americans enjoy a substantially higher standard of living than any other large country? According to Matt Ridley, it is because the liberal democracy we have nurtured over the last 250 years is the essential catalyst to foster innovation.
Americans enjoy the economic prosperity and freedoms of its liberal democracy. But our elevated stature is threatened. As the U.S. recoils from the world, the era of U.S. dominance might be ending.
President Trump, like many others along the political spectrum, has derided the persistent U.S. trade deficit – particularly with China – as a waste of capital leaving our country. The view that the U.S. would benefit by correcting this imbalance is taken up in a new book, with a message that should concern all financial market participants.
Dare to disagree with Paul Krugman? If you’re prominent enough to merit his attention, he will attack your ideas and worse, label you as evil. But behind his rhetoric is an economist who is often worth listening to.
Does market history offer any parallels to today’s novel coronavirus crisis?
The future of humanity offers continued and widespread betterment, punctuated by challenges that we have the riches and knowledge to address. Why do so many people fear it?
Navigating between the despotic extreme of authoritarianism and the unbridled liberty of anarchism is the challenge of society in its quest for good government. A new book looks at the choices facing policymakers to achieve the proper balance and to improve the prospects of those countries outside the “narrow corridor” of effective governance that lies between those extremes.
In his latest book, Malcolm Gladwell turns to a theme that matters greatly to financial advisors – preventing financial fraud and abuse. It is part of his broader inquiry into how we can avoid placing our trust in the wrong people.
Does a prosperous global society need access to energy supplies that grow faster than the population? Conventional wisdom says yes, but a new book tackles this question and reaches the surprising and optimistic conclusion that we can live better while consuming less energy and fewer material resources.
A well-schooled generalist will outshine a specialist at a cocktail party, with an ability to thoughtfully contribute to conversations on any topic. But does that skill translate to better problem solving in all disciplines? As advisors, we should be particularly interested in the answer as it pertains to the discipline of investing.
Is venture capital a good investment? For long periods in the past, the best VC firms had spectacular returns, as their outside investors or “limited partners” participated in the emergence of great companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. But, going forward, can VC investors expect the same returns? Or are we in a new era of lower returns and a more challenging environment?
Why don’t we appreciate and celebrate big business more wholeheartedly? Why do so many of us regard it as unfair, monopolistic, manipulative, impersonal, and exploitative, to say nothing of inefficient? In Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero, the economist and free-range intellectual Tyler Cowen poses these questions and suggests a wide assortment of answers.
With The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty, Clay Christensen strays from his familiar turf of big-business strategy and seeks to save the world. His bottom-up philosophy and contrarianism are a sharp and welcome contrast to much of the prevailing wisdom on alleviating global poverty.
In Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government, a beautifully crafted autobiography, Pau Volcker recounts the many struggles involved in achieving his aims.
The chief goal of society should be to maximize wealth, according to Tyler Cowen. Pursuing that goal has delivered everything from nutritious and abundant food, to air conditioning and smartphones in the developed world, and those benefits are spreading rapidly to the developing world. The challenge is how societies can embrace and implement that goal. If those challenges are overcome, the benefits to globally diversified equity investors will be substantial.
I can guarantee a few things about Howard Marks’ new book, Mastering the Market Cycle. You will enjoy the thoughtful writing in clear language, and you will learn one great, and I believe correct, idea about the operation of markets.
Michael Lewis’ account of governance in the age of Donald Trump is frightening, inspiring, and surprisingly lively.
For the first time in at least 40 years, there’s a fundamental economic reason that a yield curve near-inversion might notherald a recession.
Byron Wien discusses what people don’t recognize about Donald Trump, the future of Italy and the E.U. and whether federal deficits will be inflationary.
Among the populist ideas that have gained currency are hostility to free trade, a sharp reduction in immigration, the redistribution of income, and nationalism bordering on jingoism. Dambisa Moyo doesn’t like it, and neither does Ian Bremmer.
The rise of populism has been fueled by rhetoric bemoaning the downward plight of the middle class, and that chorus has been joined by many from the left. But are we really worse off than we were a generation or a century ago? Not according to Steven Pinker, whose new book documents the dramatic improvement in lives across the globe.
Why do experts, CEOs, politicians, and other apparently highly capable people make such terrible decisions so often? Is because they’re ill-intentioned? Or because, despite appearances, they’re actually stupid? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, philosopher, businessman, perpetual troublemaker, and author of, among other works, the groundbreaking Fooled by Randomness, says it’s neither.
In this far-reaching interview, Jack Bogle comments on the future of index funds, argues that the value premium has been arbitraged away and attacks publicly-held mutual fund companies.
