A review of Yusuf Bodiat’s The Bottom Line. Yusuf Bodiat’s The Bottom Line asks a question that most South African policy writing tiptoes around: why does a state rich in talent and natural resources, with the formal architecture of a functioning country – constitution, treasury, reserve bank, courts, statistical agency – struggle so visibly to…
In his book, Loss Coverage: Why Insurance Works Better with Some Adverse Selection, Guy Thomas propose an interesting point that adverse selection may not be as harmful as many actuaries believe. They actually go further and suggest that, at least from a policy perspective, adverse selection may be a good thing. This is particularly relevant…
Michael Lewis, of Liar’s Poker and The Big Short fame, has written a book on the world of High Frequency Trading. The booked is called Flash Boys and it’s more or less as entertaining has Lewis’s recent books. Â That’s a good thing, even if it doesn’t quite reach the highs of Liar’s Poker (which you…
Jeffrey Robinson, the author of the well known book “Laundrymen” that I’m now reading, has written an engaging story about The Satoshi Faithful (as he calls them) supporters of Bitcoin and where their Faith is leading them stray. The book is called BitCon: The Naked Truth About Bitcoin and it doesn’t pull punches in deriding the…
Kim Warren has a trouble. His trouble is with the art and science of business strategy. His book, The Trouble with Strategy: The brutal reality of why business strategy doesn’t work and what to do about it, outlines how poorly mainstream strategy ideas have performed and how slowly (if at all) the “profession of strategy”…
The Hedge Fund Mirage: The Illusion of Big Money and Why It’s Too Good to Be True is an  account of where the money is made in hedge funds and a series of anecdotes about exactly how many different ways everything can go wrong. Author, Simon Lack, combines easy reading prose with sufficiently crisp examples…
Brad de Long and Stephen S. Cohen have a new book called The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money. It’s an interesting, informative, provocative and relevant read, providing context for the economic position the US finds itself in now. Perhaps of more direct interest, the issues of currency manipulation (done…
Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way of Chris Mortenson and his best-selling books “Three Cups of Tea”, and “Stones into Schools”. Three Cups of Tea tells the supposedly true story of Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute (CAI) building schools in Pakistan while on a rip-roaring adventure of…
