Tag: finance
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Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis
This leftist assessment of our current economic situation has a lot to offer but lost me in a few critical ways.
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“…It’s nonsense, of course. But it’s load-bearing nonsense.”
Dave Karpf finds two books with the same title about the same thing, 20 years apart.
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The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend by Rob Copeland
Ray Dalio, by Copeland’s telling, is an amalgamation of the worst characteristics you can find in a boss. He’s apparently an unpredictable, mercurial, petty, meddling micromanager. Whether you will enjoy reading 300 pages about it probably depends on your familiarity with his public persona, or your appetite for Rich Guys Behaving Badly (enabled by sycophants).…
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“Paralyzed by puddles of pee”
Andrew Keen interviews Rob Copeland about his new book about Ray Dalio. The book was on my radar but this interview pushed me to order it. The quote in the title comes from this NYMag article which is also a barnburner.
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Conspicuous Destruction by Kim Phillips-Fein in NYRB
Barnburner of an essay from Kim Phillips-Fein in NYRB on the issues with private equity, and also an interview with her about the essay. I read one of the books she talks about — These are the Plunderers — and liked it much more than I expected to. It wasn’t the anti-capitalist rant I thought…
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A good review
From Patrick McKenzie, in Bits About Money: a review of Number Go Up by Zeke Faux. I like the concept of ‘the anti-book’.
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These are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner
I read a lot of ‘capitalists behaving badly’ books, and this was stunning even by those standards. It’s an interesting companion to The Big Myth in that it details exactly how wealthy private equity convinces governments and regulators that it’s a force for good in the world, while that’s only true for the bank balances of…
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Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison
I’m not sure if this was originally planned as a long read for Bloomberg or Wired or something, but it seemed to me to be very padded. I really struggled to stay engaged. We learn the backstory of figures that appear for a single chapter. There is a lot of inside-baseball HR stuff that is…
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Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Neidermeyer
First half of this book is a snoozer but holy cow did I love the rest. Neidermeyer is more interested in the engineering, design and manufacturing of the Tesla, rather than Elon Musk. Obviously you can’t separate the two but the car comes first in this book, and the book is better for it. The…