Product Description

Winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2008

A detailed map of the new investment landscape from the man Fortune magazine calls the “Global Guru”

Never before have investors and policy makers been beset by so many conflicting messages about the economy and the markets. While most pundits dismiss the conflicts as “noise” in the system, Mohamed A. El-Erian, president and CEO of the $35 billion Harvard Endowment and incoming co-CEO and co-CIO of PIMCO, one of today's most successful investment firms, avers that those messages signal deep, structural changes and realignments that are radically redefining the investment game.

Written by the man who Fortune magazine refers to as a “Global Guru,” When Markets Collide offers a cogent picture of the rapidly changing world financial system. A book that is sure to become an overnight investment classic, it gets you up to speed on the new economic and investing landscape and provides a detailed blueprint for capitalizing on the phenomenal opportunities now available in that new investment landscape, while minimizing the new and challenging set of risks.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52235 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

FT, September 18th 2008
Mohammed El-Erian's When Markets Collide is shortlisted for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2008

From the Back Cover

The #1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller

“Mohamed A. El-Erian is one of the most gifted and successful risk management practitioners in the world. In this book he combines an academic’s insight into advanced risk analysis with a portfolio manager’s grasp of real world economics. This book is an essential read for those who wish to understand the modern world of investing.”
—Alan Greenspan

"Few people are as well positioned to understand markets as Mohamed El-Erian. He is almost unique in being able to attack the credit crisis from the perspectives of academic economist, policy official, investment banker and fund manager...Mr. El-Erian's insights are as valuable as ever."
--Financial Times

"El-Erian is a doer and a thinker and someone who understands the risks of rare events. [Never before, have] I seen such a combination. Read this book."
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author The Black Swan

“This extraordinary book portrays the future with a powerful and trail-blazing illumination of the past.”
—Peter L. Bernstein, author Capital Ideas Evolving

“Brilliantly written, easy to understand—a forceful explanation of our changing global economy.”
—Bill Gross, Managing Director, Founder and CIO, PIMCO

“Mohamed El-Erian, with his deep grounding in economics and his profound knowledge of financial markets, has written a book that no one else could write.”
—Seth A. Klarman

“Mohamed El-Erian’s book is an important, wise and insightful analysis….”
—Michael Spence, recipient of the Noble Prize in Economics (2001)

“I can think of no better guide to the terrifying yet exhilarating new world of global finance….”
—Niall Ferguson, William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School

“Mohamed El-Erian is a deep thinker of the global financial and economic scene.”
—Arminio Fraga, Founding Partner, Gavea Investimentos and Former President, Central Bank of Brazil

“Mohamed El-Erian is that rare creature: a skillful participant in financial markets who is also a brilliant analyst of them. He has written a book that is important and urgent.”
—Fareed Zakaria, editor, Newsweek International

"Mr. El-Erian . . . offers extremely detailed advice.”
--Paul B. Brown, The New York Times

“El-Erian...specializes in spotting trends amid the blur and clanging noise of markets in motion. He steps back to consider the big picture and offer tips on how to allocate your assets in his new book, When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change. El-Erian does offer something valuable for investors seeking to benefit from the global economic realignment: a road map. In a chapter on asset allocation, he provides an illustrative mix for a long-term U.S.-based investor.”
--Bloomberg News

“The recent turmoil in financial markets is a symptom of realigning economic power around the world, promising investors more rough times ahead, prominent fund manager Mohamed El-Erian writes in a new book.”
--Reuters

About the Author
Mohammed A. El-Erian is CEO of PIMCO, one of the largest investment management companies in the world. He formerly served as president and CEO of Harvard Management company, the firm that manages the university’s $35 billion endowment. He spent 15 years at the International Money Fund, working on policy, capital market and multi lateral economic issues. In 2004, Fortune named him a member of its eight-person ‘Mutual Fund Dream Team’.

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Customer Reviews

badly written, poorly edited..
No doubt Mohamed El-Erian have learned the slang of the City and Wall Street. He punishes the reader with a dense, and many times unfocused, book written perhaps too early and with the intention to explain the dynamics that are changing the global economy. He was the first to get a book out so good for him, but it is not the best and definitely you can summarise his message in less than 20 pages. The other 280 pages are full of the same annoying words used by Investment bankers trying to look smart. Overall, the book is a collection of his contributions to Financial Times, WSJ as well as conferences, and Mohamed has been adding comments here and there to make this look like a book. Again and again we read about the "secular" destination and every chapter gets introduced as he did in the preface.

Mohamed is extremelly inteligent and and one of the true intense minds in the market, but his book is awful. I hope he and his editor make an effort in the second edition as they will need to update it with the more juicy events that happened after he wrote this "finished-in-a-rush" book in January 2008. In any case, he won the award of "book of the year" by FT and Goldman Sachs so I guess it is no longer necesary to have writing skills but just telling people how to distinguish "noise" from true signals. Analysts and associates will enjoy this book, but serious professionals will put it down after few pages.

A valuable insight into the rapidly changing economy
When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change
Mohamed El Erian has spent many years involved in the emerging markets and this book gives a very valuable insight into the impact that these markets are having on the financial landscape and how to capitalize on it.

In future the emerging markets will be much more important drivers of the world economy than the US, UK, Europe or Japan.

The book talks about the crisis caused by the undervaluation of risk combined with the under-assessment of the quantity of risk outstanding and the consequential fundamental changes taking place. The sheer complexity of the structure of financial products and the inability of the regulatory system to keep on top of these developments has been a catalyst in the resulting financial chaos as has the advance in technology. Technology has undermined the role of the sell side in price discovery which has caused the sell side to extend their activities into new and unfamiliar areas at greater risk of market accidents.

Derivative based products significantly reduced barriers to entry in a range of markets and the complexity stemmed from the ground upwards. Domestic mortgages are taken as a good example. Gone were the days of plain vanilla fixed or floating loans. Instead a plethora of structures were offered, many so complex that household borrowers didn't understand them.

The author emphasises the importance of interpreting signals and differentiating between what is noise and what are real structural changes. He focuses on China as being the most important contributor to world growth. Emerging economies which have greatly benefited from the US and parts of Europe by sustaining consumer demand way beyond income growth are now building up massive amounts of wealth.

Time and time again the Sovereign Wealth Funds are mentioned.

This book gives us food for thought about how to assess the new financial landscape given that many of the emerging markets have shifted from debtors to creditors and are now extremely important drivers of the world economy. It encourages the reader to keep a close eye on the SWFs and their allocation of capital. It gives us some ideas as to construct an international portfolio. It also talks about changes that will be required in organisations such as the IMF.

This book is not worth a penny - fully agree with Julio Cortazar
This book is so unbelievably bad that after reading the first 10 pages I was in a rage that I had actually paid money for it. Later I managed to go through selected pages across the whole book, and it got even worse! It is the equivalent of the homework of a 1-st year university student that has collected superficial materials from the media and collected them in a text without having any idea or personal experience on the subject. I have read many good books on investment (among others Inside the House of Money, Hedge Hunters, Hedge Hogging, Fooling Some People Most of the Time) and compared to them, this one is the equivalent of a ponzi-scheme - you pay money and get nothing for it. I also work in finance and I agree with every word that Julio Cortazar says below. The only thing where I have my suspicion is that El Erian himself has written the book. It seems more probable that it was his secretary.