Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43145 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 430 pages

Customer Reviews

Mr. Market does it again
Mr. Market always miscalculates and the author of this book predicted the housing bubble that burst last year. This book is a collection of Grant's Interest Rate Observer letters from 1990s to the present economic crisis. He mainly blames human nature for leading us to where we are today. He says that the cause that led to the housing and stock market bubble was the lenders' willingness to loan money to speculators or house flippers. It was not the low interest rate policies of the Fed as many might believe. However, our regulators are not without fault. They set the stage in the 1970s with the deregulation of financial markets.

I really liked the author's description of the financial instruments, especially CDS derivatives. Even if you are not a financial expert, you should be able to understand it because the author has described it in simple terms. Although there is so much evidence supporting the idea that Mr. Market miscalculates, I am amazed at how many institutional investors believe in efficient market theory and have managed their investments through indexing.

- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

Distilled economics
I love this book - it's a series of potentially heavy-going economic observations, packaged into a more accessible format. Jim Grant certainly has a talent, like Krugman and Roubini, for expressing complex ideas to the (comparative)layman. A must-read for finance professionals and students alike.

A picture tells 1000 words
If you can't afford the $900 or so that an annual subscription costs, why not do the next best thing and read this best-of compilation of Grant's Interest Observer. See James Grant fulminate on the last two bubbles and Alan Greenspan, and eventually be proved right. Learn some fundamental analysis and contrarian thinking in the mean time. Maybe lose less money in the next bubble. One star knocked off for not reproducing graphs mentioned in the text.