In House of Debt, Atif Mian, an economist at Princeton University, and Amir Sufi, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, make the case that household debt was the 2008 recession’s main culprit. This is a nuanced view that differs slightly from the view that it was the 2007 home price decline. Mian and…
Category: Book reviews
Weekend Reading: Capital
In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues that if the rate of return on capital is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. The theory is that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. It’s a great…
Weekend Reading: Flash Boys
I admit to being a Michael Lewis fanboy. I consider him one of the best business writers. He has a knack for using characters as a lens to explain an issue. The issue in Flash Boys is high frequency trading. Or high speed trading. Or electronic trading. It’s a bit of a confusing mix. Uncharacteristically,…
Weekend Reading: Busted
What do you do when the whistleblower sitting in front of you is an unreliable drug addict? Maybe you see some nugget of truth in the story. Maybe you see some way to find reliable evidence that proves that nugget of truth. Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker, reporters at Philadelphia’s Daily News were confronted with…
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
Movies about compliance officers are few and far between. It may surprise you to find Chris Pine playing that role in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Jack Ryan is the protagonist in Tom Clancy’s cold war thrillers. I read most of his books back in the 1980s. They were so cold war based I wondered how…
Weekend Reading: A Time to Attack
What should we do about the nuclear weapon program in Iran? The country is not complying with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Iran has four main sites being used to create weapons-grade uranium. The country has stopped short of further purifying the uranium to the concentration needed for a bomb. But once…
Weekend Reading: Fierce Patriot
General Sherman is known for burning Atlanta. That is as much I knew about him. Having been raised in Boston, my schooling in American History emphasized the Revolutionary War. But my friend and author Megan Kate Nelson has piqued my interest in the Civil War. Why did I read about Sherman? The publisher offered me…
Secure Borders
What do compliance and border security have in common? More than you might initially think. Try reading Sylvia Longmire’s Border Insecurity. Some of the issues with border security will resonate with compliance professionals. (Hopefully, you don’t have to deal with illegal immigration, human trafficking, terrorism and drug smuggling as the compliance issues at your company.)…
Private Equity at Work
Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt tried to take an academic look at private equity firms and published their results in Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street. The authors paint the world in black and white. They present the book as a question of whether private equity firms are (1) financial innovators…
Weekend Reading: The Sea & Civilization
Lincoln Paine wants to change your view of the world. He wants you to focus on the blue parts of the map that cover over 70% of the world’s surface. In his book, The Sea and Civilization, he makes that case that mankind’s technological and social adaptation to the water has been a driving force…