Author Richard A. D’Aveni has written a very compelling book with Strategic Capitalism, a book that provides some very important information for Americans to review and consider due to the coming economic cold war between the United States and China. Mr. D’Aveni asserts that the United States’ traditional version of capitalism must be adapted in order to compete with China’s conglomeration of various types of capitalism. The beginning of the book details the many different pure types of capitalism – Laissez-Faire, social-market, managed, and philanthropic – and how these have been used over the years in many different economies. Mr. D’Aveni points out that rarely is a single pure type of capitalism ever the only type of capitalism in use in an economic system, but rather that many different forms of capitalism are blended together to work in the economic and political interests of the country or union in question. […]
economic update
Book Review: The Malign Hand of the Markets
Subtitle: The Insidious Forces on Wall Street that are Destroying Financial Markets – and What We Can Do About It This book, written by Duke Professor of Psychology, Biology and Neurobiology John Staddon, provides a quite interesting view of the way our markets are impacted by the “malign hand” – a play on the “invisible hand” described by Adam Smith in his book “Wealth of Nations”. Briefly, the Invisible Hand Theory describes how an unknown force allows the market to self-balance – the self-interest of the individuals making up the marketplace has a beneficial impact on the overall marketplace, even though the individuals in the marketplace are only interested in their own benefit. But we’re not here to talk about Invisible Hand, but rather the Malign Hand. Staddon explains that individual self-interest may have a negative impact to the overall marketplace. One example of this is in the tragedy of […]
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Book Review: Saving Capitalism from Short-Termism
How to Build Long-Term Value and Take Back Our Financial Future This is a great book. I got a lot out of the sections that bring to the surface a lot of the issues that we’ve been seeing in our economy. These issues have been written about in countless places, but author Alfred Rappaport also proposes workable options that could be put into place to resolve these issues, a step that has been lacking in other places I’ve seen these issues discussed. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The issues I’ve referenced above are the sort of systemic issues we’re seeing in economy in general and specifically the financial services industry. Included in these issues are the wild short-term fluctuations we have been seeing in the markets, in part due to the ways that CEOs are compensated, how investment managers are compensated, and how those compensation systems influence behaviors and […]
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Book Review: The Last Economic Superpower
Have you found yourself wondering over the past couple of years just how the Great Recession came about? What sorts of things led up to this meltdown, and how far in advance did it all start? What might we do in the future to keep something similar from happening again? In his book, The Last Economic Superpower, Joseph P. Quinlan does a wonderful job of answering those questions and many, many, more. While the text does get long on statistics and therefore a bit technical to comprehend, I think Quinlan has done an excellent job overall of walking the reader through the precursors to the crisis, the crisis itself, and what our present situation looks like as a result. The first section of the book covers all the events leading up to the late-2008 global economic crisis, tracing issues back to the very roots of the rise of globalization after […]
Sterling Raskie, MSFS, CFP®, ChFC®
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