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HA: Reviews of Stuff
This a new blog that reviews stuff that we are interested in – books, music, technology and more! If you have any suggestions send us an email to reviews@hedgeanswers.com.
No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller…
July 9th, 2010When Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme imploded in December 2008, it unleashed two major scandals. One was the biggest fraud in financial history: Huge losses with lots of victims. The other great indignity (and arguably the bigger one) is that the world’s biggest financial con survived for years under the nose of America’s top regulatory agency: the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Harry Markopolos spent nearly a decade warning the SEC that Madoff’s returns were too good to be true. But the regulatory honchos ignored Markopolos, a securities analyst and forensic accountant. Markopolos recounts this amazing but disturbing story in No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (Wiley 2010). It’s a page turner that reads like a whodunnit (even though Markopolos knew who did it) fused with a sobering indictment of SEC incompetence. Think Raymond Chandler meets Ben Graham.
“It all began in 1999 when my friend Frank Casey first brought Madoff to my attention,” Markopolos recalls. “I was confounded by the Wall Street mogul’s financial successes, and had to know more. I tried but couldn’t replicate his results. I later concluded it was impossible. One red flag led to another, until there were simply too many to ignore.”
Madoff’s scam finally collapsed in December 2008. What was the trigger? It wasn’t the SEC. The straw that ultimately broke Bernie’s back was the 2008 financial crisis. You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out, Warren Buffett once said. In December 2008, the tide finally went out on Madoff. What if the economy and markets had continued to rise? Perhaps Madoff would still be in business today.
“THE BIG BURN”, by Timothy Egan
July 5th, 2010Calling The Big Burn a story about a forest fire would be like calling 9-11 a plane crash. Both events defined America’s vulnerability at the hands of underestimated enemies and government officials deafened by naysayers. Being green wasn’t always politically correct, as Timothy Egan shows us in his detailed, often moving account of the early 20th century boom-time battle between land barons and the fledgling conservation movement whose hero, Teddy Roosevelt, considered conservation “a great moral issue”. Roosevelt’s newly created U.S. Forest Service fought an uphill battle for funding, manpower and respect for a newly minted and zealously dedicated corps of forest rangers as land and timber interests threw up roadblocks, political and physical. It took the 1910 fire called the Big Burn, destroying over 3-million acres in Idaho and Montana, to open America’s eyes to the value of the forests through the realization that brave men– forest rangers– had died, been burned or relinquished body parts to fight for wilderness as a gift for generations to come. The personal sacrifices made by many of these first rangers during the Big Burn provide a heartbreakingly human face for a battle fought both in Washington, DC, and in a muddy mine tunnel that provided a last stand for one group of firefighters led by legendary ranger Ed Pulaski, inventor of an ax bearing his name still used today to fight forest fires.
Frugality is Chic in Weber's "In Cheap We Trust"
June 29th, 2010Lauren Weber brings us the 2009 version of I’m OK, You’re OK through a well-researched chronicle of American spending habits that could be called, I’m Cheap, You’re Cheap and We’re All OK. Born to an admitted cheapskate who refused to use turn signals to save money on light bulbs while at the same time putting his children through the best universities money can buy, Weber takes us on an exhaustive and, at times, tedious history lesson that keeps coming back to the same idea– that cheapness, frugality, whatever you want to call it, is a very personal concept that means different things to different people and the rules of cheapness change all the time because we’re such gluttons for prosperity in her book “In Cheap We Trust” (Little, Brown 2009). We like our flat-screen TV’s and 10-dollar lunches, but we don’t have enough money in the bank for an emergency, let alone retirement. Perhaps the take-home message from Ms. Weber is one that millions of Americans already practice: “…don’t be afraid to turn down the thermostat. If your kids complain, tell them they can put on another sweater. Someday, they’ll understand. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll thank you for it.”
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