Product Description

From the witch-hunts of the early modern world to the war on terror, from dot-com mania to the real estate bubble, people have always been caught up in frauds, conceits, and wild guesses - often with devastating results. This book shows groupthink at work in an array of instances throughout history and reveal why swimming against the current pays.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125575 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 424 pages

Features

• New
• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
• Guaranteed packaging
• No quibbles returns

Review
"…extremely timely…irreverent but thought–provoking examination of the goings on in international finance today… packs a serious punch." (The Independent)

"To say that this book is skeptical or contrarian is like saying Warren Buffett has money....entertaining criticism of anything and everything...I read the full 400 pages in just a few days.."–Rob May at Business Pundit (Top 10 business site) http://www.businesspundit.com/50226711/mobs—messiahs—and—markets.php(Nov. 2007)

"...the recent market instability stemming out of subprime woes makes this book extremely timely." (Gulf Business, February 2008)

"Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets by William Bonner and Lila Rajiva is a fascinating work....downright hilarious...a serious look at an important phenomenon in the human condition."– Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty of the highly rated philosophy site, Radical Academy (Oct. 2007)

"a sharp–witted jaunt through the mass hysteria that’s defined markets and people through the ages" –Money Week (Sept. 2007)

"William Bonner and Lila Rajiva provide the answers in this exhilarating –– if somewhat depressing –– book. Although their insights will often make readers laugh out loud, they will also find themselves wriggling uncomfortably at the manifold idiocies of human behaviour." –The National Post, Canada (Nov. 07)

"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay would be a better choice to begin. Without that context for this book, you′ll find yourself gobbling caviar without knowing what it is." – Donald Mitchell, author of The 2000 Percent Solution, December 18, 2007

"A fascinating book," – Alan Caruba in Book Views, December, 2007

"Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is a tragi–comedy, full of sharp observations, delivered with equally sharp wit. This book′s dark and disturbing revelations could leave one depressed and disillusioned, were it not so damn funny." –– Adam Bergen at Blog Critics, December 31, 2007

"…extremely timely…irreverent but thought–provoking examination of the goings on in international finance today… packs a serious punch." (The Independent, Tuesday 11th September)

"...the recent market instability stemming out of subprime woes makes this book extremely timely." (Gulf Business, February 2008)

“…well written and entertaining”.Biz.Yahoo.com Tuesday 6 May 2008

Review
"...well written and entertaining".

From the Back Cover
Praise for

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

"This book strikes at the center of conventional wisdom. It is brilliant and fun to read."
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan

"As fun to read as it is thought–provoking and filled with fascinating insights into how the world really works."
—John Mauldin, President, Millennium Wave Advisors, LLC and author of Bull′s Eye Investing and Just One Thing

"Learn about Fed bubbles and make Ben Bernanke unhappy: read this book."
—Lew Rockwell, President, the Ludwig von Mises Institute

"A cock–eyed, frolicking hell of a read."
—Dr. Mark Skousen, Professor of Economics and author of EconoPower

"I laughed aloud, I learned, and I was even offended. Behind the crafty writing, the authors share the deeper secrets of investing and push us to question what we believe."
—Steve Sjuggerud, Editor of the investment newsletter True Wealth

"Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is one of the funniest and most entertaining books I have ever read. If I had to name just one book investors should read, this is the one I would select."
—Dr. Marc Faber, contrarian guru, author of Tomorrow′s Gold, and Editor of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report

"Entertainingly and irreverently investigates the ′do–gooders′ and ′world–improvers′ who stir up mass hysteria, unjustified wars, and financial crises, while at the same time it warns readers how to better protect themselves and their pocketbooks."
—Ron Paul, United States Congressman

Customer Reviews

History Rewritten to Demonstate Lessons for Today
A quote you'll often read is that history is written by the victors. Many people think that observation is limited to histories of battles and wars. But the same can be said of those who win political and appointed offices, CEOs, and write the daily stories in the press. These victors are almost always impressed with themselves and what just happened while failing to cast any perspective on what might actually be going on. Others hear the same story so often they don't even bother to notice that contrary evidence to the common delusion is all around them. William Bonner and Lila Rajiva are deeply skeptical of the consensus and provide lots of evidence to the contrary. The book's main weakness is that sometimes their evidence is too superficial to capture the underlying causes of what they describe.

What are some of the key lessons the book develops?

1. World improvers using force and funds can do a lot more harm than good. Was invading Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction really necessary?

2. People would rather treat an issue through a story someone tells them rather than think matters through. A failed leader may tell an untrue success story so often that everyone comes to remember only the story, rather than what the leader accomplished.

3. People can easily become fearful of something that's not happening. Witness the political success in the U.S. of "fighting terrorism" when there have been no significant domestic events of this since early 2002.

4. The authors argue that democracy isn't so good for economic growth. I found this analysis incomplete because it failed to separate out the effects of lender-mandated "reforms" by the World Bank and IMF that created depressions in most new democracies in the last few decades.

5. Out of hysteria bred by publicity can come actual harm to the accused. The original witch hunts and the more recent convictions of child care workers based on the "aided" testimony of five-year-olds are cited as evidence.

6. Wars are always associated with false reports of atrocities that no one bothers to question.

7. Many countries enter wars when they would have accomplished more by not doing so (such as the United States in World War I).

8. Most "heroes" were actually bumblers. Che Guevara and Alan Greenspan are cited as examples of the left and right.

9. Booms are rarely created by top-down efforts of governments. True improvements come from the efforts of people working independent of governments.

10. Investors discount unlikely events, underestimating their potential occurrence and impact.

11. The U.S. Federal Reserve has been sponsoring one bubble after another around the world by inflating the U.S. currency in circulation in conjunction with the Japanese Central Bank by offering bargain basement interest rates to borrowers who want to buy into the bubbles.

12. Almost all markets are over priced right now, but investors are unconcerned as they march to the edge of the cliff.

13. To make money in investments, don't do what others do . . . and don't look for problems where there are none.

14. If you decide to sit out the housing and financial markets, gold is a safer bet than money market funds or short-term bonds.

15. Use a historical perspective over a couple of cycles of up and down to see where the markets are at any given time.

Some will find the book maddening because it's oblique in making its points. Others will be charmed by the stories and thought-provoking historical examples.

I suggest that this not be your first book on manias. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay would be a better choice to begin. Without that context for this book, you'll find yourself gobbling caviar without knowing what it is . . . and you may not like the taste without preparation.

Question all popular beliefs and political statements!

Mis-remembering history - we all do it
This is a well researched and documented book - with each assertion backed by facts and analysis. Yet somehow it manages to entertain and hold the readers attention. It might be a little long (412 pages including notes) but it is a well argued case.

Why do financial bubbles happen - well, it seems because we want something for nothing. We want to survive on assets without worrying about income or servicing debts. And, if a million other people are buying stocks or houses at silly prices, then we tend to throw our own judgement out of the window and follow the mob. We all know this is true, and I suspect many of us have been burnt. Yet we all still fall for it, because somehow as a collective we think and act differently as we would as individuals. Worse yet, from a money management perspective, we each take our hard earned money and hand it over the financial managers who are strangers.

The authors admit that they offer no real alternatives to how to do this properly, but they sure give examples of how not to do it. That in itself should help us all.

The book starts with the concept of "Do Gooders Gone wrong" - meaning that people who apparently start out with good intent so often lead the rest of us to the wrong thing. And, sometimes people who want to do bad things and who are delusional (Hitler, anyone?) manage to get other good people to follow. There are many stories in the book illustrating the authors points - but this macabre and downright terrifying tale is particularily powerful:

"The do-gooders who never catch on, of course, are hopeless from the get-go. Take poor Armin Meiwes. The man thought he had a solution to the problems of poverty and over population. He was, no doubt, discussing his program with Bernard Brandes just before the two cut off Brandes' most private part and ate it. Then, wouldn't you know it, Brandes died, either as a result of blood loss from the butchering or as a consequence of Meiwes slitting his throat. And then the press made a big stink about it, branding Meiwes the "Cannibal of Rotenburg." But Meiwes was not merely a pervert; he was an activist.

"We could solve the problem of over population and famine at a stroke," said he, according to testimony in the Times of London. "The third world is really ripe for eating." But wait, a fellow omnivore thought he saw a flaw in Meiwes' utopia: "If we make cannibalism into the norm, then everyone will start eating each other and there will be nobody left." "That's why I'm not keen on eating women," replied Meiwes."

Wow.

Moving hastily along, Rajiva and Bonner analyse how we mis-remember history (otherwise we might learn from our collective mistakes?); how we blame someone or something else for our personal misfortune (it was a curse I was given by a witch, m'lord); and how we ignore our instinct and intuition to follow the logic of the crowd because somehow that makes us feel comfortable.

And yet we forget that the world's most successful private investor (Warren Buffett) is meticulous in understanding the businesses and the people he invests in.

Perhaps the most sobering part of the book is the discussion of the subprime market. I do not claim to be an economist, but when you study the records the authors present over several years (and with the benefit of objective hind sight, of course) anyone can see the trouble brewing. Too much cheap money, lent out against inflated assets, with no real generation of value (and thus income) by anyone in the system to sustain it.

We all never had it so good - until those unfortunate people who could no longer service their mortgage debts lost their homes. South Sea Bubble? Dot Bomb?

So, an entertaining and sobering book. Read it, and learn how to think for yourself, analyse the facts, trust your own intuition ... and don't get conned.

Entertaining or annoying
The reviewer who called this "a big long rant" was spot-on.

I didn't believe him because he didn't elaborate on this, however, and went on to buy the book.

I started getting suspicious when the cover said it was both entertaining, fun to read and thought-provoking. Unfortunately, the book is entertaining only if you accept to agree with every single undocumented or poorly backed claim, and there are loads and loads of them. However, if you accept those, the book isn't thought-provoking. So you'll either find this book thought-provoking and annoying, or you'll find it to fit in with what you already think, in which case it will be fun and entertaining. To put it in another perspective: The writers somehow try to bond with you socially through all the entertainment and humour, and it's always hard, or not fun, to disagree with people you have a "buddy" relation to.

One central theorem in the book seems to be "All do-gooders are nitwits". The logic seems to be like this: Hitler and Mussolini were do-gooders, thus all do-gooders do bad things and not good things. Of course, they should have said "All do-gooders are nitwits, except us do-gooders that try to rid the world of do-gooders". And what about Nelson Mandela? Martin Luther King Jr.? Sir Winston Churchill? Everyone who jointly fought against slavery, Feudalism, Despotism, hunger etc. etc. - and actually won? And what would democracies have been like without the do-gooders of the Enlightenment? This counter-argument could go on forever!

The book also - arguably - takes a quick and quite undocumented stance in favour of cultural relativism - all cultures are equally good. However, as informed people know this is not true. What IS true is that it's nearly impossible to get a full overview of another culture, and thus to judge it.

The writers goes on to rant about modern art, why humans are genetically programmed to act irrationally, and other subjects, but none of this is at a particularly high level. It sounds like something most European academics could have written, and it's only loosely based on science. At some point, the book uncritically, and without references, claims that not only the sun and moon's positions, but also the planets' position in the sky control people's serotonin levels (and thus some of their behaviour) - as predicted in Astrology. That's when I started getting really annoyed.

After this, the book instantly proceeds with logic like "Do-gooders want to raise taxes for the rich, and as we have shown all do-gooders are bad. Thus it is misinformed to raise taxes for the rich". At this point, 50 pages into the book, I induced that the rest of the book would be equally annoying and poorly written, and put it aside. Maybe I've missed out on something, but other reviewers will have to take a stand on that. I'm not going to read another word.

The writers of this book are, however, more intelligent and well-informed than most people, and they admittedly come up with quite a bit of interesting thoughts, even if they're usually poorly founded. If you're an average person, I guess you'll be well off reading this book uncritically and taking everything here as being true. If you're already well-informed about how things work, go for some other book where the style of writing lets you use the critical part of your brain.

You'll be better off going for the book Inevitable Illusions instead, even if it contains nothing about economics.