“Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets” is coming out next week in the book stores.

Pretty exciting.

And the end of a year-long saga.

Bill and I began work on the book in July, 2006.

Well, sort of.

In fits and starts.

We couldn’t fit in what both of us wanted to say and we got a late start… September 2006, to be exact.

The late start came about because Bill convinced me (he is a powerful persuader) that I ought to transport myself to South America to help write the manuscript somewhere on his 250,000 acre ranch in the terrain beyond the colonial university town of Salta (it might have been twice that much — I’ve lost count of the zeroes), lost in the north-western mists of Argentina, near the border of Peru.

It says something, I suppose, that I seriously planned on doing it.

Although I don’t speak Spanish and had never set foot in South America before.

But I ended up hanging out in Buenos Ayres.

Not a bad place to hang out, by the way.

And no, I did not live in one of Agora’s magnificent French apartments on Nuevo de Julio, but that’s another story.
Getting back to the book. Bill is a prolific author, as anyone who knows him would say. Churning out words is not a problem for him. And I believe I am not lacking in loquacity either. Of course, we could cull material from his financial columns. But this book was not really only – or even mostly – about finance. It’ s on something very central to Bill’s thinking —  “public thinking” — the kind of pseudo-thinking about big issues that dominates the newspapers.

We ended up working in a bit of a frenzy.

The result was that between late September and the end of December ‘06, while we thought we’d put together a manuscript of about 500 pages, we turned out to have been counting in single- spaced pages — which meant we actually had on our hands some 1000 pages, almost three times the length of the usual financial book.

It was, needless to say, a singularly tedious January for me…..

But, finally, we did manage to turn in the finished product right on deadline in the first week of February.

It was by then a slimmer and a more toned opus, but even then, as Bill’s good friend, contrarian guru Marc Faber asked — who would want to read a 400- page book, when most people these days think they can become informed about everything everywhere in the world from 30-second TV spots?

Good question.

But, apparently, a lot of people do. A week before hitting the stores and with the marketing just gearing up, MOBS is already #4 on Amazon (it was briefly #3) and #1 in the business/finance section. (It’s actually backed off to #5 this evening).
That means it’s up there behind Harry Potter, a story by Khaled Hosseini set in Afghanistan, a memoir of a famous rock-and-roll trifecta (George Harrison-Patty Boyd-Eric Clapton), and a book about Mother Theresa.

Saints, Sinners, War — and Magic.

We, I suppose, must classify ourselves under Money.

But I rather think there’s really a bit of everything in the book. In a skewed helter-skelter fashion.

Money, of course. The genuine kind and the dubious stuff mounting up in gigantic heaps all over the planet like industrial waste.

War, course. That’s what empires do best. And we included a full complement of would-be saints and the herd of sinners who stumble after them.

The only thing we missed was magic. Although, come to think of it, we have a dollop of that too — in the chapters about central banks and paper money.

Talk about conjuring from thin air.

Hogwarts has nothing on the Bank of Bernanke.