A strong print review by Araminta Wordsworth from The National Post.
MOBS, MESSIAHS AND MARKETS: SURVIVING THE PUBLIC SPECTACLE IN FINANCE AND POLITICS
William Bonner and Lila Rajiva, John Wiley 424 pages, $33.99
It has been more than 25 years since gold hit the kind of highs we have been seeing recently and widows and orphans lined up round the block to get their hands on an ingot. Now, the yellow metal is building for another run-up and gold bugs, who’ve been holding on for just such a day, are saying, “I told you so.”
But canny investors with money burning a hole in their pockets are looking elsewhere — to ethanol stocks, say, or farmland in Argentina. Or, if they insist on having a piece of this action, gold mining stocks, even though Mark Twain described a gold mine as “a hole in the ground owned by a liar.”
Yet gold will still find buyers at these prices, though logic and commonsense should quickly show the foolhardiness of the “investment.”
Why does this happen again and again, with those least able to bear the losses throwing away their money?
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 authors’ hope is that some of their advice will stick, enabling us to stand aside as the herd thunders by — and prosper.
Which is tough, as they admit humans are engineered to want to be part of a group. We are more comfortable when “everybody else” seems to be thinking along the same lines, whether it is investors stampeding into a sure-fire money earner or mobs of 17th-century New Englanders being convinced that harmless old ladies who lived by themselves were witches. Or Americans believing the world is being made safe against terror by invading Iraq.
As the Japanese proverb notes, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”
Take real estate. In the past decade, as housing prices have risen like a cake baking in the oven, pushing many properties into the unreal category, buyers have been encouraged to purchase ever-larger and more expensive houses, taking out equally large mortgages. The belief is that you can always sell a house for more than you paid for it.
But as the subprime mess south of the border is showing in spades, this is just not true. Although Canadians have been protected to a large extent by tougher lending rules here — insistence on a down-payment in almost all cases, for example — we should not imagine we are insulated from any aftershocks.
It is clearly a global concern. For the first time in several years, house prices in England have stopped their meteoric rise. Many British house owners will be vulnerable to any fall in value as they have been able to borrow 100% of the purchase price. Canadian banks are also among those caught up in the disaster, thanks to their purchase of mortgage-backed securities, sliced and diced portfolios of mortgages often of doubtful quality. Massive write downs are already the order of the day south of the border.
As historians, the authors also provide some valuable alternatives to accepted accounts of past events. Among many examples is the first invasion of Kabul in 1842. This is usually portrayed in British history books as a valiant expedition that ended in unforeseen tragedy. In their hands it becomes a study in bungling ineptitude, with the tragedy being all too easily predictable.
Government types are also high on the Bonner/Rajiya list of betes noires. These range from the usual suspects, such as Hitler and Mao, to less obvious targets like the World Bank and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also attracts their ire for suggesting that U.S. gasoline consumption would be cut by giving the owners of hybrid vehicles free parking.
Read this book and laugh. But I guarantee it will also provide much food for thought.