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11 internautes sur 11 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
3.0étoiles sur 5
Journalists and Pundits "Explain" Past and Current Market Collapses, Déc 18 2008
Unless you feel compelled to read every word that Michael Lewis writes, skip this book.
Panic! is a very peculiar concept for a book: Assemble mostly stories by journalists (and a few pundits) to describe the mood before, during, and after market crashes . . . while also providing a little understanding of "why" the market crashed. To me, that's a little like expecting sports journalists to predict who will be the best-performing athletes next season . . . and then explain why their predictions didn't pan out.
What do journalists know about financial markets? Based on reading these articles, precious little.
There are occasional gems that bear reading and serious consideration, but they are too few and too far between.
The articles are grouped around the market collapses that began with the October 1987 meltdown driven and aided by "portfolio insurance" program trades and move on to the currency runs on Thailand and Russia in 1997 and 1998, the Internet stock collapse in 2000, and the subprime mortgage fiasco recently spreading into the stock market crash of 2008-.
I predict that most readers will find the articles "describing" 1987 to be pretty confusing. There are better articles written about the period that are omitted from this collection. The currency runs are only slightly less confusing. The last two disasters are easier to follow if you aren't an economist or someone who watches CNBC six hours a day.
The standout of all the articles is the essay by Dave Barry, "How to Get Rich in Real Estate," from Dave Barry's Money Secrets. It's hilarious and right on. It's too bad the rest of the writing isn't as good.
Don't get me wrong. Michael Lewis knows how to write about finances in an entertaining way (even if he admits that he doesn't understand the newfangled financial instruments all that well), but he contributed only seven of the substantive articles in the collection. Two of them you will have read before (from Liar's Poker and The New, New Thing). One of them seems offbase to me ("In Defense of the Boom" which seems to say that having a wildly overpriced stock market in Internet stocks was a good thing).
I would have graded the book lower, but I was pleased to see that Mr. Lewis understands that the typical austerity advice that the IMF and the World Bank peddle to underdeveloped countries when there is a run on their currency is all wet. If we followed that advice in the current crisis, our short-term interest rate would be 22 percent and about 15 million more Americans would already be out of jobs.
At a time when one of the greatest financial messes in the history of the world is being unveiled daily in front of you, I would suggest you skip this book and watch the far more fascinating drama that's going on now. Clip the articles that you like, and you too will be able to produce a book like this one at some point.
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3 internautes sur 3 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
3.0étoiles sur 5
Retrospective of crises since 1987 offers little support for author's theory, Déc 27 2009
The title of Michael Lewis' recent book "Panic" may already seem a bit dated now that markets seem to have eased their way up from last year's financial crisis, but it's not just this most recent panic that has captured Mr. Lewis' attention. Starting with the 1987 crash (the largest drop in history), working his way through the Asian currency crisis of 1997 and Long Term Capital Management's market churning demise in 1998, then on to the dot-com bubble, and finally ending with the recent real estate bubble and related crisis in the world's financial infrastructure, Lewis weaves a very readable narrative from articles and book excerpts published at the time of the events. The effect is at once historical (most of the events happened a while ago) and immediate (the articles were clearly written at the time of the events). The articles are chosen well, and even reference each other - quite a feat for being published independently.
Some of the articles feature names in contexts that seem quite humerous now. For example, one article features future NYSE president and future mega-pension recipient Dick Grasso, and another refers reverently to Bernie Madoff as a market authority and in the next sentence to disgraced analyst Henry Blodget as a rising star. Still another has then newly minted US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan opining that there was only a "very small" chance of another market crash, and another has Jim Cramer lamenting the decline in his company [...]decline in share value, and that if he had to do it again (journalism) he would do it on TV.
While the articles are interesting and woven together capably, they fail completely to support Lewis' notion in his introduction that these are the first of a new type of panic. How are they different? Lewis doesn't say. In fact, upon completion of the book, one is left wondering if this isn't indeed more of the same human folly, just told in a novel and detailed way.
Lewis himself has seven of the book's fifty five articles, and fortunately he's a very gifted and entertaining writer himself. Other writers include Robert Shiller, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Roger Lowenstein, and even Dave Barry - top names that will be familiar to readers of the financial press. The book includes a light glossary at the end, and a brief biography of each of the authors and journalists.
To try to add some referential credibility, Lewis cites once Charles Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", but aside from this reference and the inclusion of articles by the above esteemed journalists and economists, there is little that's academically robust about this book. By comparison, the late Charles Kindleberger makes a compelling, academically robust, though somewhat dryly worded case that bubbles have happened for centuries around the world, and the latest edition of his book "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" is updated through the dot-com bubble.
Lewis' ostensible reason for putting the book together seems quickly forgotten in order to provide a chronological series of interesting articles about major market events of the past twenty years. A very interesting read, but one that leaves you wondering what exactly the message of the book is. For all its readability, it has neither the captivating and personal accounts of Lewis' first book, "Liar's Poker", nor an edifying text that contributes to our understanding of markets. Few will refer to this book in ten years the way they do to "Liar's Poker" twenty years on.
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2 internautes sur 2 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
4.0étoiles sur 5
An Interesting Look Back, Janv. 29 2009
The newest book edited by Michael Lewis, aptly named "Panic" is a collection of previously published articles before, during, and after the market collapses of 1987, the Asian financial crisis of 1998, the Dot Com bust in 2001 and the latest Subprime mortgage meltdown.
Though, none of the books contents represents any new analysis or synthesis of the events past, nor is much contextualization given by Lewis of the articles and events, I still felt that the book was a good read. Mostly because it was refreshing to re-read what people were feeling at the time. They give a snapshot in time of the over-confidence, anxieties, and overall market psychology that underlies the whole system.
I do highly recommend this book, not just because I'm a Michael Lewis fan, but because I think the book illustrates both the complexity and the folly of the economic markets. There's no trying to make sense of it all, because there is no sense to begin with.
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de Michael Lewis
de James Grant
de Michael Lewis
