More than any I have read so far, this book has captured all the major factors that have contributed to the financial crisis we are now facing. Barry Ritholtz does an excellent job of documenting all the missteps, moral hazard, short-term thinking, unintended consequences, bailouts and greed that have brought us to the brink. If you want to know how to turn an economic superpower into a bailout nation on the edge of financial collapse, in this book Ritholtz lays out the step-by-step recipe and we as a nation have followed it to a “T.” The continuing pattern throughout Ritholtz’s chronicle is that using a bailout as a response to a financial crisis plants the seeds for a bigger financial crisis requiring a bigger bailout. Given that we are in the midst of the biggest bailout in the history of man, the seeds that are being planted now should reap a bountiful harvest of disaster. After reading this, you will know whom to be mad at…especially when the next (perhaps fatal) shoe drops.
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Over the years, many people have asked me for investment advice. This section is my answer to the question, “Chip, what are you doing with your portfolio?” It details the portfolio I use to implement my investment strategy— the Plumb Performance Portfolio© |
Further details and return history about the Plumb Performance Portfolio. |
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“...an investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs great resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money. Finally, it is the long-term investor, he who promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for the most criticism, wherever investment funds are managed by committee or boards or banks. For it is the essence of his behavior that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness, and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”
– Lord John Maynard Keynes