Rating: 
Summary: Exellent work
Review: Bonner's Financial Reckoning Day is a tour de force: his is a lucid account of the current economic climate with practical and specific advice for the future. Along with Krugman's The Great Unraveling and Mahar's Bull!: A History of the Boom, this one of my favorite investing/economic history books of 2003.
Rating: 
Summary: doom and gloom abound
Review: Another Doom and Gloom book. Right up there with "Dr." Ravi Batra. There is an old saying in the investment world "bulls make money and bears make money...but hogs get slaughtered and chickens get plucked" What this means is that if you use a common sence investment approach the stock market, bond market or other investments are not an unsafe place to keep your money. Bonner and Wiggin are doing a disservice to those new to the investment world. If you are new to investing and are looking for practical advice that you can actually use, read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.
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Summary: Overblown, Same Old
Review: A lot of philosophising and meandering before getting to the "essence" of the message which we have all heard many times before anyway in many previous "countdown to economic disaster books". The message-that there is no free lunch, printing dollars will ultimitely lead to disaster and Social Security is a Ponzi scheme headed for a meltdown etc. So what else is new?
Rating: 
Summary: from a customer of Bill Bonner's
Review: Interesting book, but bear a few things in mind. I subscribe to several of his products - Oxford Club,Q Wave, and his E-newsletter. This really is more a diatribe, which is entertaining and fairly accurate, than market advice. He rips Ed Yardeni for his Y2K stance (but the ultimate Y2K loser was Gary North, whom he thanks in his preface), he rips Gilder, who was right about tech, but wrong about tech stocks, and in general points out a lot of stuff he's been right about but with a sarcastic edge.If you really want this type of information with bite, documentation, and substance, either join the Oxford Club, or read any of James Dale Davidson/Rees-Mogg's work. I should say, despite the fact that this book is 3 star, that his E newsletter has saved me tens of thousands of dollars by basically following his overall idea of market direction.
Rating:
Summary: "A fool and his money..."
Review: LOL at the one star reviews. Go ahead, buy the NASDAQ, someone has to. Ain't going to be me. Books like this do a tremendous service for people who are willing to turn off CNBC and consider for a moment that most of the stuff we are bombarded with day in and day out may not be accurate. Kudlow and Cramer are fun to watch, but come on, so are the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Judging by what has been happening (again) in the stock market, it seems that not only have we not learned John Law's lesson, we havn't even learned the NASDAQ lesson yet. Alan Greenspan is still supposedly leading us to the promised land? Ignore this book at your own peril.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappoiniting: Interesting history. No advice on "Survival"
Review: While I found this book interesting and educational as a history of bubble economies and modern monetary systems, it contains no usable financial advice of any kind. 99.99% of the text is devoted to predictions of doom. Unfortunatlly, Bonner & Wiggin forgot to cover the subject of their sub-title, i.e. "Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century". There is absolutely zero explicit advice here. Just a hint (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) to buy gold because fiat currencies will become worthless. As a fan of Harry S. Dent, I already know that the sky is likely to fall What I need are instructions on how to shore it up. All-in-all I consider this book a waste of money as an investment guide. To pick nits about style, Bonner should remember that not everyone speaks French. When you use a term from a foreign language, please provide the translation either parenthetically or in a foot note.
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Summary: Author is President of Publisher under SEC investigation
Review: William Bonner, one of the authors of Financial Reckonig Day is listed as president of Agora Inc, a financial newsletter publisher. The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a complaint against Agora, alleging the publisher and one of it's subsidiaries called Pirate Investor engaged in a scheme to defraud investors by disseminating false information in several internet newsletters. As they say, check the source.
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Summary: Eating their cake in Paris...
Review: If anything, these guys are clever. They publish a book about the madness of crowds (writing glibly, in a way that makes the reader feel like an insider conspiring to cash in on the foolishness of others as America nears the brink of a long slump). And then, through their Agora Publishing service, send readers of their Daily Reckoning email newsletter endless solicitations to buy trading alerts that promise humongous gains in just days (and subscriptions can cost $2,000/year!). In other words, they are selling pickaxes to the greedy prospectors that they deride. What chutzpah. Today they sent me an email titled "special appeal to the Financial Reckoning Day brigade?which basically asked readers to tell their friends about their great contrarian book so that it can get into the top 5 of the NY Times bestseller list, which will mean prominent displays in bookstores. I guess they figure that everyone is bullish now, but if they can just get their bearish perspective out, perhaps the tipping point will arrive sooner and their prophecy will become self-fulfilling (which means winning their bets). As for the book, it's an entertaining quick read that makes the point that fiat currency easily loses value if not backed by something of real worth. The expansion of the money supply under Greenspan's tenure fueled the tech, real estate and consumption bubbles. Meanwhile the free-spending, highly indebted baby-boom generation is approaching retirement and is about to sell their assets. In other words, we're exactly 10 years behind Japan. Here comes the bust. Buy gold! (Psst ?need any pickaxes?)
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Summary: Returning to the basics of prosperity
Review: The premise of this book is a return to what's essentially and historically true about wealth building and wealth retention. William Bonner develops a very powerful historical analysis of booms, bubbles, and busts in the context of human behavior in the market place. He characterizes how an individual, a nation, and a civilization participate in prevailing markets that produce and destroy wealth. It's a powerfully insightful study of the pros and cons of the uses of paper currency systems, in markets since the first major such boom and bust in circa 1720 France. The reader will find many familiar elements in each of Bonner's historical examples. The book opens with a review of the most well known corporate failures of the early 21st century. It's an effective survey, explicating details in a cohesive historical manner, which makes those events and times sensible and understandable. In another chapter, Bonner writes a terrific history and philosophical treatment of Alan Greenspan. This enigmatic character has been something of a mystery to me, and I finally now know whence Greenspan came. Bonner effectively chastises modern economists who rely exclusively upon quantitative methods without factoring in without understanding the qualitative nature of the markets-for example, the mass psychology of the mob. He identifies the larger quantitative issues that apply to the market-issues that determine how the markets must respond in kind. For example, his chapter on demographics is so compelling that it is almost frightening in places. He locates two powerful modern demographic surges. One is the aging of the baby boomers, in both Japan and in the rest of the western industrialized world. Craig Karpel developed this factor is very well too, in his book, "The Retirement Myth." Bonner shows how the aging baby boomers will depress the stock market in the long run, and create a very serious crisis in health care costs-especially where large numbers of the aged and longevity are concerned. The other demographic time-bomb is the radical boom of young males in primarily Islamic countries. This factor is also very well explored some fifteen years earlier, in James Dale Davidson's work, in "The Great Reckoning." In this case, Bonner shows that whenever similar demographic surges occurred in history, socio-political and economic systems were challenged, in crisis, and ultimately transformed into something completely new. In a major sense, the book appears pessimistic about the future of the American economy. In "The Great Reckoning," Davidson writes, that in what seems to be prosperous modern America, we're actually spending down the capital wealth accrued over two hundred years. Although I intuitively knew he was correct in that assertion, I never fully understood how. With "Financial Reckoning Day," I now have that full understanding at last. It makes so much sense. Yet, under girding Bonner's treatment, is a refreshing grounding of the fundamental principles of true wealth building. I come away from this book with confirmation that the basics of how to create real wealth (in lieu of deriving it,) saving money (in lieu of spending it,) and storing value in precious assets are fundamental and sound. So much of the market behavior in the past two decades has been counter-intuitive-and often I've been somewhat bewildered, thinking that something was wrong with me. Yet, I have never followed the masses in my investment choices. In his new book, William Bonner has validated the common sense basics that I have believed in, and followed, which will yield prosperity even in the emerging economy.
Rating: 
Summary: Marshalls a lot of economic facts
Review: This is a worthwhile read. The authors portray the USA in a worrisome light using a lot of insight and comparisons of the present with historical economic events, some quite famous and interesting in their own right. However, they do not quite get the connection between massive trade deficits/surpluses and their multiplier effects on banking systems, leading to disastrous bubbles. They seem to feel it is substantially all monetarist activity at the FED, which certainly is a major contributing factor to our present bubble. This book should be read in conjunction with The Dollar Crisis by Richard Duncan in order to understand the cental bank role and get the true macro picture of excessive liquidity and why we are in a liquidity trap.
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