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Summary: a wonderful book
Review: The most erudite, entertaining, insightful book on economics i have ever read. I loved the sociological vignettes, the eyewitness accounts, the interweaving of human ingenuity and human folly. a classic for the ages.
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Summary: Come join the party!
Review: Things aren't different this time, are they? And they won't be different the next time around neither. The great Oscar Wilde once wrote: "It assures me to see that the others don't agree with me, otherwise I'd have the impression that I'm wrong". In a bubble, a great number of people jump on the bandwagon, the herd mentality predominates and prices are driven too far from fundamental value. One of the things that I like the most in Mr Chancellor's book is his attempt to highlight social and political factors analysing euphoria and bubbles. The self- interest being the principal economic motivation, it's inevitable that nations will be prone to speculative manias: the greed of individuals will provide the driving force, while the lack of tough regulation and political laxism will certainly help to make things worse. Fortunately bubbles, like epidemics, are rare and those who have been burned once tend to be inoculated for life - so the disease has to wait at least until the next generation has grown up before it strikes again. Mr Chancellor provides three common features of the euphoric stage of a bubble: conspicuous consumption, corruption (what a novelty!) and new-age theories. During bull market periods people tend to be more extravagant in their consumption - after all the Empire State Building was planned at the peak of the 1920s bull market, Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers were completed just before the 1997 asian financial crisis, the Tulip Mania bubble came at a time of great prosperity in the Netherlands when people had money to spend on luxury goods like tulips, freshly imported from Turkey - and it's certainly not Keynes with his Consumption and Saving Marginal Propension Law who'll disagree. Furthermore, those who profit from doubtful operations will find it not difficult to keep those in authority onside by bribery - does the name John Blunt ring a bell to you? Besides all this I have to admit that there are few things in this books that I don't find very convincing. I have the impression there's a teeny-weeny bias towards speculators in this book, and we all know how useful speculators are in "normal" times and under tight regulations, and I'm not thinking only of the liquidity they provide to the market. And besides this, bubbles are not totally irrational; although being one-off events, they follow a standart pattern and share many common characteristics...but I guess I'm nitpicking a bit here. This is one of the most intelligent and insightful books I've read, as far as economics and financial works are concerned. Had more people read it right before the 1998-2000 Nasdaq bubble, would the aftermath have been less painful? I doubt it: one of the few things that history has taught us up to now is that it continually keeps repeating itself, and more important yet, we quite never learn from our past painful mistakes.
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Summary: Reads like a novel
Review: This book is a great buy. It takes you from ancient Rome (where speculators - the word comes from the Latin speculum which means mirror - were those that were on the lookout for trouble) through Amsterdam's tulipomania to the recent LTCN debacle. It reads like a novel and is not afraid to mention Freud.
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Summary: Play it again Alan!
Review: This book is an exception in a market flooded with similar tales. While they all seem to start off with the South Seas Bubble and then trudge through the familiar seed beds of tulips and Real Estate, Devil Take the Hindmost skips quickly on to more recent scams. It's a fast moving tale of greed and fear that in my opinion is one of the best on the market. Chancellor, an ex. financial journalist, writes extremely well and knows how to spin a good story. After all, that what all the bubbles were based on. Hot air and hapless dupes. Devil Take the Hindmost wasn't written late enough in the day to get into the most recent latest madness - the global IT bubble centred on the US. But all the recent scams are there -: Michael Milken and his junk bond extravaganza in the 1980s, the Japanese equity bubble and the missing artwork masterpieces in the late 1980s and the Hong Kong property and Red Chip bubbles of the mid-1990s. Working in the emerging markets field, I'd say market bubbles are a lot more common than some of the previous reviewers seem to believe. I've seen almost half a dozen in Asia in the last six years. In a nice touch, Chancellor skips forward in each chapter to look at how history repeats itself which vicious regularity. After reading this you'll wonder why the recent technology bubble ever took off. There have been so many of these scams in the past that surely someone must have seen the crash coming. Of course, there were many, many cassandras and many foresaw the final reckoning. But no one listened. No one bothered to work out their risk-reward profile. In many cases, they didn't even understand that reward and risk go upwards hand-in-hand. They were all too busy buying over-priced stocks and bonds in companies that had little more than an idea behind them. Sound familiar? Well, first there was a spot of trouble in the South Seas. Then things got crazy in Tulips, The Gilded Age, Real Estate, Transistors, Junk Bonds.........
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Summary: Dry and not the whole story
Review: This book is not that good. First is it a fairly dry history. The stories of the manias and bubbles that make up the book are fascinating times with fascinating people but the tales told here are dry and better told elsewhere. The subtext in the book, that we are in a mania and bubble today, is important and reasonable. A more important, relevant and interesting subject are the stories of other transitional times in history, like the introduction of the railroad, the car, the telephone, the printed page or the industrial revolution. Comparing those times to the introduction of the Internet would be more valuable or at the least should not omitted completely from the text.
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Summary: Very informative
Review: This book is one of the most complete and concise books written on the matter of financial speculation that I have found to date. It covers most of the major periods of extensive financial speculation; including the Japanese market of the 1980's, the crash of 1929, and the South Seas debacle. It certainly offers a solid historical base upon which to view today's seemingly maniacly environment; one in which the Nasdaq sports an average P/E ratio of 175 and companies that have never made a penny in profits boast multi-billion dollar market caps.
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Summary: One of the best new books around!
Review: This book is very inciteful about the history of speculation. It also presents comparisons to today and how it relates to us. I really enjoyed this book and it is definatly worth the money I payed.
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Summary: Outstanding
Review: This book is written at the college level, so it may be hard going for someone used to typical investment books. A somewhat breezier text is Money, Greed, and Risk by Charles R. Morris, which is also very good. I was already familiar with the basic history of booms and busts in speculative markets, but this book helped fill out the picture with many interesting details.
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Summary: Anticipates the pricking of the Internet Bubble
Review: This is a sobering tome published at exactly the right time. Unfortunately I was too busy salivating at the prospects of quadruple-figure appreciation when I bought Priceline.com at $104 to read it when it came out last year. Now reading it makes for a nice penitence as I contemplate the error of my financial ways while filling out forms for a second mortgage on the ranch. Just joking. Actually this is a readable and entertaining account from Roman times to the modern hedge fund mania. The usual financial delusions are covered, the tulip mania, the South Sea bubble, the crashes of 1929 and 1987, etc. Chancellor does especially nice surgical work on the Japanese bubble economy of the eighties. The operative mechanism is at first GREED, an emotion that blinds investors, just as jealousy blinds the cuckolded or love the lover, into seeing delusion instead of reality, and persuades them to pay high prices for something of little or no value. Then, when it is seen that the emperor has no clothes, that dot.com megamegabucks has no earnings and isn't likely to have any--ever--the value of the trifle paid so dearly for, begins to fall. Now the emotion of FEAR takes hold. This also blinds the investor. The crash begins, the bubble bursts, and overly-margined plutocrats jump despondently out of the windows of high-storied buildings... Or shoot up brokerage houses with live bullets. Notice however that when Internet stocks went very far south of the Cape of Good Hope this last year, no bubble burst; rather the sector experienced the slow deflation characteristic of a tire going flat. This was mainly because the margin requirements at brokerage houses are now fifty percent instead of the ten percent that prevailed during the Roaring Twenties. Chancellor makes note of this and other differences that make bursting bubbles less painful perhaps, but no more unlikely since the fundamental human emotions underlying the mechanism that produces speculation has not changed.
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Summary: Insightful!
Review: This is a thoroughly engaging book about the world of financial speculation. Edward Chancellor discusses the origins of financial markets from the time of the Roman Empire through the modern Internet bubble. The book offers great insights about stock exchanges, outbreaks of speculation mania, and the fraud and greed that accompany any human endeavor. He presents in-depth reviews of many well-known "speculative manias" and several of the lesser-known ones. We at getAbstract recommend this book to anyone who wants a thoughtful treatment of a subject that touches all our lives.
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