Supermoney (Audible Audio Edition) Adam Smith Adam Zink Audible Studios Books
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Supermoney may be even more relevant today than when it was first published nearly 25 years ago. Written in the bright and funny style that became Adam Smith's trademark, this book gives a view inside institutions, professionals, and the nature of markets that has rarely been shown before or since.
"Adam Smith" was the first to introduce an obscure fund manager in Omaha, Nebraska, named Warren Buffett. In this new edition, Smith provides a fresh perspective in an updated Preface that contextualizes the applicability of the markets of the 1960s and 1970s to today's markets. Things change, but sometimes the more they change, the more they stay the same.
Supermoney (Audible Audio Edition) Adam Smith Adam Zink Audible Studios Books
Adam Smith, who is really George Goodman, wrote this as a follow-up to the best-selling The Money Game (1968) (which were his first and second non-fiction books). The Money Game (1968) was a number one bestseller for over a year. "Adam Smith" introduced the catchphrase "Assume a can opener"* to mock the tendency of economists to make unjustified assumptions and asked, "Why are the economists almost always wrong?" Goodman was a member of the Editorial Board of The New York Times, an editor of Esquire Magazine, a writer for Fortune magazine, and a founding member of New York magazine where he worked with such writers as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Gloria Steinem.If you have worked in the financial industry or love stock market history you will probably eat this up. If your interest in finance is on the practical side then you can safely give this a pass. It reads like Warren Buffett (who is frequently mentioned) is talking to you. I couldn't put it down. It is very hard to describe because it is a series of conversations, choices, and confrontations to the reader. We are eavesdropping on ideas about investing, Swiss bank accounts, money management, politics and much more. The book is not linear at all. It does explain and show the concept of "Super Money" which is really leveraged money very well. That idea is not nearly as transformational now as it was in the 1970's but here it is well-explained in a very compelling narrative. The more familiar you are with the behind the scenes world of finance the more you will appreciate the profound insights of the author. The wisdom of the message makes this book an absolute classic.
* "Assume a can opener" is a catchphrase used to mock professionals, particularly economists, who base their conclusions on unrealistic or unlikely assumptions and tend to oversimplify problems. "A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, 'Let's smash the can open with a rock.' The chemist says, 'Let's build a fire and heat the can first.' The economist says, 'Let's assume that we have a can-opener...'"
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Supermoney (Audible Audio Edition) Adam Smith Adam Zink Audible Studios Books Reviews
A little bit different than the investing books I typically read but it was entertaining. I especially enjoyed the section of the book that included Smith's meetings with Warren Buffett
This book explains a lot about the sources of inequality. Just as banks loan out 10x the money that they take in from depositors, giving them enormous financial leverage, any public company - or even any company with a plausible hope of going public or being acquired at a high premium - is able to pay its employees in what this book calls Supermoney, valued sometimes at hundreds of times the value of the currency available to companies living purely in the ordinary world of exchanging goods and services. I wrote a long chapter on this topic in my own forthcoming book (entitled WTF What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us.) While that's a big extension of what Adam Smith says here, and in many respects, this book is dated, it provides a fundamental tool for understanding the economy and what has gone wrong with it. Highly recommended.
Great!
Fascinating story. Fun to read.
fun read -- read it on the plane -- kinda old so some of the stuff I had to look up later on but still great
Book Review - Supermoney by Adam Smith
I came across Supermoney in a list of investment books. I forget whose list recommended it, but suspect it was more than one. So I'm now guilty for not giving credit to the site and peerson(s) who turned me onto the book, as I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Published 41 years ago (1972), I was surprised by how much the investment world today is similar to the one described. In 1972 the US equity indexes were not doing well after the market boom of early-and mid-1960s. The Dow fell some 35% between 1968 and mid-1970 when I image the bulk of the writing was done. It was not until 1985 that a sustained bull market started.
The book highlights deals gone bad, investment managers overpaying for growth, and the rejection of hedge funds and finance as a career by university graduates.
Despite the plethora of investment books, academic papers, investor newsletters, magazine articles, and blogs that highlight the fallacy of accounting; market booms and busts, under and overvaluation of asset prices, financial crisis, etc., our basic greed and fear mentality remain intact.
I found Supermoney to be relevant to Asia today. This is because the equity markets and ownership pattern in my part of the world seem to be very similar his description of America 40-60 years ago. (I live in Hong Kong).
Below are some observations linked to quotations from the book. I've added comments and examples
More regulation after a downturn
"The involvement of Congress in passing the Securities Investor Protection Act means a continuing involvement of Congress; the government rarely leaves any endeavor where it has created additional staff".
MM comment think about the rapid increase in financial regulation after 2008's crash.
Currency debasing as cause of national decline
Quoting The International Harry Schultz Letter "A people can only sink lower without a dependable store of value. Currency debauchery is the sole source of US decline and decadence - just as it has been in every society of recorded history."
MM comment think of most macro-economic commentators now
Giving Investors What They Want
"The supply of growth companies grew to meet the demand."
MM Comment think about the large increase in US listed Chinese companies
Fallacy of Nicely Growing Earnings
"Everywhere you looked, there was a company with a neat stepladder of growing earnings. Some kept the stepladder right up to the day they filed for bankruptcy."
MM comment think about Worldcom and Bernie Madoff
Fallacy of Corporate Accounts
"What did it mean to have distinguished accounting name on reports?", "'Nothing,' said Thornton O'Glove, an accountant who writes a newsletter on accounting for a Wall Street firm, 'The signature is worthless.'"
Quoting Leonard Spacek, then a senior partner and chairman emeritus of Arthur Anderson & Company, one of America's Big Eight accountanting firms at the time "How my profession can tolerate such fiction and look the public in the eye is beyond my understanding. I suppose the answer lies in the fact that if your living depends on playing poker, you can easily develop a poker face. My profession appears to regard a set of financial statements as a roulette while to the public investor - and it is his tough luck if he doesn't understand the risks that we inject into accounting reports."
MM comment I continue to hear about accounting frauds and accountants on the take in Mainland China.
Hedge Funds Attracting the Greedy
Quoting a former dean of Harvard Business School admissions,"'Last year,' I said,' my classes all wanted to go right to work for a hedge fund. You couldn't even offer them twenty thousand a year, because they were going to run five million into ten in a year and take twenty percent of the gain. I used to say, 'Good morning, greedy little bastards.'"
MM comment reminds me of last few years in the US
On Malthus and the futility of making forecasts (my favorite quote so far)
"If you had assumed our population growth in 1880 without the automobile, you could have assumed asphyxiation by horse manure".
MM comment most forecasts just don't work (i.e. The Signal and the Noise by Nate Sliver)
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The author sounds a bit like the Michael Lewis of the late-60s to early-90s. 'Adam Smith' is actually George Goodman, a Rhodes Scholar. According to Wikipedia he was in the US Army Special Forces' intelligence group concentrating on psychological warfare. In the mid-80s he started Adam Smith's Money World which ran on America's respectable Public Broadcasting System (PBS). The program won five Emmy Awards. He also wrote three novels and spent time in Hollywood writing screen plays.
I got this book because having heard it is a classic but I never made it past the first chapter because the writing is this old style and it's really boring to the core.
Adam Smith, who is really George Goodman, wrote this as a follow-up to the best-selling The Money Game (1968) (which were his first and second non-fiction books). The Money Game (1968) was a number one bestseller for over a year. "Adam Smith" introduced the catchphrase "Assume a can opener"* to mock the tendency of economists to make unjustified assumptions and asked, "Why are the economists almost always wrong?" Goodman was a member of the Editorial Board of The New York Times, an editor of Esquire Magazine, a writer for Fortune magazine, and a founding member of New York magazine where he worked with such writers as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Gloria Steinem.
If you have worked in the financial industry or love stock market history you will probably eat this up. If your interest in finance is on the practical side then you can safely give this a pass. It reads like Warren Buffett (who is frequently mentioned) is talking to you. I couldn't put it down. It is very hard to describe because it is a series of conversations, choices, and confrontations to the reader. We are eavesdropping on ideas about investing, Swiss bank accounts, money management, politics and much more. The book is not linear at all. It does explain and show the concept of "Super Money" which is really leveraged money very well. That idea is not nearly as transformational now as it was in the 1970's but here it is well-explained in a very compelling narrative. The more familiar you are with the behind the scenes world of finance the more you will appreciate the profound insights of the author. The wisdom of the message makes this book an absolute classic.
* "Assume a can opener" is a catchphrase used to mock professionals, particularly economists, who base their conclusions on unrealistic or unlikely assumptions and tend to oversimplify problems. "A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, 'Let's smash the can open with a rock.' The chemist says, 'Let's build a fire and heat the can first.' The economist says, 'Let's assume that we have a can-opener...'"
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