Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 21-25 of 53
 important ... but I wish it were better written November 30, 2008
JPC (NC United States)
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
There are few people in the world whose opinions and insights on financial issues matter more than El-Erian. So this is an extremely important book, even for the average investor. However, the book's audience seems to be mainly managers of large portfolios and financial policy makers, and many of the issues discussed will seem arcane to the average investor. Making it that much more difficult for the average reader, I thought the writing style left much to be desired. For instance, El-Erian repeatedly outlines the issues the book will cover, but then, when he actually gets to the meat of his arguments, I felt he left many important points unclear or even just alluded to. I hope future editions will try to improve the books clarity and organization.
Finally, I wish El-Erian would have spent a bit more time on explaining how the average investor implements and monitors the investing strategies he recommends. Nevertheless, keeping in mind that this is not a handbook for us normal people, the average investor can gain a truly authoratative big-picture account of how the global financial landscape is evolving and how this will impact their investments in the coming years.
 when market collide November 25, 2008
Seth M. Wilfong
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
excellent read and very pertinent to the investor/trader who wishes to stay on top of the future investment climate.
 Unlocking the Credit Crisis November 22, 2008
Red Dawn (Glendale, AZ, USA)
5 out of 12 found this review helpful
The United States is now a debtor nation to the tune of about $10 trillion (why did I have to find out this amount from BBC America & THE THREE TRILLION DOLLAR WAR instead of from CNBC?). Debtor nations issue & market their debt at attractive rates to nations having a large surplus of money beyond what they require for investing in U.S. Treasuries. Unfortunately, due to an absence of a compliance agency overseeing the integrity of U.S. debt, bad debt got mixed in with good debt. (See my review of BAD MONEY for background on how we got to this point.) Thus, the global credit lock-up. Now it looks as if a stop-gap recall & some form of warranty for guaranteeing our bad debt has to be implemented UNTIL pristine regulations concerning debt quality & compliance laws are promulgated.
WHEN MARKETS COLLIDE presents a structure for repairing the global crisis. Sadly, it took a "Black Swan" event to awaken us to this necessity. El-Erian provides guidance for individual investors/institutions, national policy, & multilateral relationships.
A new way of thinking: Consider the global economy as a 3-D chessboard with each country represented by a board & everything inter-connected by derivatives for easing the passage from one board to another of each country's financial instruments & products. In other words, the variety of investment vehicles are here to stay. See allianzinvestors.com for PGP, for example.
From an individual investor's point of view, due diligence must rely less on out-sourced risk management advice & more on our own efforts. For example, Citigroup at $55 per share began losing value prior to the end of 2006, but it took Deutsche Bank until November 14, 2008, to guide us from a Buy to a Hold. Readers need to incorporate risk management with overlays & the Lemon Theory into traditional asset allocation. Promising alternative investment vehicles are the "130/30" funds & indexed products with actively managed overlays. See cefa.com.
I would ignore any negative comments on writing style. El-Erian mastered his English writing style while at Cambridge & Oxford.
 dissapointing November 14, 2008
gabster
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
you would think that the CEO of the largest bond fund would have meaningful insights to share..... but you'd be wrong
 With this book, I give up my remaining trust in cover blurbs. November 9, 2008
David R. Harper (Los Angeles, CA USA)
254 out of 269 found this review helpful
I bought this book because it won the Financial Times Book of the Year Award (not a top ten winner or something, #1 mind you). Historically, a reliable guide (e.g., the masterpiece China Shakes the World, and theoretically dubious but highly provocative Friedman's World is Flat). It has dawned on me belatedly that advance praisers probably don't read their books. All these absolutely glowing endorsements by serious people...for a book that *clearly* isn't top notch.
T. Bojko's review may seem harsh, but it's spot-on. I can live with the ponderous writing style. I initially thought the big words concealed some new or profound thinking...but not at all.
The problems are: 1. there's almost nothing new or inspired about the "markets of tomorrow," and 2. there is nary a sliver of new, actionable advice about investing. The whole thing is a compendium of the superficial. Seeking to cut a swath a mile wide, it is everywhere one inch deep.
In regard to the first, the following are superficially summarized: global trade/capital flows (rightly footnoted to Martin Wolf, but Wolf's own columns are better on this); a cocktail of snippets on behavioral finance - called a "cocktail" - just read Shiller straightaway; some stuff on global trade and commodities, see latest Economist; a paraphrase of Taleb's colorful insights (just read Taleb directly); a woefully weak primer-not-really on securitization; a brief primer on asset classes that repeats everything I've got in a dozen other finance books; and too much material on IMF (e.g., not a single mention of Basel). I agree the topics per se are important, but most of them here are superficially derivative of other, better works.
Here are the four insights from Chapter 2: we are coming from a period of aberrations, many puzzles; too many dismissed them as noise; the inability to distinguish signal from noise is a bad thing; the adjustment caught people off guard. I'm not kidding. The blinding insight is: take care to distinguish signal from noise! Noise bad, signal good....
Strangest of all, in my opinion, is that the author appears to have nothing to add to the field of risk management, which stuns me given his unique vantage point. Risk management is reduced to a few catchphrases: tail risk, moral hazard, principal-agent. Say it ain't so...
Finally, T. Bojko is right about the mundane asset allocation plan: "the author just lays out a pretty mundane asset allocation plan (which is available for free on any number of websites) and then fills a couple dozen pages with worthless blather. Seriously, that's it." That's exactly right.
The book boils down to: big "structural" change is coming, try to sort signal from noise, here's pointers to a bunch of good reading material, I worked at the IMF, start with this generic plan.
I saved you a few bucks. More to the point, I wasted my time reading this book so you don't have to. Since that time is lost to me forever, the least you can do is vote my review "helpful."
Showing reviews 21-25 of 53
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