Red notice

Red notice: a true story of high finance, murder, and one man's fight for justice / Bill Browder, 396 pgs.

Browder is the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, a hedge fund that started by specializing in Russia.  He (and the fund) are successful until getting on the wrong side of the oligarchs and Putin.  Despite laws on the books, things are not run with an eye to following legal constructs. Instead, there is very little regard to anything except making more money and gaining more power.  Browder skates on the edge for a long time then is eventually expelled from the country.  He works to get his team to safety but one man refuses to leave his home. That man's fate is not pretty. Browder continues to push back and is eventually tried in absentia. His focus changes to fight for justice on behalf of his former colleague.  This real life thriller is hard to put down. 

Boomerang

Boomerang: Travels in the new Third World by Michael Lewis 226 pages.

As usual, this author can do no wrong in my eyes.  His books are insightful, informative, funny...what more can you ask for?  Oh yes, they are also really frightening.  This touches base in what may be the still waiting to collapse (or freshly collapsed) economies of the world and tells of how and why they find themselves in so much trouble.  Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and the local governments in the U.S. all get the treatment and make you wonder over and over again...HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

In Iceland, Range Rovers catch fire more than anywhere else.  The locals borrowed to buy them with foreign currency and when their local currency failed the value of the loans on the $35, 000 vehicle was now $100,000 and with the failure came unemployment.  The solution is the set it on fire and collect the insurance.

In Greece, people are not accustomed to paying their taxes but enjoy high paying government jobs.  Now they want other countries to bail them out so they can keep their generous retirement benefits and low retirement age  (the best in the Eurozone).  Not surprisingly, this is unpopular with Germans who will work longer and harder to pay the Greeks to retire younger and richer.

Every bank in Ireland would have failed but the government said they would bail them out - $10.6 trillion in losses which would consume 100% of all taxes for the next 4 years.

I don't even want to write about the U.S. chapter.

How will this turn out?  Nobody knows but you have to figure it won't be a thing of beauty like this book.

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The Shadow Market

The Shadow Market: how a group of wealthy nations and powerful investors secretly dominate the world/Eric J. Weiner 304 pgs.

The author seems to think the news that wealthy organizations and governments are dominating the world is somehow news. This has been obvious to many for a long time. Now that I've made my slightly disparaging remark, let me continue by saying this book fascinated me with carefully researched examples and situations that seem to get at the crux of what it means that companies in the US are owned by foreigners and the state of business, investment and economy in the US and the world is changing. The changes don't look to hold a lot of improvement for our country but we have only helped them along and sold ourselves out. I particularly read with interest the chapter about Norway's Government Pension Fund that played a part in toppling Iceland's economy (really in was only a matter of time, Iceland was being really crazy). Norway isn't on a lot of our lists when it comes to economic power houses but they have brilliantly invested their oil revenues instead of spending every penny...I mean to say that they are brilliant BECAUSE they have invested, not so much that they have always made wise investments. Anyway, enough details. Weiner has done a great job with an interesting topic.

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