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 enlarge | Author: Mohamed El-erian
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 916
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0071592814
Dewey Decimal Number: 381.101
EAN: 9780071592819
ASIN: 0071592814
Publication Date: May 23, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Unlocking the Credit Crisis November 22, 2008
0 out of 4 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.
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.
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.
I would ignore any negative comments on writing style. El-Erian mastered his English writing style while at Cambridge & Oxford.
 dissapointing November 14, 2008
2 out of 3 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
15 out of 18 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."
In the eye of the reader -- Eclectic or a muddle? November 8, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
The author risked a muddle and he at least partially succeeded by targeting very different audiences at the same time in the same book. He creates this confusion intentionally. "I'm addressing both investors and national and international policy makers." Very few pages are devoted to specific investment that an investor my actually be able to use (see page 203 "Implementation Vehicles"). The average IMF Economist will get much more out of this book than the average stock and bond investor.
Terrible November 1, 2008
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
Wow, what a disappointment. The book is poorly written and turns simple ideas into convoluted muck. For example, everyone knows that you can sometimes get a bargain in a pool of assets that are generally considered "lemons" such as the used car market. In this book, the "market for lemons" becomes "MFL" and allegedly was originated in 1970 with George Akerlof, a professor and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. Huh? Another staggering glimpse of the obvious: people have trouble absorbing the reality of a sudden, unexpected event (e.g., 9/11, Kennedy assasination (my examples which, incidentally, are better than his)). Wow! and let's cite Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his insights about Black Swans for that astounding revelation! Jeez. I'm not going to bore you with examples of the dense and turgid writing. Also, if you are not a fan of "impact" used as a verb, avoid this book, it occurs in almost every paragraph. If you want clear, crisp writing and good analysis about the economy, skip this leaden tract and read The Economist or The Financial Times.
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