Here’s the follow-up to Best of Books 2021: Part I, which recaps some of the highlights that appeared on these pages during the year that expires at the stroke of midnight. Whatever you think of 2021, the calendar year that’s about to pass into history certainly dispatched several captivating reads that are worthy of your time. Here’s five:
Adam Tooze
Review via Reuters
Confronting the crisis forced governments to discard old orthodoxies, many of which were already under attack. Politicians who had previously sought to rein in public spending deployed vast sums to support citizens stuck at home and businesses which had been forced to close. Central banks hoovered up government bonds and backstopped a range of financial markets. Commitments to free trade and private enterprise were discarded in the rush to secure face masks and vaccines, and support crisis-struck industries.
Eswar S. Prasad
Q&A with author via Bloomberg
Q: Why is there such urgency for central banks to develop digital currencies?
A: The reality is that the end of physical cash is not too far away. We are seeing digital payments in various forms beginning to dominate in economies small and large, developing and advanced. So I think for central banks, if you think about their money being used at the retail level, this is at some level an existential question. Central banks will still be able to conduct their main functions and maybe they can continue doing so without having their money being used for retail payments, but having a CBDC has a variety of advantages.
Robin Wigglesworth
Interview with author and excerpt via Marketplace.org
The finance industry has historically been adept at inventing new products that line its own pockets more than those of Main Street. The index fund is a rare exception to the rule. At a time when the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening everywhere, the positive impact that an initially much-maligned invention by a motley group of self-described finance industry renegades and heretics can have in the space of a few decades is inspirational. Nonetheless, new technologies — and that is essentially what the index fund is — always have side effects, and not all of them are positive. As index investing has grown, the initially snide comments have been replaced by concern, even fear. Over the past decade, it has become a crescendo. Paul Singer, a famous hedge fund manager, even argues that passive investing has grown into a “blob” that is now “in danger of devouring capitalism.”
William J. Bernstein
Review via Publishers Weekly
God, greed, and the yen for conformity reliably override reason, according to this sweeping survey of religious and financial manias. Neurologist and historian Bernstein (A Splendid Exchange) shares vivid accounts of several centuries of sectarian crazies, from the Anabaptists who took over the German city of Münster in 1534, imposing communism and polygamy and executing dissenters, to Branch Davidian messiah David Koresh and the Islamic State. On the finance front, he recaps the South Sea bubble in 18th-century England, the 1990s tech bubble, and other stock market frenzies. Bernstein lucidly deploys neurobiology, behavioral economics, and social psychology to explain why reason fails and other instances, noting, for example, that many people will believe two obviously unequal line segments to be the same length if other people say they are.
Rush Doshi
Review via The Economist
As Mr Doshi describes it, the crucible of China’s grand strategy was the “traumatic trifecta”: the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991 and, also that year, the collapse of the Soviet Union. These events convinced China that America posed the biggest threat ideologically, militarily and geopolitically. China responded by devising a plan to blunt American power. This was to be low-key: Deng Xiaoping, then retired as a party leader but still highly influential, suggested China should “hide its capabilities and bide its time”. The country focused on developing weapons that would keep America at bay and on joining multilateral organisations such as the World Trade Organisation, hoping to use these institutions’ rules to constrain America.
Please note that the links to books above are affiliate links with Amazon.com and James Picerno (a.k.a. The Capital Spectator) earns money if you buy one of the titles listed. Also note that you will not pay extra for a book even though it generates revenue for The Capital Spectator. By purchasing books through this site, you provide support for The Capital Spectator’s free content. Thank you!