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Enough.
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Enough.

True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

John C. Bogle
Wiley, 2008
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Editorial Rating

8

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Recommendation

This inspiring work by John C. Bogle, one of the great financial innovators in American history, sounds like an echo of the distant past. Indeed, he calls for a return to 18th century values, and uses such words as “virtue” and “character” to describe his vision of how the financial system should be constituted. Many of the themes Bogle strikes will be familiar to readers acquainted with his other works. However, with the American financial system in crisis, his critique gains a new resonance. Indeed, readers may detect a striking parallel between author Bogle’s call for professional responsibility in the financial services industry and President Barack Obama’s call for greater responsibility within society at large. Let getAbstract be the first to confirm that this book is clearly a product of its times.

Summary

Why Enough? Authors Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut were attending a party hosted by a hedge fund manager. Vonnegut told Heller that their host earned more in a day than Heller had earned in years from the royalties on his bestselling novel, Catch-22. Heller replied, “Yes, but I have something he will never have...enough.” This story, recounted in a poem by Vonnegut, greatly impressed author John C. Bogle, because it expressed his sense that the monetary excesses of recent decades are a symptom that many people in the financial system do not know what “enough” means. Because their appetites know no bounds, they have sacrificed professional ethics, personal character and moral values in the pursuit of more – always more.

John C. Bogle comes from a family with a long history in the United States and in business. His great-grandfather, Philander Bannister Armstrong, was a business leader and a strong critic of corruption in the insurance industry. His grandfather, William Yeats Bogle, founded a forerunner to the American Can Company. His family lost its fortune in the 1929 stock market crash and Bogle grew up having to work. He attended Blair...

About the Author

John C. Bogle is the founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group and president of Bogle Financial Markets Research Center. This is his seventh book.

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