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Capital Wars
Book

Capital Wars

The New East-West Challenge for Entrepreneurial Leadership and Economic Success

Daniel Pinto
Bloomsbury, 2014
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8

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Recommendation

Daniel Pinto presents a clear-eyed, practical takedown of modern capitalism in this study of the challenges facing Western economies. Pinto sides neither with the low-tax, limited-government prescriptions of the right nor with the add-more-government pleas of the left. He does acknowledge that government intervention plays a historic role in the rise of the US economy. Pinto points out that the state-managed economies of China and other emerging markets post enviable growth rates despite government meddling. Another main theme: Investors’ and managers’ thinking is so short-term that managers risk their careers when they look past the next quarter’s results. Alas, this elegantly written lecture suffers from distracting punctuation errors and occasional misspellings. While always politically neutral, getAbstract recommends Pinto’s incisive, and sometimes controversial, views to students, entrepreneurs, policy makers and investors seeking an alternative – but still profitable – approach to today’s Western capitalism.

Summary

The Complacent, Delusional West

The balance of economic power is shifting from west to east and perhaps a bit south. The United States and Great Britain, once hotbeds of entrepreneurialism, have lost their edge. Today, China, India and Brazil show the way. These new powers embrace risk taking, entrepreneur-friendly corporate governance and personal thrift in a way the developed world should emulate. Instead, the West’s leaders, citizens and executives continue to live in delusion. Workers believe that a comfortable pension is their birthright, even though companies and governments cannot sustain such safety nets. Business leaders delude themselves into thinking they can keep operating as they always have, even as the ground fractures beneath their business models.

Consider the steel industry. Entrepreneur Lakshmi Mittal roiled the steel market in a way that caught his slower, softer competitors flat-footed. Starting with one steel plant in Indonesia, Mittal maneuvered – over the course of three decades – to the top of the industry. In 2006, when Mittal proposed closing two outdated blast furnaces in France, politicians responded with an outcry, threatening to nationalize...

About the Author

CEO of the asset management firm Stanhope Capital, Daniel Pinto founded the New City Initiative think tank.

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