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Financial Reckoning Day
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Financial Reckoning Day

Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century

William Bonner and Addison Wiggin
Wiley, 2003
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

This book is an intellectual tour de force. The breadth of the authors’ accomplishment is impressive, drawing on sources from Emerson to Einstein to Freud to Adam Smith and more. Whether their analysis is correct, however, is highly debatable. One could build a small mountain out of books that have declared prematurely that the American economic miracle is over. This volume draws heavily on the Japanese model to predict continued economic doldrums in the U.S., and the comparison seems a poor fit. Its over-reliance on a continental historical perspective - Americans are naïve, overly optimistic fools whose prosperity is the result of dumb luck - seems fairly dubious. None of that takes away from the authors’ keen perspective. Right or wrong, they bring intellectual light to the question, ’Just what is going on with the American economy?’ Because of this volume’s range and insight, getAbstract.com very strongly recommends it, especially to those seeking historical and cross-cultural context for alternative views about the U.S. economy.

Summary

Seeking Deception

"The world wants to be deceived," says a Latin proverb. "So let it be deceived." For example, the very investors who overshot the realistic value of the dot.com boom companies they invested in quickly clamored for the heads of corrupt corporate leaders once the boom went bust. Is such self-deception waiting down the road for the American economy at large?

Fallacy is a commonly traded coin of the realm. For example, Francis Fukuyama published a widely-noted essay entitled, "The End of History" in 1989 in The National Interest that suggested that all of history was a march toward democracy and capitalism. The collapse of communism meant the fulfillment of this parade, and thus history was at an effective end. In retrospect, given the stock market bubble’s collapse and the subsequent recession, the essay seems to promote an obvious fallacy. The lesson, however, is that the masses are easily deceived. Public opinion lurches with fashion from one popular myth to another. If you want to have any understanding of what’s going on in the markets, you need to understand history.

One reason Americans are set up for an economic collapse is their incurable...

About the Authors

As president and CEO of Agora Publisher, William Bonner leads one of the U.S.’s largest financial newsletter companies. Bonner founded the Daily Reckoning, a contrarian financial newsletter distributed via e-mail. Addison Wiggin is the Managing Editor of the Daily Reckoning and a former employee of the Cato Institute.

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