Tag Archives: Growth

Slow Finance

Slow Finance, by Gervais Williams, Bloomsbury, London, Sterling £20, 183 pages

There’s food for thought in adopting the principles of the Slow Cooking movement and applying them to making investment decisions. Typically the Slow Cooking aficionado chooses ingredients carefully, preparing them the night before, cutting meat into small chunks, trimming the vegetables. In the morning they go into a vessel which cooks them slowly at a lower heat, allowing all the juices and flavours to blend. In the evening the smell of a delicious casserole wafts out from the kitchen. This makes a much more appetising prospect than zapping an “unidentified frying object” in a microwave, as celebrity chef Keith Floyd used to say.

Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

We Spent Our Children’s Birthright Through Foolish Borrowing

Endgame the End of the Debt Supercycle and How It Changes Everything, John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New Jersey, $27.95, 2011, 318 pages.

American Gridlock Why the Right and Left Are Both Wrong, H. Woody Brock, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New Jersey, $27.95, 2012, 273 pages.

In Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber identifies an essential difference between happiness and misery.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Two recent books consider the muddle politicians, bankers and economists have made of the world’s finances, during which the Micawber doctrine sadly got forgotten. They focus on the debt burden we have strapped on to the backs of coming generations and tackle the inability of current political systems to confront the ensuing mess.

Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,