Today is Thursday, May 17, 2012

Books

FDR’s stimulus didn’t end the Great Depression; neither did WW II

The leading economic historian of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, reminds us that government make work programs failed to cut unemployment below the double digits during the 1930s.

And, she notes, “Some argue that a huge increase in military spending—on the scale of what the U.S. did in World War II—ended the Great Depression and is the model for today. But Christina Romer, chairwoman of the Obama White House‚Äôs Council of Economic Advisers, has suggested that monetary easing, and not wartime spending, took the country out of the Depression.”

Finally, contrary to President Obama’s claims that the debate over how the depression ended is over, Shlaes warns, there is no consensus among historians or economists about how the nation recovered from the depression.

Her book is a good read and deserves another read now that we’re in a major recession, if not Great Depression II.

Books about trading options on stocks

I won’t review all the books about trading stock options that I’ve read, but I’ll rank them:

1. The Option Adviser by Bernie Schaeffer.
2. The Bible of Options Strategies, by Guy Cohen.
3. Options as a Stragegic Investment, by Lawrence G. McMillan.
4. Covered Calls and Leaps, by Joseph Hooper and Aaron Zalewski.
5. Profit with Options, by Lawrence G. McMillan.
6. The complete option player by Kenneth R. Trester (4th ed.).
7. Fundamentals of the Options Market, by Michael S. Williams and Amy Hoffman.
8. The Options workbook, by Anthony J. Saliba, (2nd ed).
9. The optionetic course, from practice to profits, by optionetics.com. The 2 day course costs about $4,000 and includes a lot of hard sell for their other courses, services. It helped me get off the dime and start trading, but the books and course aren’t worth $4,000 if you can read a book or two.

Every one of these books except No. 8, I think, is tied to a subscription-based advisory service on the web. Thus, I consider all the books promos for the advisory services, but they all are very useful. Each one adds info the others skip.

Biotechnology, global warming, ethanol and environmentalism

The world faces economic disasters if it adopts the policies advocated by global warming alarmists Al Gore and Nicholas Stern, and promoting ethanol as an alternative energy resource is a mistake that politically will be hard to reverse.

That’s the message that this global warming skeptic takes from Freeman Dyson’s review of

What do the new business gurus tell us about investing?

Thomas H. Davenport has used content analysis to develop a new list of the top business gurus, wsj.com reports.

It would be interesting to see a

 

Business wiki will be written by online ‘We are smarter’ community, published as book

WeAreSmarter.org is a new online business and management wiki created by the U.K. Publisher Pearson, Wharton and MIT’s Sloan School of Management to draw on the expertise of the schools academics and alumni as well as others who will write and edit a book on business and management that will be published in September 2007.

Modeled after http://www.wikipedia.com, the wiki will be an attempt to draw on the expertise of thousands of managers who like to write about what they do.

Wiki software is becoming widely available as part of content management software that cost less than $300 but requires a few thousand dollars worth of programming and managment to install and maintain. One provider of integrated wiki, blog, message board and shopping cart software is http://www.pmachine.com , which publishes Expression Engine. This web site and blog uses Expression Engine.