Book Bits | 17 March 2018

Predicting the Markets: A Professional Autobiography
By Edward Yardeni
Q&A with author via Barron’s
Barron’s: Are we heading for a trade war that will derail the markets?
Yardeni: The president is hard to predict, which makes the stock market’s reaction hard to predict. Back in the ’90s, the bond vigilantes disciplined Washington over inflation. Now we see the Dow vigilantes. The stock market is the one poll Trump follows. If it continues to decline, it will make him realize that [imposing tariffs] isn’t a good way to proceed.

China’s Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle
By Dinny McMahon
Review via Publishers Weekly
China is poised to overtake the United States, and the rest of the developed world, economically by the year 2030. Or is it? To gauge by this account, Western capitalists can breathe a little easier. Business journalist McMahon, a longtime China reporter for the Wall Street Journal and current fellow at the Paulson Institute, contends that for all the anti-corruption rhetoric of the Xi Jinping government, corruption is still rampant, adding burdens to an economy already bound by strains of command-economy socialism, free-market capitalism, crony capitalism, and state capitalism, all designations that fail “to sufficiently describe the nature of the Chinese economy.” Suffice it to say that nothing is as it seems: the data are fudged, the numbers untrustworthy and incomplete, and while the government presence is inescapable, there is evidently little coordination among the sectors.

Client Psychology
By CFP Board (edited by‎ Charles R. Chaffin)
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
The second in the CFP Board Center for Financial Planning Series, Client Psychology explores the biases, behaviors, and perceptions that impact client decision-making and overall financial well-being. This book, written for practitioners, researchers, and educators, outlines the theory behind many of these areas while also explicitly stating how these related areas directly impact financial planning practice. Additionally, some chapters build an argument based solely upon theory while others will have exclusively practical applications.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
By Quinn Slobodian
Summary via publisher (Harvard University Press)
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless change, and social injustice that accompanied it.

Introducing a New Economics: Pluralist, Sustainable and Progressive
By Jack Reardon, et al.
Summary via publisher (Pluto Press)
Introducing a New Economics is a groundbreaking textbook that heralds a revolution in the teaching of economics. Students and lecturers alike are rejecting the narrow curricula and lack of intellectual diversity that characterise the mainstream. They demand that the real world should be brought back into the classroom, insisting that this is the only way to confront the current crisis. With a firm commitment to theoretical, methodological and disciplinary pluralism, the renowned authors of this book challenge the current hegemony head-on. This unique textbook reflects a new ethos of economics education, highlighting sustainability and justice in its discussion of work, employment, power, capital, markets, money and debt.

The Investment Writing Handbook: How to Craft Effective Communications to Investors
By Assaf Kedem
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
The Investment Writing Handbook provides practical, accessible guidance for crafting more effective investor communications. Written by an award-winning writer, editor, and speechwriter, this book explains the principles and conventions that help writing achieve its purpose; whether you need to inform, educate, persuade, or motivate, you’ll become better-equipped to develop a broad range of communications and literature for investor consumption. Examples from real-world financial institutions illustrate expert execution, while explanations and advice targeted specifically toward investor relations give you the help you need quickly. From white papers and investment commentary to RFPs, product literature, and beyond, this book is the financial writer’s “bible” that you should keep within arm’s reach.

Nonparametric Finance
By Jussi Klemelä
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
Nonparametric function estimation is an important part of machine learning, which is becoming increasingly important in quantitative finance. Nonparametric Finance provides graduate students and finance professionals with a foundation in nonparametric function estimation and the underlying mathematics. Economic significance is emphasized over statistical significance throughout, and R code is provided to help readers reproduce the research, computations, and figures being discussed.