● Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street
William D. Cohan
Review via Semafor
Apollo founder Leon Black’s career started falling apart in October of 2020, when The New York Times revealed that he’d been one of Jeffrey Epstein’s main financial patrons, relying on the criminal long after others had abandoned him.
The veteran finance writer Bill Cohan’s new 673-page Black biography, Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street, offers a very different narrative of a brilliant finance pioneer laid low by a combination of lust and naïveté — but not by any serious complicity with Epstein in his darker schemes. Cohan told me he views it in part as a rebuttal of a strain of Times reporting he referred to in an interview as a “Leon jihad.”

● The Awesome Portfolio: A simple, stress-free approach to investing
Jared Dillian
Summary via publisher (Harriman House)
For the last few decades, the conventional wisdom in investing has been to put your money in low-cost index funds, let them compound over time, and ride them into retirement, where you pick up your bag of money. Often, that isn’t what happens. Over the course of an investing lifetime, there will be enormous ups and downs, big bear markets, and people will be unable to withstand the volatility. If volatility is the enemy, then the goal should be to construct a portfolio that gives you something close to the returns of the stock market, but with a lot less volatility – enter Jared Dillian’s ‘Awesome Portfolio’. It is the portfolio for people who want to sleep at night, and not ever have to worry about what their investments are doing. In this practical and accessible book, Jared Dillian, a seasoned Wall Street veteran and financial thought leader, dives deep into the philosophy and rationale behind this approach, examining the historical returns and mathematics that make it work.

● The Forever Paycheck: The New Retirement Strategy to Spend More, Worry Less, and Never Run Out of Money
Jean Chatzky
Review via Publishers Weekly
Chatzky (Women with Money), the financial editor for NBC’s Today show, provides a detailed guide for living off one’s retirement savings. Some 66% of Americans fear running out of money in retirement, she notes, explaining many struggle after decades of saving to flip the switch to spending. Her solution is the “Forever Paycheck,” payments that last the rest of one’s lifetime. Getting paid on a routine schedule as opposed to a lump sum is key to minimizing worry and stress, she says, encouraging readers to convert some of the money in their retirement and other accounts into regular paychecks upon retiring.

● The Common Good Economy: How to Make Capitalism Work for Us All
Mariana Mazzucato
Excerpt via Fortune
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) issued nearly identical loan guarantees to Tesla ($465 million) and Solyndra ($500 million), a solar panel manufacturer. While Tesla succeeded, Solyndra declared bankruptcy just two years later, attracting intense public scrutiny. The US government suffered the public backlash and cost from Solyndra’s failure but received nothing from Tesla’s success. Under the original agreement, the government would only receive three million shares if Tesla failed — a counterintuitive arrangement, since public stakes in struggling companies rarely benefit taxpayers.
A more effective approach would have granted the government shares only if Tesla succeeded, allowing taxpayers to benefit from the company’s growth.

Please note that the links to books above are affiliate links with Amazon.com and James Picerno (a.k.a. The Capital Spectator) earns money if you buy one of the titles listed. Also note that you will not pay extra for a book even though it generates revenue for The Capital Spectator. Thank you!