2024 Reading List

Another great year of reading in the books (pun intended). Please see below for some of my highlights:

§? Broken Money by Lyn Alden provides a clear overview of our country’s current monetary system and its many weaknesses.?

Among many takeaways form the book is that, although I have always viewed the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency as conveying meaningful benefits to our economy, Alden, details this “exorbitant privilege,” artificially inflates the value of the U.S. dollar, hindering the competitiveness of our manufacturing base and leading to persistent trade deficits. Paraphrasing Alden, these trade deficits, over decades, poison the currency until it becomes unfit to maintain its reserve status.

She further notes that our current system incentives short-term business cycles resulting in higher degrees of leverage because, in a downturn, rather than allowing cleaning defaults, central banks expand the monetary base.

While I remain a digital asset skeptic, Broken Money provides the far the best justification for digital money I have encountered. Thank you to Brian Abely, CFA for the recommendation. ??

§? Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das is beautifully written in a style rarely found in non-fiction. I look forward to her next book, perhaps on the Modi regime?

§? “Even Beethoven played scales” is a motto I’ve used to guide my career. Meaning, wherever you are in your professional path, you can always keep improving. With this belief in mind, I try to read at least one fixed income textbook a year.

The Credit Investor’s Handbook by Michael Gatto has set the new gold standard for leverage finance primers. Combining fixed income fundamentals with “real world” investment examples, Gatto’s book is informative and remarkably readable. I enjoyed Bruce Mendelsohn and Carla Casella 's contribution as well.

This is a must-read for lev-fin investors. I am not trying to sound like a shill for Gatto, but I heard pushback from people along the lines of “this books costs $50!?!?” While not trying to trivialize cost, few books come with the potential for a direct ROI. I actually identified a long-short investment opportunity inspired by an idea in this book.?

§? Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that Will Change the World by Parmy Olson escribes how the latest AI craze has further consolidated the power of Big Tech. Many AI start-ups began with noble aspirations of changing the world (as highlighted by OpenAI’s initial non-profit structure), only to be absorbed by Big Tech with promises of nearly ultimate resources and wealth rivaling NFL quarterbacks. Parmy notes that the U.S. government dismantled AT&T in 1984 amid concerns its size stifled competition. At its height, AT&T commanded a $60bn market cap, or roughly $150bn in today’s dollars. Meanwhile, Apple just eclipsed a once unfathomable $4T market cap.

She further highlights:

“We have no historical reference point for what happens when companies become this big. The market cap numbers that Google, Amazon and Microsoft are currently achieving have never been seen before. And while they bring greater wealth to the shareholders of those companies, including pension funds, they have also centralized power in such a way that the privacy, identity, public discourse, and increasingly the job prospects of billions of people are beholden to a handful of firms, run by a handful of unfathomably wealth people.”

§? We will look back on this era of digital distraction and addictive technology and wonder how society was so spectacularly wrong. Jonathan Haidt The Anxious Generation will be remembered in the same breath as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as books that inspired change.

§? Brody Mullins ’ and Luke Mullins ' Wolf of K Street provides an entertaining and horrifying account of how lobbyists have effectively hijacked our country’s policy-making process. Mullins details how the waning power of unions and special interest groups (like Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen in the 1980s) have left corporate interests unchecked in Washington—leaving Bond-villain like characters charting the course of regulation/legislation.

I hope the lurid tales of Washington insider excess finds its way to a Netflix adaption. It would make for compelling television and these stories deserve a wider audience.

?https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2024