Rating: 1 out of 5
I wrote a review for this title about fifty times, listening to it while out and about. Only putting it to paper some time later, the main feelings from this title remain the same: if I came back to revisit my old writings twenty years hence, I should very much hope to not agree wholeheartedly with nearly everything that I had previously written! True, in a few select places Mr Napier acknowledges that he was (partially) mistaken, but by-and-by this title can be summed up with “Look how right I was and have always been!’
I picked this up because I thought that it would be useful to read an economic history and Mr Napier was recommended by Scott Phillips and Ram from Motley Fool Australia. The author may be an influential thinker, but at least this book fails to meet what I was hoping for. Though there are long sections of (previously published) commentary on how bad exchange rate controls are and the various ways investors can hurt themselves by trying to do currency trades. Ok…
But what were the actual decisions that people took? In only a few select cases, perhaps for two or three events, is a central bank or government decision attributed to a specific person who would have had motives, who would have had an interest in achieving a specific goal. The rest of the time, it’s either the behemoth of a central bank or the government or some ministry doing something “bad”. This level of analysis is clearly incomplete: someone, or a group of someones, took these decisions for some specific reasons. Who these people were and what they were trying to do remains an unknown throughout this title.
Perhaps I should have only wanted to read through the memos the author published in the 1990s, paraphrasing his own words, often finishing them at sunup of the day they went out, and generally (it seemed) without much heavy thinking behind it. Though some of the later memos indicated good parables, this really wasn’t my reason for picking up a book that purports to describe the Asian financial crisis. That makes it even more disappointing that the vast majority of the time, the intervening 20 years had not made a difference to what the author thought about the subject.
One of my final thoughts is that if the author was supposedly so smart at the time, understanding the pitfalls of the moves that were happening, surely he could have been much better off outside of CLSA, as a trader or investor. While indeed he broke off his CLSA career at about the same time the events in the book taper off, to the best of my knowledge Mr Napier isn’t recognized as a top investor from the following period either. For all that conviction, there’s not a lot of “put one’s money where one’s mouth is”.
Where does this leave us? For once, I’m hard pressed to find someone to recommend this title to.
