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When Markets Collide, by Mohamed El-Erian, offers significant insight into the changing dynamics of the global economies and the responses of policy makers and leaders of countries to the new financial landscape.Information shared in this book is comparable to the visions of the future addressed by Thomas Friedman in "The World is Flat" and by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, "The Black Swan."Disruptive innovation, structural transformation and new technological capabilities are mentioned frequently in this book. Discussing these factors helps to raise investor awareness on the speed of change and the lack of capacity and capability of current structures and business practices to respond.Disruptions not previously experienced prior to the recent financial meltdown*Decline in trust among counterparties*Sudden stops in market liquidity*Policy makers simultaneously thrown into crisis management modeDynamic Changes*Emerging countries transition from debtor to creditor nation status*US and European countries burdened by extraordinary debt*China as the largest underwriter of US debtChallenges*Emergence of global financial disruptions occurring simultaneously*Ability of emerging economies to successfully manage the new found wealth and avoid the pitfalls of excessive spending and free credit*Potential inability of policy makers (FED, IMF, etc). to influence monetary and fiscal policiesAside from alerting his readers to the changes noted above, Mr. El-Erian's goal is to help others "recognize and understand turning points in the markets" to "have a way to identify and think about signals within the noise" of change.Good return on investment now for success in the future.
This is good background reading for reconsidering what your portfolio should look like and how you should manage it. Many of the points are becoming the "new consensus". The answers may not be perfect, but the highly experienced author raises many of the right questions
very insightful, this man has great vision and wisdom that he shares with thr rest of us.
And just to confuse matters even more, we spends a good portion of the book addressing desired changes to national and international policy.In spite of the very poor writing, there are some interesting ideas, especially as they relate to the changing economic landscape with the 'emergence' of emerging economies. At other times 'investors' are investment bankers managing large funds.
Unfortunately, these three articles only fill about 1/10th the space, so a lot of repetition and filler is added to bring it to the full length. This book reads like three articles and a lot of filler: an article from an economics journal, another from a popular investment magazine and finally a foreign policy review article.
At times 'investors' seems to reference retail investors who buy index funds. It does have a number of good points, but, in spite of the excessive verbiage, they seem to be poorly elaborated.
The author seems to repeat, rather than elucidate.It is also difficult to determine the audience the author is addressing - especially since he commonly refers to 'investors'. Sometimes, I found myself midway through a section before realizing it was a different "investor" he was talking to.
Perhaps the author will choose to reduce the book to a few well-written articles.
It wont teach you that. This is a weak book. To do that you should maybe consider Toby Crabel or Linda Raschke or evern Ed Seykota. Obviously Mohamed goes around, writing about things that are trivial and economically untested. It will give you a general idea of the financial industry, but you buy this book to learn how to make money. They are real traders that dont write books. I think all of them have some articles on Ebay if you look, they write things that were just great and true because they trade for a living.
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