One should fall in love with ideas, with people, or with idealism based on the possibilities that exist in this adventuresome world. The last thing to fall in love with is a particular security. It is, after all, just a sheet of paper indicating a part ownership in a corporation. Its use is purely mercenary. I learned early in my career to be skeptical and flexible, not stubborn, about a stock. I also learned to take quick, small losses rather than to get emotionally involved in a stock that was dragging me down. Some people have been extremely fortunate in the past by falling in love with something that went their way. That is not necessarily proof it will always be that way. In other words, it’s alright to be in love with a security- until it gets overvalued. Then let somebody else fall in love.

Topics of the week

What first led me to Wall Street was a desire to make money so I could buy great art and support artists. What I didn’t know when I started is that working on Wall Street can be a fascinating art in itself and one for which I was almost immediately suited.

— Roy Neuberger

Frederik Gieschen talks about So Far, So Good — The First 94 Years, the autobiography of Roy Neuberger (co-founder of asset manager Neuberger Berman). Neuberger wrote the book in 1997, at 94 years old, while he was still working. He’d arrived on Wall Street on the eve of the crash in 1929 and was one of very few people to experience the market’s full arc from 1929 to 2008. He passed away in 2010, at age 107.

Frederik Gieschen:

Honestly, more than investment advice I was hoping for his formula for longevity. Aside from genes, what jumped out at me was his daily exercise, doing work he enjoyed, a passion that led to a rich social life, a lasting marriage, an emphasis on family, and a daily morning walk with friends.

The book is an autobiography and not an investment how-to manual. It features Neuberger’s passion for art just as prominently as his interest in the market. That said, it contains some enduring ideas about markets and life. And it’s worth pondering what someone with 68 years of experience in markets considers important: Neuberger wanted to pass on a collection of core principles, not formulas. He wanted to teach us how to think, not what specifically to do.

Neuberger came from a wealthy family and lost both his parents at a young age. He spent some time working at a department store and traveled to Europe where he discovered his love for art. He was enrolled at NYU but dropped out to work without ever getting a degree.

The book illustrates how different Wall Street was at the time. Neuberger showed up at a brokerage firm and immediately got a job as a runner delivering trade orders. He climbed the ranks and became a broker. He also had a head start by managing the accounts of wealthy relatives. Neuberger was very successful (Neuberger Berman today manages some $460bn) but it’s not a rags to riches story.

“I chose Wall Street because in the 1920s, that’s where the money was.”

Neuberger was devoted to the game of markets but he placed his work in service of his true love: art.

Some people waste their lives in the constant pursuit of great wealth. As a commodity, let’s face it, money doesn’t rate as high as good health and it certainly isn’t up there with great art.

Money in and of itself has never really interested me. The driving passions of my career and my life have been the art of trading and the support of art. Money, of course, has been the by-product of trading that enabled me to purchase great art and support culture.

After reading a biography of van Gogh, who struggled to make a living during his lifetime, Neuberger dedicated himself to collecting the work of living artists. He never sold but rather donated countless works over the course of his life.

Neuberger was always clear about the higher purpose of his work on Wall Street. Accumulating wealth was never an end in itself.

I wanted to be able to buy the works of living artists, to support their work financially. … In February 1929, after returning to Paris from Berlin and Vienna, I began to make arrangements to come home to New York, determined to enter an arena about which I knew absolutely nothing: Wall Street.

Everyone knows the reply by the celebrated safecracker Willie Sutton to the question: Why do you rob banks? “Because,” he said, “that’s where the money is.” I chose Wall Street because in the 1920s, that’s where the money was.

1929 and Radio Corporation of America

It’s funny how our first experiences with the market can shape our entire careers. Neuberger arrived on the street in 1929, during the final mad days of the bubble. One of his first big trades was to short the market darling, Radio Corporation of America or RCA. The stock was already weakening, as was the entire market, and the valuation made no sense to him.

The most actively traded stock on Wall Street at that time was Radio Corporation of America referred to as “Radio”), which evolved into RCA as we know it to-day. I studied that company more than any other. I really learned the ins and outs on a lot of different levels.

Radio Corporation of America reached a high of 574. Then it split 5 for 1. I set out to discover why the stock was so high and so active. Nothing seemed to justify the seemingly excessive price. I asked older, more experienced investors, but I received no definitive answers. People explained that we were entering the radio age-simple as that.

Neuberger shorted RCA stock worth 100% of his portfolio. It’s hard to overstate how lucky he got here. Others had shorted Radio during the bull market and been steamrolled. When the market crashed, RCA collapsed and protected Neuberger’s portfolio while those around him lost their fortunes.

This moment defined his career: Neuberger always considered himself a trader and kept hedging to protect himself — though he explicitly did not recommend shorting to his readers because one needs “a stubborn, perverse, and patient temperament.”

In many ways, the Panic shaped my current approach to the market: I am prematurely bearish when the market experiences a prolonged ascent, when everybody is pleased because they’re growing richer.

Margin leverage had been a key driver inflating the bubble and when investors around Neuberger refused to protect themselves, they could lose everything in the collapse. Neuberger drew his own conclusions:

In order to do well, you must be able to learn from the past. And you need to look at things objectively. I learned to be absolutely pragmatic and realistic during the prolonged bear market that ensued after the Panic.

I think one of the biggest problems of the 1920s was the systematic refusal by so many people to be realists. They wanted the boom to continue forever, so they failed to notice how much of it was fleeting.

Many businesses appeared to be in better shape than they actually were. Examples of failure were everywhere: The textile industry suffered a huge crash in 1924; Florida was the site of a major real estate panic in 1925 and did not recover for many years. But people refused to see the warning signs.

Simply surviving and persisting in the business proved important as well. As brokers around him left the business, Neuberger picked up their accounts.

Trader or investor?

Neuberger also reminded me of Irving Kahn, another survivor of the crash and Wall Street old-timer, who lived to be 109. They even graduated from the same high school. While Kahn was a Graham and Dodd value disciple, his style was eclectic.

“It’s impossible to reverse-engineer Irving’s investment process,” says Carl Schecter, the head of risk-arbitrage trading at Nomura Securities in New York and a long-time Kahn Brothers client. “It’s an idiosyncratic mix of top-down economic insight and bottom-up financial analysis.”

The same seems true of Neuberger who doesn’t quite fit one mold. On the one hand, he had a trader’s mindset. With his art he was happy to buy and hold forever. By contrast, “getting married to a stock can prove disastrous.”

He compared his trading style to his “youthful addiction to tennis.” You had to do your homework and be prepared to act with speed when the market presented opportunities.

You have to make fast decisions. You can’t wait to think about it overnight.

On the other hand, Neuberger discussed the importance of finding great companies that could do well over long periods of time. Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer much specific advice.

The criteria for purchase of any substantial amount of stock should remain on solid grounds that stand the test of time: (1) a good product; (2) a necessary product; (3) honest, effective management; and (4) honest reporting.

True, but not particularly helpful. Neuberger called missing Coca-Cola his ‘biggest mistake’.

Then came the biggest mistake I’ve ever made on Wall Street–a lost opportunity. I misdiagnosed the potential of a great corporation-Coca-Cola because I knew it had stiff competition from Pepsi and other soft drinks. I simply didn’t take seriously the proposition that this was a great growth company like AT&T. I am pointing out humbly that it is impossible to be right all the time on Wall Street. My perspectives on the potential of Coca-Cola were misguided, and I never should have sold it.

But he doesn’t elaborate on his analysis of Coca-Cola or other companies and business models. And holding a great company to let it compound is not consistent with one of his other principles, the stop-loss or “10%” rule:

You can’t always win on Wall Street, so you have to learn to cut losses quickly and move on gracefully. At one point, I was bullish on International Harvester.

Right after I bought it, unfortunately, it began going down, down, down and I realized I had made a mistake. I sold it the same day, lucky to take a small, quick drop rather than a big, drawn-out loss.

Getting married to a stock can prove disastrous. The 10 percent rule is sensible: If your stock starts falling, take a loss of 10 percent and start again. I take this idea very seriously, and it’s worked quite well for me. The flip side of that rule is not to be greedy with profits. Never try to guess the top.

He may have picked up this 10% stop loss rule from Gerald Loeb’s The Battle for Investment Survival, a popular post-crash trading book. “I’m inclined to say that when a new investment has shrunk by 10%, it is time to stop, look and listen,” Loeb wrote. Buy and hold seemed dead in the painful bear market that followed 1929.

My sense was that Neuberger, like other market veterans, operated with multiple mental models. He could hold a compounder like AT&T for the long run but also be a nimble trader in many other securities.

He used the stop-loss rule to protect himself from behavioral biases. Neuberger had observed too many smart people in denial in 1929. The stop-loss was a way to protect himself from that fate.

Remember how Richard Whitney watched his stocks decline in 1929 until he was wiped out? He failed to follow the 10 percent rule: If the stock is on the way down, take your loss at the 10 percent level. This rule has helped me many times. Using the money elsewhere will usually be more fruitful than maintaining a mistaken position.

One of the enduring lessons of Neuberger’s life is that nobody is bigger than the market. Ego can be absolutely deadly.

I received a real education into seeing things as they are, not as one might wish they were. I learned that the market has a rhythm of its own, like the waves of the ocean. Every few months, there is a change. Sometimes a long-term investor can ride out the ups and downs. But I’m a trader. I have to be closely attuned to the changing waves. It’s often a choppy voyage.

What we can learn from someone who survived in markets for 68 years is to be flexible, to adapt, to not let ourselves get emotional.

One should fall in love with ideas, with people, or with idealism based on the possibilities that exist in this adventuresome world. The last thing to fall in love with is a particular security. It is, after all, just a sheet of paper indicating a part ownership in a corporation. Its use is purely mercenary.

I learned early in my career to be skeptical and flexible, not stubborn, about a stock. I also learned to take quick, small losses rather than to get emotionally involved in a stock that was dragging me down.

Some people have been extremely fortunate in the past by falling in love with something that went their way. That is not necessarily proof it will always be that way. In other words, it’s alright to be in love with a security- until it gets overvalued. Then let somebody else fall in love.

A work of art

Neuberger started one of the first “no-load” mutual funds (no upfront sales commission), a novel idea at the time. Just like he was early in his focus on contemporary artists, Neuberger liked the idea of breaking with convention:

As an idealist, I don’t generally like to accept what is called conventional wisdom. I had great respect for my elders, but I learned early that everything practiced by my contemporaries was not necessarily sound.

Unsurprisingly, he considered the fund his enduring contribution to the world (like Buffett with Berkshire as his canvas).

The book is not a must-read for investors but I enjoyed it, mainly because of Neuberger’s passion, character, and the sheer magnitude of perspective and life experience he brought to the table. Its enduring message is that to master the market, you must master yourself. And if your autobiography is about a lot more than markets, that’s an indication of a rich life.

Neuberger himself pointed out not to copy what worked for him on Wall Street, that “wonderful, exciting game.” “If you do, you will go crazy,” he warns. “You have to dig for yourself, just as I do.”

It is invigorating for me to use my brain to analyze what is going on. If I have taught you how to use your brain in a different way, then I will have fulfilled the first mission of a teacher — to make oneself expendable. And you will have learned the most important lesson — how to learn.

Links to consider

• Using ETFs to Conceal Insider Trading
• Raghav Kapoor of Smartkarma on what he learnt investing in biotech
• George Soros’ Theory of Reflexivity
• The Great Gatsby of Gold Took Their Millions—and Vanished
• Geometric vs Arithmetic Mean In The Wild
• HSBC Head of Asia FX research Joey Chew on flows into Asia (16 mins)
• Segra’s Adam Rodman on the global uranium market (52 mins)
• The Best Tax System on Earth
• Europe’s unicorn investors
• Daniel Crosby talks with Tom Howard about behavioral finance vs. behavioral investing
• Peter Lazaroff talks with Dasarte Yarnway about the importance of diversity in financial services and how to increase it

Infographic

Quotes

Books that caught our attention this week

With a fractured geography and complex identity, The Philippines is an eclectic and unique mix of culture, environment, people and politics. Known mostly for natural disasters, migrant labour and dictatorial presidents, in this book Philip Bowing shows how it is much, much more. Deftly navigating the history of this populous island republic, The Making of the Modern Philippines traces its history to define and explain its position in the modern world. Looking past the headlines of volcanoes, earthquakes and violence, it asks why has the Filipino economy lagged behind its neighbours, explores the importance of its location in geopolitics, and investigates how its deep-rooted Catholicism clashes with the Islamic consciousness of the region in which it sits. Taking the history of the Philippines from its pre-colonial era, through its Spanish and American occupations and up to the modern day, it unravels the complex politics, culture, peoples and economy of this rich and unique nation. Engaging with challenges the Filipino people face today such as federalism, revolution, Mindanao, the diaspora, capitalism and relations with China, it rediscovers the struggles, culture and history of its past to understand the present.

Amazon

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“Eat local” has become a popular marketing slogan in recent years, based on the idea that food grown or raised nearby is better for you and friendlier to the environment than similar products shipped in from many miles away. That slogan reflects a broader worldview suggesting that everything local, including government and knowledge, is better than what originates somewhere else. Small Isn’t Beautiful acknowledges that some things that are local are good, but denies that what’s local is always or even often better than what’s far away. “Localism” is based on an “undeserved aura of respectability, virtue, and good sense” and can produce results that are misguided or even dangerous. Particularly when it comes to public policies, decisions made at the local level are rarely superior and are sometimes unjust. Small Isn’t Beautiful exposes the supposed “virtue” of localism as a hodgepodge of weak arguments and misleading hunches. Trevor Latimer’s engagingly written and provocative book will appeal to all readers who want to understand localism beyond slogans and marketing.

Amazon

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Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York’s skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months. These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston’s “Big Dig”? Almost every sizeable city in the world has such a fiasco in its backyard. In fact, no less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both. The cost of California’s high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billon—and won’t even go where promised. More modest endeavors, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why? Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.” In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours.

Amazon

Video of the week

Vanguard – The 8 Trillion Dollar Financial Empire | 2023 Documentary

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Getting Rich Is Super Easy | Jeff Bezos

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The Fake Chip Scourge

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The Netherlands is Controlling China, And Trying To Takeover The World Economy…

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Many individuals are curious about where millionaires keep their wealth, and for good reason. By gaining insight into the financial habits of the wealthy, we can learn from their success and potentially improve our own financial situation. The data shows that millionaire households allocate approximately 25% of their wealth to their primary residence and 15% to business interests, with the remaining 60% invested in stocks, bonds, and cash. However, as households become even wealthier, the proportion invested in stocks, bonds, and cash tends to decrease, with business interests becoming the dominant source of wealth.

Topics of the week

Where Do Millionaires Keep Their Money?

Nick Maggiulli, Chief Operating Officer for Ritholtz Wealth Management LLC., published a great post.

If you’ve ever wondered, “Where do millionaires keep their money?” then you’re not alone. Many people are curious about the financial habits of the wealthy, and for good reason. Having a better understanding of how millionaires manage their money can help us learn from their successes and potentially improve our own financial well-being as well. We’ve touched on this before in one of the previous Dispatches. In his blog post, Nick dives deeper and explores the various options available to millionaires for storing and growing their wealth. From traditional asset classes to more exotic investments, we’ll take a closer look at the strategies millionaires employ to protect and grow their fortunes. Whether you’re a millionaire looking for new ways to manage your money or just someone who wants to learn from the best, this post has something for you. Here we go.

How Do Millionaires Invest Their Money?

To figure out how millionaires invest their money, I will be examining the three primary investment decisions that impact their returns (according to the late pioneer of institutional asset management David Swensen):

1. Asset allocation: What asset classes do millionaires invest in.
2. Market timing: When do millionaires buy/sell those assets.
3. Security selection: How do millionaires choose which securities to buy within an asset class.

To do this, I will primarily be relying on Vanguard’s 2020 How America Invests study, which examines how affluent households (those with at least $500,000 in investable assets at Vanguard) invest their money. While not all of the households in this study are millionaires, the vast majority of them are. The median household in the study has over $1 million with Vanguard and those below the median have assets outside of Vanguard (i.e. real estate, non-Vanguard accounts, etc.) that make most of them millionaires as well.

With that being said, let’s address the first part of how millionaires invest—their asset allocation.

What Asset Classes Do Millionaires Own?

According to Vanguard, the asset allocation of a typical millionaire household is:

• 65% Stocks (Equity)
• 25% Bonds (Fixed income)
• 10% Cash

As you can see in the chart below, this allocation has been relatively stable over time as well:

This gives us a good idea of how millionaires tend to invest their money within their investment accounts on average. However, it doesn’t tell us anything about how those allocations change over time within households. Since the chart above is the aggregate allocation across all households, we don’t get to see any age-related allocation changes.

Fortunately, Vanguard provides a breakdown of allocation by household age in their study as well. We can see this in the table below which shows that households under 45 tend to allocate around 75% of their portfolios to equities, while households older than 65 allocate around 60% to equities:

What happens to the money that comes out of equities as these affluent households age? It goes into fixed income.

From the table above, we can see that the fixed income allocation of affluent households nearly doubles from age 50 to age 80. In other words, affluent households tend to go from 15% bonds to 30% bonds as they enter retirement.

But, what about other asset classes? Don’t millionaires invest a lot of money outside of stocks, bonds, and cash? According to the 2017 U.S. Trust Insights on Wealth and Worth, the answer is “Not really.”

As their study shows, high net worth households (those with over $3 million in investable assets) had the vast majority of their wealth in stocks, bonds, and cash, with less than 7% of their investable assets in alternatives:

This suggests that what we see in the Vanguard’s How America Invests study is representative of how the typical millionaire household allocates their money. They own typical asset classes and not all these exotic investments like the financial media might have us believe.

Of course, these studies exclude personal real estate and ownership of an individual business, both which can be significant. As Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko stated about the typical millionaire household in The Millionaire Next Door:

On average, 21 percent of our household’s wealth is in our private business.

Once we include ownership of private businesses and real estate, the typical millionaire household’s allocation to traditional asset classes like stocks and bonds is a bit lower that what has been advertised above.

We can see this more clearly if we look at the chart below (from VisualCapitalist), which highlights how household net worth is broken out across different wealth tiers. In it we can see the percentage allocated to a primary residence, vehicles, business interests, and much more:

As you can see, millionaire households have about 25% of their wealth in their primary residence and 15% in business interests (trust me I measured the bars). This implies that the typical millionaire has a 60% allocation to stocks, bonds, and cash. More importantly, this percentage seems to decline as households get wealthier. Once you become a decamillionaire or centimillionaire, business interests began to dominate most of your wealth.

Now that we have a rough idea of how millionaires allocate their assets, let’s look at their buy and sell decisions.

Do Millionaires Try to Time the Market?

When it comes to trying to time the market, affluent households are quite tame. As the table below (from Vanguard) illustrates, a little over half of all affluent households traded their accounts within a year, and when they did they only traded about 10% of their total assets:

This suggests that millionaire households aren’t trying to time the market. And this isn’t just an artifact of the relatively calm market stretch from 2015-2019. During the market crash of March 2020, only 11% of Vanguard investors made any active trades.

And this isn’t just a Vanguard thing either. The Millionaire Next Door comes to a similar conclusion when describing the typical millionaire household (emphasis mine):

We hold nearly 20 percent of our household’s wealth in transaction securities such as publicly traded stocks and mutual funds. But we rarely sell our equity investments.

From what I’ve seen between these two data sources, it seems clear to me that most millionaires aren’t trying to time the market in any meaningful way. They invest and let it ride.

Now that we have looked at market timing, let’s examine how millionaires pick which securities to buy within an asset class.

How Do Millionaires Pick Securities Within an Asset Class?

When it comes to how millionaires pick securities within an asset class, the answer is—diversification. If you look at the investment product choices that affluent households make, you will see that the vast majority use mutual funds (which tend to be diversified), with only one third of them owning any individual securities (i.e. individual stocks):

While the vast majority of affluent households diversify through mutual funds, they are not all passive investors. Though the shift to passive funds accelerated from 2015 to 2019, 77% of affluent households still owned an active mutual fund in 2019.

This might surprise you, but this phenomenon is mostly being driven by older households who tend to have more of their wealth in active strategies:

As German scientist Max Planck once said:

Science advances one funeral at a time.

Well, the same seems to be true with passive investing. Older investors, who didn’t grow up in the age of mass indexing, don’t seem to have taken to passive in the same way as younger investors as a whole. Therefore, as these older investors pass on, we should see even further adoption of passive investing in the future.

Now that we have looked at the asset allocation, market timing, and security selection decisions of millionaire households, let’s examine whether wealthier millionaires invest the same as their less fortunate counterparts.

Do Wealthier Millionaires Invest Differently?

So far I have focused our analysis on households that are right above the millionaire threshold. But, what about households that have more than just a few million dollars to their name? Do they invest differently than the typical millionaire household?

The evidence suggests that they do. This report from KKR demonstrates that ultra-high net worth investors (those with >$30 million in assets) invest more money into alternatives (i.e. private equity, hedge funds, etc.) and cash than high net worth investors (those with >$1 million in assets).

As you can see in the chart below, ultra-high net worth (UHNW) investors allocated 30% to stocks, 10% to bonds, 50% to alternatives, and 10% to cash while high net worth (HNW) investors allocated around 50% to stocks, 20% to bonds, 25% to alternatives, and 5% to cash:

I can’t necessarily explain why UHNW investors have more money in alternatives, but I have a few theories. One of them is that, as wealth increases, households tend to invest based more on status than returns. Alternative investments like private equity and hedge funds offer a sense of exclusivity that you can’t get with a Vanguard index fund.

Another possibility is that wealthier households invest in alternatives because they are the only ones that can access them anyway. While anyone with a few thousand dollars (sometimes less) can buy an index fund, you need to have serious capital to get into many of these alternatives.

Fortunately, retail investors (i.e. you and I) don’t need alternatives to successfully build wealth. In fact, there’s a decent amount of evidence showing that public investment strategies tend to outperform private strategies, especially after fees are taken into account. For example, the chart below shows the returns generated by hedge funds and the S&P 500 from 2015 to 2021:

As you can see, the S&P 500 outperformed a basket of hedge funds in every year from 2015-2021. This is even true in 2018, the only down year during this time period! For all those hedge fund defenders that like to say, “But hedge funds will outperform in a down market!” please explain 2018.

Either way, my point stands. There is no evidence that the typical retail investor needs alternatives to build wealth. While investing in alternatives can be nice to brag about at dinner parties, I’m not in the business of bragging. I’m in the business of trying to make you richer.

With that being said, let’s conclude by discussing why investing like a millionaire won’t necessarily make you into one.

Why Investing Like a Millionaire Won’t Necessarily Make You a Millionaire

Throughout this article we have assumed that by emulating how millionaires invest their money, you too will one day become a millionaire. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Why? Because most millionaires don’t become millionaires solely based on their investment decisions. They also tend to have a high income, a high savings rate, or both. And the further you go up the wealth spectrum, the more apparent this becomes.

If you want to become a typical millionaire, like the affluent households in Vanguard’s 2020 How America Invests study, buying a diverse set of income-producing assets and earning 7% a year will work just fine.

However, if you want wealth that is orders of magnitude higher, the S&P 500 ain’t gonna cut it. To obtain extreme levels of wealth you need:

1. A very high income (i.e. famous musician/actor/athlete, successful business owner, C-Suite executive, etc.), or
2. A huge liquidity event (i.e. sell your business, startup equity IPO, etc.)

Possibly a bit of both. Of course, I don’t know which path will be right for you. But, I do know that investing like a millionaire won’t necessarily make you into one.

Source

Links to consider

• PE in Crosshairs in $11 Trillion Investor Group’s CO2 Plan
• The Getty Family’s Trust Issues
• Music Lovers to Become Royalty Investors in New Trading Platform
• Multi-Manager/Pod/Hedge Fund 101
• Q&A: The draw of private markets for family offices
• Raising Capital Has Gotten a Lot Harder — But These LPs Could Be the Solution
• We Asked ChatGPT to Make a Market-Beating ETF. Here’s What Happened
• Cultures Clash at Salomon Smith Barney

Infographics

Quotes

Books that caught our attention this week

A central feature of modern Asia that trumps differences in economic and political systems is the web of close relationships running between and within business and politics; the connections world. These networks facilitate highly transactional interactions yielding significant reciprocal benefits. Although the connections world has not as yet seriously impeded Asia’s economic renaissance, it comes with significant costs and fallibilities. These include the creation and entrenchment of huge market power and the attenuation of competition. They in turn hold back the growth in productivity and innovation that will be essential for further development. The connections world also breeds massive inequalities that may culminate in political instability. The authors argue that if Asia’s claim to the 21st century is not to be derailed, major changes must be made to policy and behaviour so as to cut away the foundations of the connections world and promote more sustainable economic and political systems.

Amazon

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Written by bestselling author Tom Davenport and Deloitte’s Nitin Mittal, All-In on AI looks at artificial intelligence at its cutting edge from the viewpoint of established companies like Anthem, Ping An, Airbus, and Capital One. Filled with insights, strategies, and best practices, All-In on AI also provides leaders and their teams with the information they need to help their own companies take AI to the next level. If you’re curious about the next phase in the implementation of artificial intelligence within companies, or if you’re looking to adopt this powerful technology in a more robust way yourself, All-In on AI will give you a rare inside look at what the leading adopters are doing, while providing you with the tools to put AI at the core of everything you do.

Amazon

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This book deconstructs a series of myths surrounding China’s economic rise. The first myth is that globalization led directly to China’s rise; the second is that China is another East Asian developmental state; the third that China’s market reform had been implemented in an incremental way; and fourth that China’s ‘resilient authoritarianism’ has been effective in ensuring the country’s economic and political transformation. Yue argues that the China model is one of ‘crony comprador capitalism’ that has hindered the country’s attempts at economic and political modernity. It is argued that the United States’ strategy of integrating China into the international system is self-defeating in the long run; not because such an approach has created a ‘restless empire’ capable of challenging US primacy, but because the Chinese ‘miracle’ has subsequently backfired on the liberal order created after World War Two. Covering the entire reform period from the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 to the present day, the author calls for readers to rethink globalization and leave more policy space for China and the developing nations to pursue national development through internal integration, which is more conducive to democratic transition and global peace.

Amazon

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Some of the most significant moments in American history have occurred over meals, as U.S. presidents broke bread with friends or foe: Thomas Jefferson’s nationbuilding receptions in the new capital, Washington, D.C.; Ulysses S. Grant’s state dinner for the king of Hawaii; Teddy Roosevelt’s groundbreaking supper with Booker T. Washington; Richard Nixon’s practiced use of chopsticks to pry open China; Jimmy Carter’s cakes and pies that fueled a détente between Israel and Egypt at Camp David. Here Alex Prud’homme invites readers into the White House kitchen to reveal the sometimes curious tastes of twenty-six of America’s most influential presidents, how their meals were prepared and by whom, and the ways their choices affected food policy around the world. And the White House menu grew over time— from simple eggs and black coffee for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and celebratory turtle soup after and squirrel stew for Dwight Eisenhower, to jelly beans and enchiladas for Ronald Reagan and arugula for Barack Obama. What our leaders say about food touches on everything from our nation’s shifting diet and local politics to global trade, science, religion, war, class, gender, race, and so much more.

Amazon

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