A Business Miscellany
Friday, 2 March 2007
Last Updated: Wednesday, 22 August 2007
By The Economist
Profile Books $29.95
Reviewed by Thomas Mann
While better indexing would make the book easier to use – a section on mobile phone usage is strangely followed by a list of airplane ownership among Fortune 500 companies – this is hardly a cover-to-cover read.
Much like the Guinness Book of Records this is a book for idle skimming. There is a danger that precious working minutes could be siphoned away as you fall into the world of facts and figures suggested on the cover, but this collection of facts and figures meets your business trivia needs.
The lists range from the serious to the trivial, with The Economist writers covering all aspects of the business world. To illustrate this here’s a list of some of the lists:
- Staggering: America’s biggest bank ruses (WorldCom’s $US103.9 billion failure in 2002, way out in front); biggest profits; biggest blunders.
- Quotable: A list a snappy quotes that ignores Gordon Gekko in favor of Buffett, Trump, Turner and Rockefeller; cheat-sheet bios of name-droppable economists including Drucker, Machiavelli, Tayor and Sun Tzu.
- Cultural: foreign etiquette; a list of world currencies that goes far beyond high-school geography; a list of internet suffixes – handy for finding out where that suspicious email ending in .ky came from. (Answer: the Cayman Islands)
You’ll also find lists to help you translate the jargon of lawyer-speak and businesses as well as other important details like national tax rates and the closing times of stock exchanges.
Hopefully you can put some of these tidbits to use and retire to a life of luxury in one of the 39 countries listed as tax havens. See you in Aruba, or Malta, or Liechtenstein or...
The book also includes a section detailing some of the greatest economic failures and burst bubbles, such as:
Tulipmania
In 1633 admired varieties were selling for 10, 000 florins – roughly the same cost as a canal-side home in central Amsterdam. By 1637 the market had withered.
The Mississippi bubble
The Mississippi Company shares increased 20-fold in their year of issue. One year later, in 1820, the shares had fallen to a tenth of their market high.
The South Sea bubble
Speculation on the wealth to be found in the Spanish colonies in South America pushed the South Sea Company’s shares to a five-fold within four months in 1720. The monopoly was riding high with a £1000 share price; three months later those shares were worthless.
Railway mania
Twice the rail craze produced crashes; in Britain on the 1840s and in America during the 1870s. In America over-investment in the new transport resulted in other businesses suffering and spiralling interest rates. The bubble burst in 1873 – the year of America’s first successful train robbery.
The Wall Street crash
In 1929 stocks were 400% higher than those in 1924. Panic selling set in during October 1929, giving the world the Great Depression and unemployment to close to 17 million people.
Japan’s monetary mistake
In 1985 Japan loosened its monetary policy to boost the value of the yen. The yen doubled in value and Japanese companies went on a spending spree of American and European assets. Australia paid off its national debt by selling land surrounding its embassy in Tokyo. The bubble burst in the early 1990s and Japan’s banks and corporations still struggle with the weight of the bad debts and stagnation that followed.
The dot-com boom and bust
Venture capitalists threw money at any internet venture fuelled by the promise of huge profits. However, it became apparent that few of the dot-com businesses could provide returns on these massive investments and the stock market plunged. The NASDAQ fell by more than 70% between 1999 and 2002 on back of the dot-com collapse.
A Business Miscellany is published by Profile Books $29.95. Distributed in Australia by Allen and Unwin
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