Many years ago, my wife lent a former colleague a large sum of money to divert the various wolves at his door. The toothy vanguard of the slaverers was the IRS, which had not had a nibble of the smallest knucklebone for several years.
A year later, passing through, we dropped by his home for coffee. His silence on the matter implied that financial disaster still loomed, so we tactfully forbore to raise the question of the loan. But he told us proudly that he had spent a large sum on getting financial advice – of which the most memorable suggestion was that he should purchase a mobile home trailer so that he and his family could go on vacation more cheaply. We can only assume that the advisor was silent about paying off debts to friends like us, who could not themselves actually afford a vacation at the time. A decade later, we have had no return from our eleemosynary investment.
I often wondered why he thought paying $500 for financial advice was a good investment of money he did not have. Why not buy a book? But that was before so-called self-help books became the best-sellers. If all these authors are so good at making money, then why are they wasting time writing books which, I know from personal experience, gives limited fame and even more limited fortune?
Last time I checked out the local bookstore for this column, the self-improvement authors had conscripted such luminaries as Attila the Hun, Winnie the Pooh and Jesus Christ to lend their names to the trite fatuities that pass for inspiration in these benighted modern days. Now, the Beardstown Ladies continue unabashed despite the failure of their claims to stand up to closer audit. However there is new if somewhat gelatinous grist for the mill with Wall Street Wit And Wisdom, a slim volume that wastes shelf space not far from Shakespeare On Leadership, a selection of quotes marred by simplistic ‘translations’ of the original pith. More interestingly, Die Rich and Tax Free seems to harmonize well with one that could almost have been written by Agatha Christie, How to Inherit Money.
Working with animals
As I browsed, the Dow was downing rapidly, so Bear Market Baloney seemed to be carrying its own rebuttal in its title. But for more baloney with bears, Winnie the Pooh has added two new titles to his repertoire. As I remember, the amiable ursine was best known for getting his head stuck in honey jars – a fairly potent metaphor for people getting hooked on an ever-soaring index, but this aspect seems to be missing from the works.
However, for pet-lovers, there is a regular menagerie of other zoological inspirational aspirants such as Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, The Pig and the Python, and intriguingly, but one suspects uselessly, Teaching the Elephant to Dance.
In the same vein, but introducing the macho wing of the advisors, is Lions Don’t Need to Roar. This pandering to the self-image of the Wall Street mouse-rider as the mighty hunter continues with A Journey Into the Heroic Environment: The Hunter and the Hunted. Joining in the Conan-the-Broker vein are The Rogue Warriors and Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior. Having squeezed Sun Tze’s Art of War for all its dubious relevance, there are now no less than four editions of the Book of the Five Rings, which purports to relate a Japanese classic on individual combat to modern business life. But when Samurai worriers lost, they did not run off with huge options and pay-offs – they disemboweled themselves. It would probably do no end of wonders for corporate leadership if this principle were rapidly reintroduced but it would take a very serious market correction before we could get it on the agenda. Still Calpers might be interested.
Now, one would hate to personalize, but just as a good ale needs no bushel, good authors don’t need to festoon their title pages with degrees. So Financial Freedom on $5 a Day by Chuck Chakrapani, MSc PhD CIM, is never going to be at the top of my beach-time reading list.
Nor would Gay Money, Gay Finances in a Straight World send out the right signal from the deck chair. Straight Finances in a Crooked Wall Street strikes me as entirely more appropriate, but I haven’t written it yet. Anyway, the whole point about money is that it is ungendered, which is why Suddenly Single, Savvy Investing for Women or A Girl Needs Cash clearly have more to do with marketing than imparting advice.
Perhaps my favorite was the reprint of John Paul Getty’s How to Be Rich, which I hope tells it like is: strike oil just as the auto age gets going and let the money flow. It certainly has more of the ring of truth than the hair oil inherent in a self-help book like The Wealthy Barber. In my experience, even the most hands-on rich guys and gals do not delve in others’ dandruff. Although they may well sell snake oil to the purchasers of the best-seller lists, if it pays enough. Personally, I’m off to start writing The Gay Animal Lover’s Guide to Unarmed Combat on Wall Street.
The Speculator
