Book Review: Wealth, Poverty and Politics An International Perspective by Thomas Sowell

This is an audio book from Audible that was published on YoutTube.

It provides counter points to Thomas Picketty's Capital in twenty first century, Niel Fuguson's Why nations fail

The main points are straightforward and of conservative roots, and the strength lies in the wide range of cases author cited (example, in culture influence on country's wealth the author cited Scotland economic rising in 18th century, Japanese in 19th century and Chinese in 20th century). 

I like to-the-point style author employs.

Highly recommend.

Book Review: The New Paradigm for Financial Market by George Soros

George Sors believed the equiliberium theory of market is not true and he proposed a reflexivity model, which states that market participants expectation affects markets fundementals, and the two sides are dependent on each other, making deviation from mean (equiliberium) more extreme (boom and bust pattern). In the past such situations triggers regulators intervention, but under Reagon's market driven philosophy, regulators now keep a blind eyes on market participants and rely on market's supposedly self correcting mechanism (rooted on the belief of equiliberium theory), which in turn leads to more extreme financial turmoil such as 2008 housing bubble, and he thinks there is a super-bubble superimposed on the housing bubble (credit expansion).

But his relexivity model can only explain the past but not able to predict what comes next.

This book came to my attention due to Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness: The hidden role of chance in life and in the markets