Review by Booklist Review
Nations, CNBC contributor, president of NationsShares, and author of Options Math for Traders (2012), writes about five significant U.S. stock market crashes in 1907, 1929, 1987, 2008, and 2010, respectively. These crashes have similar characteristics, and each defined an ensuing period of economic challenges. Nations cites a great many sources, including economic reports, government documents, trade magazines, and newspapers. He covers the specific details of each crash and explores how and why each occurred. Covering complex responses, from investment trusts to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), makes for content that may be complex for the general reader, but the minute-to-minute details are fascinating. Readers who enjoy financial history, political economy, and the work of Andrew Ross Sorkin may find this all interesting. Nations insightfully relays the parallel experiences of stock market meltdowns, the events that led up to them, and their resulting economic and social ramifications.--Pun, Raymond Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Nations (The Complete Book of Option Spreads and Combinations), a CNBC contributor, offers a fascinating look at five major stock market crashes: the Panic of 1907, Black Tuesday, Black Monday, the Great Recession, and the Flash Crash. Nations observes that stock market crises mean more than just tanking investment accounts. They also stop people from investing, impacting job availability and the economy as a whole. While these failures don't have a single cause that is easy to recognize beforehand, he asserts that all five studied here share important indicators. For one, they all had an external catalyst. He connects the Panic of 1907 to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which spurred insurance claims predominantly held by British insurers, causing a global bump in interest rates. Nations goes into equal depth on each case study, sharing stories such as that of Angeliki Papathanasopoulou, a pregnant bank employee in Athens killed in 2010 by rioters venting anger over the Greek debt crisis, which then triggered the Flash Crash. Nations's focus on underlying causes is uniquely helpful given the complexities of the ever-changing and intricately connected global economy. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In studying the stock-market crashes of 1907, 1929, 1987, 2008, and 2010, CNBC contributor and investment professional -Nations offers a comparative history on how crashes occur. For the 1907 panic, he details the backdrop of the San Francisco earthquake, President Theodore Roosevelt's trust-busting campaign, and the poor capitalization of the burgeoning trust company sector. He explains that all it then took to spook investors and crash the market was a mistake by one of the trust companies. For each ensuing financial disaster, Nations similarly lays out the root causes, profiles the central actors, and offers a fast-paced narrative of the events leading up to it. In drawing parallels among the five events, he concludes that the triggering mechanism in each was a poorly understood financial innovation that, when stressed, spiraled out of control, tearing the markets apart. VERDICT Employing a lively style, Nations's entertaining and informative work will be appreciated by all readers desiring a survey on market crashes. This work joins Robert Z. Aliber's and Charles P. Kindleberger's classic Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 7th ed. [See Prepub Alert, 12/12/16.]-Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Can we time the market? No, but this timely book by an investment executive and CNBC contributor gives some idea of how various the triggers for its collapse can be.The five market crashes Nations (The Complete Book of Option Spreads and Combinations, 2014, etc.) chronicles are comparatively recent, the first from 1907, the last from 2010. This lifts some of the predictive power from the author's argument, since the so-called panic of 1893 was easily as severe as any of its successors, while some of the crashes of the early republican era were similarly devastating. Even so, the overarching points are valuable. Nations points out that investment in the market is key in moving the economy forward and that it has indeed led to individual enrichment; he notes that a dollar invested in 1899 would have been worth nearly $157 at the time of the 2010 hiccup. However, he adds, had we not experienced the ruinous crash of 1907, the whole package would have been worth another $45 or so, and if we had been able to avoid the five worst days of the ever cresting and falling cycle, then that dollar would have been worth $319.24. Nations describes some of the mechanisms for these moments of free fall, ranging from malfeasance in the market to technical glitches in our increasingly prevalent computer-driven trades. Interestingly, some of the market crashes, by the author's account, were set in motion by the government's doing the right thing in restraining monopoly, short trades, and other examples of the free market gone bad. Do what we will to avoid them, though, crashes are a function of that market and the people who participate in them, fiscal evidence of uncertainty and fear. As Nations also writes, though the climb back can be agonizingly slow, the market eventually recovers. In an account with more villains than heroes, indifferently written but full of useful object lessons, Nations concludes with the warning that for all that, "it will crash again." An eye-opening examination of the many ways money can be madeand disappear. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
