What I Just Read

[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.] Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility. Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and s...

Author Andrei Martyanov lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and he gives readers a perceptive--and brutally candid--take on the slow-motion collapse of the USA.  Martyanov writes with the same partially-repressed astonishment of Slavoj Zizek (see for example Zizek's book  First As Tragedy, Then As Farce ). It's as if he can hardly believe what a clowning, clownish clownworld we live in, but he nevertheless soldiers on, teaching readers ways to understand and navigate it. The book could use a bit more editing, a few of the chapters could be tightened, and quite a few sentences could be rewritten: the author has a penchant for long, Germanic sentences with the subject dangling at the end. But these are minor criticisms of a smart and blunt book that helps readers see through the various mirages of today's America.  [The usual friendly warning: read no further. These are just my notes and copy-pastes from the text to help me remember what I'...