The Trouble with Prosperity
The Trouble with Prosperity is an astute, elegantly written, selective financial history of the last few decades. It sounds a cautionary note: business is inherently cyclical; every boom historically ends in a crisis; and today's relative financial prosperity in the U.S., based on relentless downsizing and low inflation, will not last. Grant suggestively argues that the U.S. financial system's dramatic recovery in the late 1980s came about through optimism generated by a stock market rally, rather than through the Federal Reserve Board's intervention, as is widely believed.
The Trouble With Prosperity discusses the cycles of optimism and pessimism, of bull markets and bear markets, and of orthodoxy and heresy.
Grant also gives a way of understanding the rise and fall of great fortunes, the vicissitudes of investment strategies, and the colorful personalities who battled for fiscal survival and supremacy from 1929.
He also identifies the risks and rewards of financial markets through a series of revealing, interlocking cautionary tales of boom and bust from little-known Wall Street history.