For the growing number of Americans who see China heading for inevitable global dominance, nudging aside the United States, a brief walk down memory lane helps put long-term predictions into perspective. Not so long ago, Japan was seen as the next (economic) number 1. American executives studied the 14 management principles of The Toyota Way, developed by the automobile manufacturer that grew into the world’s biggest car maker and is now recalling millions of defective vehicles.
The credit crisis is just over a year old and already there are dozens of books on the market to explain its causes or cure its ills
Most are not worth the time it takes to read them, according to a handful of money managers and market strategists who agreed to take part in an informal survey. The books either contain too few insights, they go over old ground, or they just get it wrong.
— “Too many of the books about the crisis are fluffy,” said Yale professor and economist Robert Shiller, who was among the most vocal sages predicting the real estate bust. Of all the books he read last year, only a few were sufficiently serious. One was “This Time is Different,” a history of 800 years of financial schemes-gone-wrong written by University of Maryland economics professor Carmen Reinhart and Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff.