Biggs on Finance, Economics, and the Stock Market: Barton's Market Chronicles from the Morgan Stanley Years

Section 5

TRAVELOGUES

Frankly, writing travelogues is a little embarrassing but some people say they're the best thing I do, which is even more embarrassing.

—Barton Biggs, September 18, 1989

“We all need an utter cultural change every so often to blow out the dust and debris,” wrote Biggs in 1980. Despite a near-crushing global travel schedule over the next few decades, Barton Biggs had real-life adventures away from the grind of investments that became legendary missives among his more routine market repertoire. He called them, “highly discretionary reading: a pure, self-centered travelogue with no redeeming business virtues.”

Whether it was a safari in Kenya or personally summiting famous world peaks from the Matterhorn to Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro, or Rainier, Biggs managed to impart the experience in a style worthy of Jon Krakauer. Biggs seemed to absorb his adventures with a sense of boyish wonderment and came away from them clearly refreshed in body and mind. They also serve to demonstrate a life well lived surrounded by family and friends, fully living in the world, not just watching from the sidelines.

They may not have had much business virtue, but literary virtue? You be the judge.