Dice Have No Memory: Big Bets and Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas

Dice Have No Memory: Big Bets and Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas

by William Bonner
Released April 2011
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9780470640043

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Book description

Right now, Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury are all gambling with your future and your money. And it's contagious. Economies around the globe are suffering from the biggest multitrillion-dollar bets ever wagered on big governments and miraculous financial interventions in pretend "free markets."

One man saw it all coming and told his readers well in advance of today's crisis. Bill Bonner reports on the true health and well-being of the world's largest economy to over half a million readers each day in The Daily Reckoning. His newsletter is to the mainstream financial press what the Gnostic Gospels are to the King James Bible.

Back in 2000, Bill Bonner sounded like a prophet crying in the wilderness. While everyone scrambled to purchase shares of the latest and hottest dot-com, Bill announced his Trade of the Decade: Sell dollars, buy gold. Back in 2000, you could get an ounce for around $264. Today, you could pay as much as $1,400 for that same ounce. Finally, some of Bonner's best pronouncements, predictions, and profitable analysis are collected in one place.

Dice Have No Memory gather's Bonner's richest insights from August 1999 through November 2010 to form a chronological narrative of economics in America.

Here's a fraction of what you'll find inside:

*Gold says "I Told You So"

*Three out of Four Economists Are Wrong

*Imperial Overstretch Marks

*Why Debt Does Matter

*Economic Zombies Shuffle Towards Bankruptcy

Bonner's Dice Have No Memory offers elegies for economists, tips for investors, tirades against wasteful warfare past and present, and practical guides to modern finance with graceful prose, well-earned intelligence, and riotous irreverence. Bill Bonner's common sense genius rips the window dressing off modern finance - a world normally populated by misguided do-gooders, corrupt politicians, and big bankers empowered by dubious "mathematical" truths. The investing game is rigged, just like Monte Carlo.

Instead of giving you magic formulas, this archcontrarian teaches you how to think clearly. And Dice Have No Memory gives today's investor the next moves he should make...before it's too late.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Introduction
  7. Chapter 1 : The Incompetence of Economists
    1. Fight the Fed?
    2. The 17-Year Itch
    3. From Funeral to Funeral
    4. The Whacky World of Modern Economists
    5. Disappearing on the Pampas
    6. Inevitable and Disgraceful, But Still Unpredictable
    7. Gonoism!
    8. 100 Years of Mismanagement
    9. Three Out of Four Economists Are Wrong
    10. The Patsy Revolt of 2010
    11. Junk Science
  8. Chapter 2 : The Maestro’s Last Helipad: The Conspiracy of Greenspan and Bernanke
    1. Greenspan’s Put Is Shot
    2. God, Man, and Alan Greenspan
    3. Houses without Moats
    4. Can Do Money
    5. The World He Lives In
    6. Poor House II—The Miracle of No-Sweat Equity . . .
    7. Take It Away, Maestro
    8. Incredible Threat
    9. Plumbers Crack
  9. Chapter 3 : No Clairvoyants Need Apply
    1. More Perfect Unions
    2. Bad Bets
    3. Misleading Knowledge, Part I
    4. Little Big Bubbles
    5. The Best Kind of Wealth
    6. Our New Trade of the Decade!
    7. The Great Correction . . . Still Pending
  10. Chapter 4 : War and Waste
    1. All Quiet on the Western Front
    2. In Praise of Group Thinking
    3. The Dark Years
    4. Tsar of Arabie
    5. Pearl Harbor
    6. Too Big to Succeed
    7. Imperial Over-Stretch Marks
    8. The Stain of Democracy
    9. The Good War
  11. Chapter 5 : Borrowing against the American Dream
    1. Honor Insolvency
    2. Playing the Game
    3. Even More Unexplanatory
    4. Land of the Free
    5. Fantasies
    6. Lost in Space
    7. Hoorah for Capitalism!
    8. Ready for the Shovels
    9. Aughts Ruined by Wall Street
    10. U.S. Economy in a Self-Made Vise
    11. Why Debt Does Matter
  12. Chapter 6 : The Zombie State: When Government Fails
    1. Wealth, Poverty, and Blithering Idiots
    2. Said the Joker to the Thief
    3. In Gono We Trust
    4. Welcome to Zombieland
    5. When Zombies Attack
    6. Central Planning and the Parasites It Creates
    7. Government Growth Does Not Equal Economic Growth
    8. The Zombie Economy
    9. Zombieland
    10. Economic Zombies Shuffle Toward Bankruptcy
    11. Tony Hayward Before Congress: No Sympathy for the Oil Man
  13. Chapter 7 : Back It with Bullion
    1. The Dow in Gold Terms . . . Where to from Here . . .
    2. Under the Big Top, Part Deux
    3. The Revenge of Gold
    4. A Goldbug’s Life
    5. Faith in Faith
    6. Gold Says, “I Told You So”
    7. A Look Forward at the Final Stage of the Gold Bull Market
  14. Chapter 8 : The Gaucho’s Guide to Investing in Argentina
    1. Earth’s Bright Side
    2. The Gaucho’s Union
    3. Hot Water
    4. Sowing the Wind, We Reap the Whirlwind
    5. The Happiest Day in a Man’s Life
  15. Chapter 9 : The Expatriate’s Experiment Abroad
    1. The Accidental Investor
    2. Planting Trees
    3. The Episcopalian’s Guide to Airport Security
    4. Reformation
    5. All Saints’ Day
    6. The Money Pit
    7. Exiles Eternal
  16. Chapter 10 : The One Appointment We Must All Keep
    1. Memento Mori
    2. Thom Hickling, R.I.P.
    3. Requiem for an Economist
    4. Frank Laarman, R.I.P.
    5. Remembrance of Fanny
    6. Life Goes On
  17. Acknowledgments
  18. About the Author
  19. Index

Product information

  • Title: Dice Have No Memory: Big Bets and Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas
  • Author(s): William Bonner
  • Release date: April 2011
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9780470640043