73. In Fed We Trust by David Wessel

Borrowed from a friend, this one was quite an unlikely read for me. My finance background generally makes me too vary of books written about an event, with the perfect gift of hindsight. Too many articles occupy my browser and mail space, inspecting, dissecting and criticising every decision made by the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank, the Securities Regulator, other Financial or Regulatory bodies including the Stock Exchanges themselves. Some of such criticisms and doomsday scenario do occasionally come true, but on the virtue of a broken clock being right twice in a day, than anything else. It would perhaps be prudent to put a disclaimer here declaring myself to be part of this ecosystem.

Anyway, it was with some trepidation that I read this book, half expecting it to be a blind bashing of every decision the Fed did make in the period 2007-10, a bad period for us finance professionals, my entry into the corporate world itself being ill-timed following this great meltdown. Many of such fears were greatly misplaced though, if anything, David Wessel has celebrated Bernanke in his work; you see, criticising a financial decision maker is too easy and infinitely more tempting that giving credit for a job well done.

The book carefully takes us through the years, giving us a glimpse of the Greenspan era, the appointment of Bernanke himself, and then the roller-coaster ride of the sub-prime crises, the events leading upto Lehmann, the events post Lehmann, the curious cases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the reorganisation of the entire Investment Banking sectors, as we knew it. The book also took me through the world of multiple regulators in US and how financial institutions go cherry-picking for the most lenient one, a problem acutely faced in India, and a problem I fear will only worsen till fixed.

The book recognises and evaluates Bernanke, the Academician, using theories learnt from his lifelong study of the Great Depression, experimenting with all the tools available with the Fed, creatively creating a few new ones, when the old ones didn't seem to be up to the task.

Personally, I have and have had mixed feelings about the way the Panic was handled. While fully appreciating that the steps taken by Bernanke and his team were critical and absolutely necessary, I remain unconvinced if the Moral Hazard issue couldn't have been handled better. While I do believe that saving those banks from bankruptcy was critical, whether protecting shareholders' value and golden parachutes for the executives should have been part of the deal, well, I remain unconvinced.

The book touched upon many things I knew, many more that I thought I knew and exposed me to even more things I didn't.

71. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

A Classic. One of the most pathbreaking books of all times. A book, which took me a little over a year to finish. "The" discourse on Evolution, the world of Darwin, which all of us are familiar with, we grew up in, with little understood or completely misunderstood and misused idioms like "Survival of the Fittest", which Darwin, interestingly attributes to Herbert Spencer.

I am sure everyone reading this review knows what the book would generally be about, and therefore, I would like to discuss some other features, which struck me. The book has a strong defensive undercurrent, through which Darwin at times is more concerned with defending his position than asserting his viewpoint. Darwin's tone, at places, where there is little proof to propagate his theory, is almost apologetic. Then he writes that many naturalists have come to terms with natural selection, while ridiculing others, who may still believe in independent creation of species.

Another most interesting observation was the glaring and most obvious absence of any definitive statement on the evolution of humans - a clear indication on Darwin's lack of willingness to rake up such a sensitive issue, his work being controversial enough as it already was. He touches upon this topic most superficially, carefully sandwiched in a para about Herbert Spencer and human psychology, "In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." Darwin revisited this topic 12 years later, in his The Descent of Man, by which time, the populace probably had enough time to digest and accept the basic tenets of evolution.

A timeless book, even if now dated.

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar

Book #48 - 2013

It is like High School Physics revisited with all the cool stuff that was missing in those textbooks. Manjit Kumar has done a great job tackling this otherwise overwhelming topic. It sure was the recounting of the golden era of physics with such stalwarts, some of them, less recognised, just in contrast with the Einsteins, Bohrs, Heisenbergs and Schrodingers of the world. I personally didn't even know of the existence of Pauli, whom the author has equated with Einstein in sheer intellect. The personal chemistry between those scientists, animated through the correspondences between them, the gradual timeline with non-gradual developments in physics were all very well manifested. The book weakened in the last few chapters, probably because of the complexity of the phenomenon the author was tackling with. The author, perhaps, would have been better off, if he had given a conceptual summary of the developments in the last 25 years, rather than doing such an unsatisfactory job of forcing a closure. There was nothing I gained from the author's explanation of the future efforts made on the leggett inequality or the inequality itself, other than the name itself. The book lost some of its hold on me in the aforementioned last few chapters, but the overall experience was fantastic.