-
The High-beta Rich
- How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
The rich are not only getting richer, they are becoming more dangerous. Starting in the early 1980s the top one percent broke away from the rest of us to become the most unstable force in the economy. An elite that had once been the flat line on the American income charts - models of financial propriety - suddenly set off on a wild ride of economic binges.
Not only do they control more than a third of the country's wealth, their increasing vulnerability to the booms and busts of the stock market wreak havoc on our consumer economy, financial markets, communities, employment opportunities, and government finances.
Robert Frank's insightful analysis provides the disturbing big picture of high-beta wealth. His vivid storytelling brings you inside the mortgaged mansions, blown-up balance sheets, repossessed Bentleys and Gulfstreams, and wrecked lives and relationships:
- How one couple frittered away a fortune trying to build America’s biggest house - 90,000 square feet with 23 full bathrooms, a 6,000 square foot master suite with a bed on a rotating platform - only to be forced to put it on the market because “we really need the money”.
- Repo men who are now the scavengers of the wealthy, picking up private jets, helicopters, yachts and racehorses – the shiny remains of a decade of conspicuous consumption financed with debt, asset bubbles, “liquidity events,” and soaring stock prices.
- How “big money ruins everything” for communities such as Aspen, Colorado whose over-reliance on the rich created a stratified social scene of velvet ropes and A-lists and crises in employment opportunities, housing, and tax revenues.
- Why California’s worst budget crisis in history is due in large part to reliance on the volatile incomes of the state’s tech tycoons.
- The bitter divorce of a couple who just a few years ago made the Forbes 400 list of the richest people, the firing of their enormous household staff of 110, and how one former spouse learned the marvels of shopping at Marshalls, filling your own gas tank, and flying commercial.
Robert Frank’s stories and analysis brilliantly show that the emergence of the high-beta rich is not just a high-class problem for the rich. High-beta wealth has national consequences: America’s dependence on the rich + great volatility among the rich = a more volatile America.
Cycles of wealth are now much faster and more extreme. The rich are a new “Potemkin Plutocracy” and the important lessons and consequences are brought to light of day in this engrossing book.
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Everyone knew it was crazy to try to extract oil and natural gas buried in shale rock deep below the ground. Everyone, that is, except a few reckless wildcatters - who risked their careers to prove the world wrong. Things looked grim for American energy in 2006. Oil production was in steep decline and natural gas was hard to find. The Iraq War threatened the nation’s already tenuous relations with the Middle East. China was rapidly industrializing and competing for resources.
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Balanced approach on controversial topic
- By Chris on 01-02-14
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Glass House
- The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
- By: Brian Alexander
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.
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What really happened to the American Dream?
- By Bill on 05-10-17
By: Brian Alexander
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How Money Became Dangerous
- The Inside Story of Our Turbulent Relationship with Modern Finance
- By: Christopher Varelas, Dan Stone
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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From a veteran of the trade, a provocative and entertaining voyage into the turbulent heart of modern money that sheds new light on the rise of our threatening and complicated financial system, how money became our adversary, and why finding a new course is crucial to a healthy society.
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Must read
- By Craig M. Stratton on 02-08-20
By: Christopher Varelas, and others
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The Lost Bank
- The Story of Washington Mutual - The Biggest Bank Failure in American History
- By: Kirsten Grind
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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During the most dizzying days of the financial crisis, Washington Mutual, a bank with hundreds of billions of dollars in its coffers, suffered a crippling bank run. The story of its final, brutal collapse in the autumn of 2008, and its controversial sale to JPMorgan Chase, is an astonishing account of how one bank lost itself to greed and mismanagement, and how the entire financial industry - and even the entire country - lost its way as well. Kirsten Grind’s The Lost Bank is a magisterial and gripping account of these events.
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Sad and Angry by Turn
- By Johnnie Walker on 07-24-12
By: Kirsten Grind
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Tap Dancing to Work
- Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966–2012: A Fortune Magazine Book
- By: Carol J. Loomis
- Narrated by: Susan Boyce, Barry Press
- Length: 17 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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When Carol Loomis first mentioned a little-known Omaha hedge-fund manager in a 1966 Fortune article, she didn’t dream that Warren Buffett would one day be considered the world’s greatest investor - nor that she and Buffett would become close personal friends. Now Loomis has collected and updated the best Buffett articles Fortune published between 1966 and 2012, including thirteen cover stories and a dozen pieces authored by Buffett himself. Loomis has provided commentary about each major article that supplies context and her own informed point of view.
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A collection of finance articles - not a biography
- By Gerardo A Dada on 08-23-13
By: Carol J. Loomis
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Boom, Bust, Exodus
- The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities
- By: Chad Broughton
- Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.
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A Story I thought I Knew
- By Meek84 on 07-08-18
By: Chad Broughton
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Pound Foolish
- Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry
- By: Helaine Olen
- Narrated by: Lyn Landon
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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For the past few decades, Americans have spent billions of dollars on personal finance products. As salaries have stagnated and companies have cut back on benefits, we've taken matters into our own hands, embracing the can-do attitude that if we're smart enough, we can overcome even daunting financial obstacles. But that's not true. In this meticulously reported and shocking audiobook, journalist and former financial columnist Helaine Olen goes behind the curtain of the personal finance industry to expose the myths, contradictions, and outright lies it has perpetuated.
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The dark side of my industry
- By jfoxcpacfp on 06-15-13
By: Helaine Olen
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King of Capital
- The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone
- By: John E. Morris, David Carey
- Narrated by: George K. Wilson
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The financial establishment---banks and investment bankers, such as Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley---were the cowboys, recklessly assuming risks, leveraging up to astronomical levels, and driving the economy to the brink of disaster.
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Great Story Ruined by Monotone Reading
- By Marc on 04-23-13
By: John E. Morris, and others
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Waffle Street
- The Confession and Rehabilitation of a Financier
- By: James Adams
- Narrated by: Scott Merriman
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Jimmy Adams was laid off from a hedge fund in early 2009. Wearied by eight years in the bond market and disillusioned by the financial services profession, he decides to get an "honest job" for a change. Before he knows what hit him, Jimmy finds himself waiting on tables of barflies at his local Waffle House.
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A wonderful story of human nature and economics
- By Douglas Meadows on 01-29-24
By: James Adams
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Ahead of the Curve
- Two Years at Harvard Business School
- By: Philip Delves Broughton
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2004 Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join 900 other would-be tycoons on the Harvard Business School's plush campus. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business: leadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, and work/life balance.
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On one breath.
- By Atkins on 05-17-22
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Crash Course
- The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster
- By: Paul Ingrassia
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In Crash Course, Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves? Ingrassia also describes dysfunctional corporate cultures (even as GM's market share plunged, the company continued business as usual) and Detroit's perverse system of "inverse layoffs" (which allowed union members to invoke seniority to avoid work).
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Contemporary History at Its Best
- By Roy on 04-19-10
By: Paul Ingrassia
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Hedgehogging
- By: Barton Biggs
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
- Abridged
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Rare is the opportunity to chat with a legendary figure and hear the unvarnished truth about what really goes on behind the scenes. Step inside the world of Wall Street with Barton Biggs as he discusses investing in general, hedge funds in particular, and how he has learned to find and profit from the best moneymaking opportunities in an eat-what-you-kill, cutthroat investment world.
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HedgeHotDogging
- By Bob on 10-01-06
By: Barton Biggs
What listeners say about The High-beta Rich
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Saltypants
- 03-27-12
TERRIBLE NARRATOR!!!
The book was interesting, but the narrator was HORRIBLE. Almost no inflection in his voice made things just run together into a long string, which made it hard to follow after a while.
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- Kindle Customer
- 11-30-11
Pretty entertaining Book, I enjoyed it.
It was quite an insight to life of High-Beta rich (as Robert Frank calls them) I didn't really know, far from the world of reality TV we all aware of . This was the best book to see the wealthy in true form.
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- Joshua Kim
- 05-06-12
high beta read
Robert Frank is the wealth reporter for the WSJ, where he writes the wealth blog, and is also the author of the 2008 book Richistan. Reading The High-Beta Rich is good fun, as who doesn't like to hear about former billionaires reduced to cleaning their own toilets and shopping at Marshalls. Frank hangs The High-Beta Rich on both stories and data, and he is a good story-teller.
The underlying data story is the degree to which the income, and therefore spending, of the wealthy fluctuates. Today's rich are different from the previous wealthy class, as most of the recent big fortunes were made by way of financial manipulation as opposed to the traditional route of building a company over many years (or through inheritance). The formerly mega-wealthy that Frank profiles made their millions (or billions) by borrowing large sums of money, and as often as not investing this borrowed money in overpriced real estate development schemes. As quickly as the sub-prime bubble burst, they were forced to lay-off the armies of butlers and private chefs that they had accumulated during the financial and housing bubble. The fallout of the rapid declines in the wealth of many previous top-earners is not however limited to the yacht and mansion set, as many municipalities (read Aspen) and employees (read most of us), have grown to depend on the tax dollars and spending of the rich. Turns out, an economy based on rich people is a volatile economy indeed.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Nichelle
- 11-04-11
Sell to the Classes, Join the Masses
This books is full of lots of interesting riches to rags stories, but it also explains why it's better to have a middle class driven economy than a richistan driven economy. Politicians need to quit worshipping the rich and read this book, and then they need to pass a law that caps all political contributions at $500 or less.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Gabe
- 12-13-11
A great follow-up to Richistan
This book was a very interesting and entertaining follow-up to Richistan. The audio is very clear and the listening experience is great. From private jet repo men to the rise and fall of America's most lavish lifestyles, it's all very eye opening.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Paul
- 05-25-16
Superficial
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
No one
What could Robert Frank have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
Better research.
How could the performance have been better?
Better content.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
Not really.
Any additional comments?
It was too superficial. Needs to have been better researched and more in depth.
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