Two Investing Classics, Plus a Third Destined to Achieve That Status

David Warsh submits: It’s a little late for gift-giving, I admit, but here are three very interesting books about investing that aren’t going to get into my blog, Economic Principals, unless I write about them now. Two of them are already classics. The third seems destined to achieve that status. As to the various joys of spending money, it is hard to beat the Weekend edition of the Financial Times. But EP remains interested in what others have to say about the deep pleasures of making money. Your Money and Your Life: A Lifetime Approach to Money Management, by Robert Z. Aliber. I am a great fan of the walk-around-the-pond-with-a-companionable-friend format. This new version of a 1982 book began when the benefits office at the University of Chicago asked Aliber to speak to retiring faculty about financial planning. He discovered many of them (at least those not involved in serial marriages) were millionaires, the result of generous pensions, rising real estate prices and the bull market in stocks. “After my presentation, I would get calls – let’s have lunch.” This book collects a couple of dozen such conversations and organizes them under three headings: decisions involving expenditure, investment and financial planning. Wondering whether to buy a new car or one that has been slightly used? To prefer public to private education? To rent or buy? To load up on insurance? To annuitize or not? Curious about how to construct a bond ladder? Anxious about senior health care? Aliber is full of wisdom on all these counts and more. Retired now after 39 years as a professor at Chicago’s Booth School of Business, he is author of The International Money Game, as well as the inheritor who has turned Charles P. Kindleberger’s classic Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises into an ongoing text.Complete Story »