Merry Christmas, Happy New Year!!! And a Book Review

At at time like this, the "fin du" year, I am reminded of what I am grateful for...I love my family, my friends, my home, my work community (company, manager and colleagues), my clients...I am grateful that my children are healthy, my home is still standing, my friends are so wonderful, my clients are so loyal, the dogs are so precious, and, particularly, that 2009 is over.

There is something so reassuring about the end of a year, and the beginning of a new one. This one will be different, it will be better. We will have more confidence, if not necessarily in our leaders, or our economy...but in ourselves.

I'd like to make a book recommendation for 2010, it's called "Devil Take the Hindmost -- A History of Financial Speculation" by Edward Chancellor. Mr. Chancellor studied history at Cambridge and Oxford, and in the early 1990's he worked for the investment bank Lazard Brothers. He's a freelance contributor to the Financial Times and The Economist. All of his experiences no doubt contribute to this very readable and interesting book, which should be required reading for all 8th graders (accelerated learners) and at the very least high school Juniors...I'm still reading it, but so far, my favorite passage involves a quote from Daniel Defoe, who in the throes of the 1720-ish South-Sea Company scheme, understood perfectly

"that trade (like credit and speculation) was dependent on confidence...(He) penned an impassioned call for calm reminiscent of Roosevelt's famous inaugural address in 1933 ("the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"). "For God's Sake, and for our Country's Sake," wrote Defoe, "let us consider what we are doing! 'Tis against Ourselves! 'Tis all setting the Knife to our Own Throats! Setting Fire to our own Houses! Destroying our own Estates. Our own Commerce, and our own Hopes! We Hurt no Body but ourselves; Impoverish no Families but our Own; and Ruin no Families but our Own; and Ruin no Country but Great Britain."

For so long, through 2005, 2006 and 2007, while home prices were actually rising, the press was crashing about our ears talking about the "housing bubble" (some would say, warning us). Later, in 2008, the confluence of the actions of our government's policies, and the greed/ingenuity of investment banks and stock brokerages, would bring down on all of us ordinarily greedy, ingenious people, the realities of inadequately vetted mortgage loans and the fraudulent practices behind them--the devaluation of real property. What a mess.

It is a very complicated situation, one from which we may well spend many years yet recovering. But Chancellor's book is illuminating, and in a perverse way, comforting. Our generation of real estate investors is not the first generation of investors to fall victim to greed and "irrational exuberance". Probably we won't be the last. But anyway, we will survive this, saved largely by our families, our friends, our clients and work, our homes that are still standing, our adorable pets, and particularly, our confidence in ourselves as survivors of one of the worst economic years of the (thankfully past) century. God Bless, Love and Luck to All, and a very Happy and Prosperous 2010...