Purchase
How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust
Crown Business
November 2011
On Sale: November 1, 2011
256 pages ISBN: 0307589897 EAN: 9780307589897 Kindle: B004J4WKXI Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
The rich are not only getting richer, they are becoming more
dangerous. Starting in the early 1980s the top one percent
(1%) 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.
high-beta rich (hi be’ta rich) 1. a newly discovered
personality type of the America upper class prone to wild
swings in wealth. 2. the winners (and occasional losers) in
an economy that creates wealth from financial markets, asset
bubbles and deals. 3. derived from the Wall Street term
“high-beta,” meaning highly volatile or prone to booms and
busts. 4. an elite that’s capable of wreaking havoc on
communities, jobs, government finances, and the consumer
economy.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|