Book Bits: 21 September 2024

● The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble
Alok Sama
Interview with author via TechCrunch
Sama delved into points of his book, particularly the psychology of investment hype cycles and the precedent set in Silicon Valley of valuing companies based on growth predictions rather than metrics like revenue and profits. While investors are doing more due diligence in today’s risk-averse market, Sama said it’s a balance between too careful and too investment-happy.
He said Son had the opportunity to invest in Facebook at a $10 billion valuation back in 2009, but ultimately passed. Today, Meta’s valuation is over $1 trillion. “That was a case of Masa having real valuation discipline, but that came back to haunt him. That’s just the reality of tech investing.”

● Money: A Story of Humanity
David McWilliams
Review via Financial Times
Money sits at the very core of human social and economic life. That is a boon to its historians, because it makes it of near-universal interest — but it also brings significant challenges. One is that money is so fundamental a part of our conceptual furniture that it is hard to get an objective view: misleading metaphors, conventional misunderstandings and the surreptitious special pleading of vested interests abound. Another is that any history of money must effectively also be a general economic history of humanity. In the wrong hands, the history of money can thus easily degenerate into a conceptually confused and unmanageably expansive mess.
McWilliams dodges these elephant traps. He establishes the Archimedean point of an accurate conceptual framework up front. Money, he explains in his introduction, is nothing more or less than a “wondrous technology” that “resides in our heads, representing value”, and which “humans invented to help us negotiate an increasingly complex and interrelated world.”

● Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market
Adam Hanieh
Summary via publisher (Verso)
This expansive history traces the hidden connections between oil and capitalism from the late 1800s to the current climate crisis. Beyond simplistic narratives that frame oil as ‘prize’ or ‘curse’, Crude Capitalism uncovers the surprising ways that oil is woven into the fabric of our modern world: the rise of an American-centered global order; the breakdown of Empire and anti-colonial rebellion; contemporary finance and US dollar hegemony; debt and militarism; and the emergence of new forms of synthetic consumption. Much more than an energy source or transport fuel, oil has a foundational place in all aspects of contemporary life – no challenge to the fossil fuel industry can be effective without taking this fact seriously.

● Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism
Brooke Harrington
Q&A with author via Marketplace.org
Q: So you’re describing a metaphorical pact with the devil. “Oh, we can bring in all this wealth by setting up an infrastructure for people to store i.e. hide some of their overseas wealth,” but it comes with unintended consequences and distortions.
A: Yes, it does seem to be a Faustian bargain for at least all the smaller countries who have tried it. The island of Jersey, that’s in the Channel Islands between France and Great Britain, Jersey and Guernsey are sort of semi-self governing entities, and they became very important tax havens. And for a while it really seemed like they’d invented the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine – they could cut taxes, and yet they brought in so much money from foreigners that they could afford to have good public services and quality of life. But after a while, the machine started to fall apart, and a really inordinate tax burden started to fall upon the locals, because the foreign capital wasn’t paying its fair share, and the democracy sort of was captured by these foreign capital interests.

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