Book Bits: 26 September 2026

● The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions–and How to Exploit Them
Alex Edmans
Review via Publishers Weekly
“Sometimes, the most rational thing a researcher can do is study the irrational,” contends London Business School finance professor Edmans (May Contain Lies) in this enlightening exploration of the psychological forces that drive financial market decisions. Edmans notes that even Isaac Newton fell victim to stock market frenzy, losing millions of pounds in a 1720 foray into South American ventures and lamenting that he could “calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.” Edmans offers examples of such madness, explaining how the weather, celebrity hype, and even the performance of a country’s soccer team skew investor behavior. Sometimes market decisions seem sound but are based on irrational biases, he adds.

● Worth the Risk: The Seven Myths That Keep Us from Taking the Chances We Need to Take
Allison Schrager
Excerpt via Bloomberg
At least once a year, regardless of market conditions, some investment bank or another announces that it is “redefining” investing. I remember attending a presentation way back in 2019 at which a senior banker argued that, after nearly a decade of low bond yields, the standard 60/40 portfolio (60% stocks, 40% bonds) needed to be rethought. After a long song and dance, his “redefinition” amounted to putting some riskier assets in the bond portfolio to goose returns.
Now the US is in a higher-interest-rate environment, and once again there is a lot of redefining going on. One change is that it’s finally good to be a saver again. The catch is that saving isn’t quite as safe as it used to be.

All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump
Anthony Scaramucci
Interview with author via Next Question with Katie Couric
Anthony Scaramucci’s life has taken more twists and turns than most. He built a successful career on Wall Street, then spent a memorable (and famously brief) 11 days as President Trump’s White House communications director. Since then, he’s become a bestselling author, co-host of the hit podcast The Rest Is Politics: US, and one of the president’s most outspoken critics.
His new book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, argues that today’s political divisions didn’t emerge overnight. Instead, Anthony traces them back to three bipartisan policy decisions that he believes fundamentally reshaped the American Dream and set the stage for where we are today.

● The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It
Annie Lowrey
Review via The Economist
Governments often treat your time as if it had no value. As monopolies, they know you cannot shop elsewhere for a passport or permit. So whereas it takes only one click to have Thai food delivered to your door by a private firm, the form for people in Michigan seeking public support until recently had 1,000 questions, many in impenetrable bureaucratese and some pointlessly intrusive (such as “what is the date of conception of your children?”).
America is not the worst offender. But as Annie Lowrey describes in “The Time Tax”, it is unusually bad for such a rich country. Americans spend five times as much time on government form-filling as Danes, Brits or South Koreans. Whereas the much poorer and more numerous citizens of India all have a digital biometric ID, Americans are still shuffling paper.

Please note that the links to books above are affiliate links with Amazon.com and James Picerno (a.k.a. The Capital Spectator) earns money if you buy one of the titles listed. Also note that you will not pay extra for a book even though it generates revenue for The Capital Spectator. Thank you!