Book Bits: 6 September 2025

● The Fractured Age: How the Return of Geopolitics Will Splinter the Global Economy
Neil Shearing
Interview with author via Financial Times
It’s a widely held assumption that US President Donald Trump has put globalization into reverse. But Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics and author of The Fractured Age: How the Return of Geopolitics Will Splinter the Global Economy, tells the FT’s world trade editor Peter Foster that Trump’s policies are a symptom and not the cause of the global trading system unravelling. They discuss how economic rivalry between the US and China is reshaping world trade – and where it might lead.

● The Manual of Ideas: The Proven Framework for Finding the Best Value Investments (2nd ed.)
John Mihaljevic
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
The Manual of Ideas is the indispensable resource top investment firms like Berkshire Hathaway rely on for cutting edge research and investment ideas. As the definitive source for value investing opportunities, this book takes you inside the minds of the world’s top money managers to learn how they generate the bright ideas that lead to big profits. This new second edition includes insights from more than 100 exclusive interviews with leading fund managers to give you access to the thought processes of super value investors including Warren Buffett, Tom Gayner, and Joel Greenblatt. Real-life case studies bring each approach to life, revealing key lessons along the way, and new tables and charts illuminate important concepts to provide a quicker, easier read.

● Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
Dan Wang
Review via The Economist
Many of the people who run China are engineers, and it shows. Since the 1980s China has built a motorway network twice the length of America’s and a high-speed rail network more than 15 times the size of Japan’s. It uses almost as much solar and wind power as the rest of the world combined, and it produces around one-third of the world’s manufactured goods.
In his illuminating new book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”, Dan Wang argues that China is an “engineering state”, locked in competition with America, which is run by lawyers. China builds things quickly. America debates endlessly about whether they should be built at all. How did China, a country that was once known mostly for intellectual-property theft and child labour, become a technological powerhouse?

● Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula One, Discovery, Sirius XM, and the Atlanta Braves
John Malone
Excerpt via The Hollywood Reporter
I built this portfolio with one clear goal — the same one that I believe anyone who is an active member of the management of a public company should share: to maximize the value of the shares of the company over a medium term. Because that is why you were hired—to maximize shareholder returns. The recent fad of “stakeholder capitalism” relegates shareholders to merely one of myriad groups a company is obligated to serve, and it is simply impractical to serve multiple masters and remain productive. You have to honor your obligations to your employees, yes, and you must honor your obligations to your lenders. But you must maximize the value for your shareholders.

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