Man vs. Markets

July 2, 2012
Our lives are affected by the financial markets on a daily basis, but even with the rise of financial journalism and Internet access to financial information, how markets operate remains a mystery to many average Americans. In his first book Hirsch, journalist and producer of American Public Media’s Marketplace, offers a straightforward, accessible, and often hilarious overview of our financial and economic systems, products, and concepts. Using colorful but simple analogies from daily life to explain complex financial instruments such as derivatives or swaps, Hirsch populates the stories with madeup characters with colorful names and speech patterns. For example, he draws on the tiered benefits of first-class and coach tickets within the airline industry to explain the basics of corporate capital structure and uses an entertaining tale of buying a Thanksgiving turkey to teach options. Organized in manageable chapters, with cartoon illustrations by Dan Archer and callout boxes sprinkled throughout to highlight certain concepts, this helpful, amusing, and engaging beginner’s guide to our financial system is sure to delight and inform readers of all ages who want to understand and navigate the markets. Illus.

August 15, 2012
A cartoon-laced, elementary but not terribly dumbed-down introduction to the dismal science by American Public Media Marketplace producer Hirsch. Anyone seeking to explain the economy, much less economics, in simple language has his or her work cut out, particularly since the natural tendency is to go simpleton-level simple in the face of complexity. Hearts may sink at Hirsch's opener, which posits as a sample enterprise an ice-cream van. An ice-cream van with public shares and derivatives? Fortunately, the author then steers the discussion onto generally more grown-up ground without ever substituting a liquor store as exemplar. Even there, the ideal reader seems to have limited ability to conceive of abstract entities gauged in abstract terms ("It helps to think of the entire market as a body, and the indices like the readings from a thermometer"). In the urge to simplify, Hirsch sometimes glosses over important realities; he tells us what short selling is, for instance, but not how risky and ruinous it can be. Even so, moral hazard--that fine economic concept--is never far away from his discussion of commodity trades, derivatives and securitization, with the dialogue describing the last take on a kind of I've-got-a-bridge-to-sell-you sense of surrealism. While some things resist simplification, others make good sense when reduced to cartoons or cartoonlike textual explanations, as when a banker walks away smiling from a teller's window while an ordinary consumer stalks away fuming, the explanation for which is the discriminatory lending rate of 1 percent for the former and 5 for the latter. Quibbles aside, if this can help those ordinary consumers understand what's happening to their money, this accessible, often entertaining book will serve a valuable purpose.

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