My Amazon Review of Mark Spitznagel's, "The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World"

Money manager Mark Spitznagel has written a very wordy paean to Austrian Economics. If ever a book needed a tight fisted editor this one is it. However, once you get beyond reading every thing Spitznagel knows about Austrian Economics the reader will get a better understanding of economics and the investment process. The key takeaways from the book are the core notions of Austrian Economics which value roundabout(indirect) production over direct production and the role of monetary policy to distort investment decisions. For example, in the case of the former, the direct route to catching a fish would be to try to grab one in a pond while the roundabout and far more profitable route would be to make a net first and then use it to catch fish. In case of the latter, the low interest policy of the Federal Reserve induces investment that will be proved unprofitable once interest rates normalize leading to a bust. This knowledge leads investors to hedge tail risks when the stock market trades at high price/replacement cost ratios and to buy individual stocks that with high returns on capital that won't be affected by increases in interest rates. Nothing really new here, but puts some real foundation underneath it. That is the value of the book.

Spitznagel uses the biographies of the three great Austrian economists, Carl Menger Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Ludvig von Mises to explain Austrian economic theory. All of that is to the good, but he leaves out perhaps the greatest Austrian economists of all time, Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek. I guess Schumpeter's and Hayek's work don't quite fit into his theories. He also ignores the work of three American economists who built on the work of the Austrians: Irving Fisher, Frank Knight and Jack Hirshleifer, a former professor of mine. For example Hirshleifer, in his "Investment, Interest and Capital" outlines a general equilibrium approach to interest rate determination with a society's rate of time preference and an intertemporal production possibilities function, pure Austrian economics.

The full Amazon URL is:http://www.amazon.com/The-Dao-Capital-Investing-Distorted-ebook/product-reviews/B00D7P2K1W/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_3?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addThreeStar&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending