Michael J. Dillon

So this morning, in the wee hours of daylight, I finished my book on the history of cod. Fitting into my general history-of-finance theme largely because of the impact cod had on various country’s economies over history, and how the development of the international fish trade came about.

Actually I found out about this book because the same author later wrote a pretty good book on the history of salt. While the cod book had a larger focus on how the different cultures would preserve caught cod, and served cod dishes, the salt book took more time to focus on the economic aspects on what the salt trade did to the world.

Since you can’t transport large amounts of cod around the world without access to a large amount of salt, the two books have a great deal of overlapping areas. The great thing about the pair of books is that while the two histories become amazingly intertwined at the point where the worldwide cod fishing industry drove the need for salt, the events that got them to that point, and the later effects take the two books in quite different directions.

So in other words, I read this book as more of a follow up to Kurlansky’s excellent salt book.

Anyway, next to get swapped into my three-at-a-time book rotataion is either Dickens’s Bleak House, or Minsky’s The Emotion Machine. I haven’t really had a non-finance, non-history book in a while.

I happened to be wandering around the basement of the Strand a few weeks ago, and found a copy of Memos From the Chairman, a collection of memos written by Ace Greenberg, during his tenure as Bear Stearn’s CEO, which was later collected and published by the same people that do the page-a-day calendars.

Which, if you sit down for an hour and change, you can get through pretty easily.

It gives a number of momentary snapshots of a financial firm as it goes from being a midsized brokerage to the ginormous financial firm that just entered the history books.

Highlights include:

• Ace Greenberg completely making up statistics at whim to support any point that he might have.
• The constant reminders to cut costs, to the point that they stopped ordering paper clips and rubber bands.
• An infatuation with a bizarrely named, fake philosopher named Haimchinkel Malintz Anaynikal, who really likes to cut costs.
• The repeatedly stated preference for PSD’s (poor, smart, desires to be rich) over MBA’s

Also of note is the forward of the book written by Warren Buffet. In his annual letter to shareholders, he is entertaining and relatively verbose. Not here. His opening is barely a page, and quite bland.

When I started this blog, all of a few weeks ago, I thought I would follow my progression through some of the CS stuff I’m doing on the side. But that’s even more boring than what I type about when I’m just filling space. So, I think, from here in, I’ll just talk about whatever I’m reading. And not topics like the fact that I keep databases on various pieces of data that I pull off the internet, which may or may not go into a future project of mine.

As to my reading, its quite disjointed; I’m usually reading several things at once. Take right now, I’m in the middle of The Prince (up to ch 23), Security Analysis (up to ch 3), and a book on the history of cod (Ch 4).

I’m usually reading about three things at once, it keeps my sanity, as I actually read quite a bit of very dry stuff that is wildly interesting in small doses. Everything I read tends to fall into three very broad categories, financial history, the political development of the United States, and occasionally a novel. Right now everything on my plate is finance, including the cod book. (Cod was one of the first internationally traded agricultural commodities.) Though whatever I finish next will get replaced with the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Unless I change my mind…

Lets see if I can come up with an interesting post on any of the last few books I’ve read. It might be a way to keep this interesting. (At least to me.)