Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics »

William (Bill) Bonner is President and CEO of Agora Financial, one of the world's largest financial newsletter companies (www.agorafinancial.com). He is the creator of the Daily Reckoning, a contrarian financial newsletter (www.dailyreckoning.com). Bonner is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of the international bestsellers Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt.

Lila Rajiva is a political journalist and the author of The Language of Empire, a groundbreaking study of the media coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. She is a contributor to Agora Financial (www.agorafinancial.com) and the creator of the blog, The Mind-Body Politic (www.lilarajiva.wordpress.com).

Collectively, people think and act in ways that are different from how they think and act as individuals. Understanding these differences, says William (Bill) Bonner—a longtime maverick observer of the financial world and the vagaries of the investing public—is vital to preserving your wealth and personal dignity. From the witch hunts of the early modern world to the war on terror, from the dot-com mania to the real estate bubble, people have always been caught up in frauds, conceits, and wild guesses—often with devastating results. In Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets, Bonner and coauthor Lila Rajiva show groupthink at work in an improbable array of instances throughout history and reveal why swimming against the current pays. They explain why people so often abandon good sense and good behavior to "follow the crowd" and show you how to avoid getting caught up in the public spectacles around you.

If an investor merely recognizes the way mob sentiment works, the authors point out, he is far ahead of most others. Ordinary people, for example, turn over billions of dollars' worth of their hard-earned money to brokers and mutual fund managers every day—immediate, tangible, personal money—believing that strangers will give them back even more. Whatever would make them think so?

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets demonstrates that investors are in fact caught between a rock and a soft place—between the private world they can understand and master and the misleading public spectacle of the markets. "The further away you get from your investments, and the less you suffer the consequences if they go bad, the worse your performance will be," say Bonner and Rajiva. "That's why 'collective' investments like index-linked funds,mutual funds, hedge funds, insurance funds, and pension funds are usually so bad. The investors are too far from the facts—and the managers are too far from the consequences."

The authors' cautionary tale of the current bubble economy warns that the gush of credit let loose by Alan Greenspan is fraught with perils for the unwary—but their thoughtful and always entertaining approach also offers some sound investing principles for avoiding the pitfalls of the public spectacle, thinking for yourself, and protecting your money, your sanity, and your soul.

A Critique of Impure Reason
Do-Gooders Gone Bad     3
Love in the Time of Viagra     21
The Transit of Venus     47
Witch Hunts and War Drums
The Devil Made Them Do It     75
Words of War     98
Militant Messiahs
War and Remembrance     113
Empire of Delusion     132
Heroes of the Revolution     150
Flattening the Globe
The Number Game     185
The Flat Earth Society     197
What the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo Didn't Know     216
The Bubble Kings
Fin de Bubble     245
The Million-Dollar Trailer     266
Central Bank Bamboozle     280
The Mother of the Mother of All Bubbles     296
Far from the Madding Mob
How Not to Be Champed by Wall Street     321
The Dupe of Hearts     364
Notes     391
Index     413