Tag: RGD

RGD: release the hounds

This is the official starting gun for the Amazon book bomb for The Return of the Great Depression. If you’re interested in buying it, either for yourself or for someone else, I’d encourage you to order a copy from Amazon in the next 12 hours. Its initial ranking was 19,795 overall and 50 in Economic History, so that’s the starting point. If you’re keeping track of the ratings as well as your fantasy team, feel free to post them here as they change on an hourly basis. I think 1,000 and 10 would be an excellent objective; anything above that would be a smashing success.

By way of encouragement, I’d like the Dread Ilk to be the first to know about the dedicated book site, which was developed for RGD by WorldNetDaily. In addition to featuring a collection of my WND columns related to the economic crisis dating back to 2002, it also has some economic prediction trackings – including a rather nice one in 2008 that I’d completely forgotten – scheduled events, reviews, and an economics blog where I will be posting daily. The official publication date isn’t until Thursday, but I believe that WND intends to announce the book site tomorrow. Some additional content, such as YouTube videos, will likely appear on the site in the relatively near future. I also plan to make some of the spreadsheets I used in producing the charts for the book available for download from the site as well.

I very much appreciate the encouragement that people here have shown throughout the writing of RGD and I hope that you will find that it does not disappoint you. It is not a massive book, but it is most definitely a data-rich one. And we should probably all hope that it is a massively incorrect one.

UPDATE – Thank you very much if you participated in the Amazon launch last night. It was a huge success and significantly exceeded my hopes for it by reaching #90 overall and #5 in Economics. You even made it the #1 Mover and Shaker on Amazon! I appreciate the confidence you have shown in the book and will look forward to hearing your thoughts on it after it arrives and you read it.

RGD book bomb tomorrow

Are you in? It’s precisely 26 hours away… 12 noon to 12 midnight central. WND mentioned the book in an email last week, which resulted in RGD shooting all the way up to #13 in Economics – two positions above our favorite Nobel Prize winner’s latest – so it will be interesting to see how things go tomorrow. Whether you’re buying the book tomorrow or not, stop by as I’ll be providing a sneak preview of the site where I’ll be doing daily economics-only blogging for the next few months. This will not have any affect on the blogging here as what will be posted there is going to be the more wonkish sort of thing with which I seldom see fit to annoy everyone here.

In other words, we’re talking pure chart-and-spreadsheet porn for the stat sickos. You know who you are. And on that edifying note, I will leave you with Jonah Goldberg’s verdict on the book.

“Vox Day is a punk rock Jeremiah who knows how to use a spreadsheet. In The Return of the Great Depression, he aims his voracious mind at our economic predicament and makes a powerful and well-documented case for why Faulkner was right: The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”
—Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism

RGD: the second review

Chad the Elder of the Fraters Libertas reviews RGD:

Let me start by passing on a shocking piece of information: Vox Day is not an economist. That may lead some to discount his views on matters economic, but in this case it proves to be beneficial. He approaches the subject as an outsider and is not wedded to any particular school of economic theory from his background. This allows him to be rather dispassionate in his analysis and also forces him to be more vigorous in his research since he doesn’t come into it with a great deal of experience.

It also makes The Return of the Great Depression a more understandable and entertaining read than your average economic tome. That’s not to say its been dumbed down or overly simplified. Vox takes on some rather weighty and complicated economic topics. But, as he previously did in The Irrational Atheist, he does so in his own unique voice (Vox’s vox?). Even while explaining the inner workings of the money supply or the components that make up GDP, he maintains his straight-shooting style infused with the mix of cynicism and sarcastic humor that readers of his blog have come to expect.

I have to admit, after the complete, utter, and admitted failure of mainstream economics to foresee or forestall the present crisis, or to present potential solutions beyond increasing the amount of debt-funded spending, I would think that not being a credentialed economist would be seen as a strength rather than a weakness these days. If the basic theory is bad, learning more sophisticated ways of playing with it is not going to help you understand anything.

RGD: reviews

Right Condition reviews The Return of the Great Depression:

Once in a while, a book comes along that shakes so many of your core beliefs that you are left questioning either the integrity of what you have read or your own knowledge. In this particular case, I had the privilege of a sneak peek at The Return of the Great Depression by Vox Day and with most certainty can state, it is the latter. RGD as it shall be referred to from now on, as can be inferred from its title makes a very compelling case as to the state of our economy and where this nation is potentially headed. However do not be misled by its name, for this is much more than a prophecy, it is principally and foremost an economic text diligently spending the majority of its efforts in explaining why we are standing on the edge of a precipice.

Chad the Elder of the Fraters Libertas reviews RGD:

Let me start by passing on a shocking piece of information: Vox Day is not an economist. That may lead some to discount his views on matters economic, but in this case it proves to be beneficial. He approaches the subject as an outsider and is not wedded to any particular school of economic theory from his background. This allows him to be rather dispassionate in his analysis and also forces him to be more vigorous in his research since he doesn’t come into it with a great deal of experience.

It also makes The Return of the Great Depression a more understandable and entertaining read than your average economic tome. That’s not to say its been dumbed down or overly simplified. Vox takes on some rather weighty and complicated economic topics…. if you want to read an informative, thoughtful, and even sometimes entertaining book on the current economic situation, you can’t go wrong with The Return of the Great Depression.

RGD: the Amazon launch

As some of you have already noticed, Amazon is listing The Return of the Great Depression, albeit with an incorrect release date of October 1st. For those intrepid readers who are interested in participating in the Amazon launch, it is scheduled for Sunday, October 25th, from 12 noon to 12 midnight Central. And, in order to provide some encouragement to those who remain undecided about picking up a copy, here’s John Derbyshire of National Review’s impression:

“Vox Day gives us a splendidly pessimistic look at the current economic mess based on a deep background in finance and global economic history. Written with style and wit – not to mention a good imitation of Dante. Read it, weep, then get on the phone to your investment advisor.”

UPDATE: Prediction time – Vox vs 43 expert economists:

The group asked 43 top economists last month if they believe the battered U.S. economy has pulled out of the worst U.S. downturn since World War II. Those surveyed include economists from leading Wall Street firms and major corporations, as well as from highly respected universities and research firms. Thirty-five respondents, or 81%, believe the recovery has begun. Only four, or 9%, believe the economy is still in a recession. The other four say they’re uncertain.

Thus spake Vox: the economy is in a depression, not a recession. It is occurring at a scale which the experts, with their myopic focus on irrelevant bottom-line quarterly GDP, have failed to recognize. The separation between the much-manipulated economic statistics and the real economy has become too great to credibly paper over, which will lead to either a complete junking of the very concept of GDP as a credible measure of economic activity, or more likely, a significant redefinition of GDP to enable it to more accurately reflect the real economy.

Positive GDP in the third and potentially fourth quarters does not mean the economy is growing, only that the government attempts to expand credit had limited success in pulling future consumption forward; such success will only last as long as the government-expanded credit programs continue to expand.

As per request, I am in the process of putting together some objective metrics that can be tracked in lieu of relying upon GDP and used to falsify my contentions, but note that positive quarterly GDP reports are not sufficient to formally indicate that a recession is over. Nor is there anything such as a “W-shaped recovery and recession”, that’s nothing more than economic posterior-covering and ignores the larger scale view.

24 days out

Here’s a bit more news about my forthcoming book. First, I’m pleased to be able to say that the publisher has agreed to make The Return of the Great Depression available for only $1.99 on Kindle and Scribd. Second, I sent pre-release galleys to a few writers and business executives with whom I am acquainted; you may recall that the Mogambo Guru thought rather well of the book. Here’s what an executive at a large European industrial concern had to say about it. I should probably mention that by “large”, I mean that its revenues would pass for national GDP in some parts of the world.

“The upward and downward excess we have been observing in the global economy for the last years suggested there was something wrong. It must be recognized that the system is addicted by false and questionable principles of monetary policy which finally brought many enterprises to unreliable business forecasts and disastrous, unsustainable capital expenditures. This book is an analytic and courageous accusation against those principles, and suggests disruptive, clear-cut, and practical solutions which are quite far from those recently adopted by governments and central banks. I strongly recommend it as vademecum to any business executive.”

It was interesting how this executive found RGD to be useful in articulating the reasons behind what he was already observing in his professional capacity, which spans four continents. The ominous synchronicity between book theory and business reality here is that two weekends ago, he told me that the moderate improvement his industry had seen since the spring appears to have been little more than inventory restocking, as the industry’s new orders are now looking worse than they were in January.

A new book

On October 29th, 2009, the 80th anniversary of Black Tuesday, WND Books will publish The Return of the Great Depression, a book addressing the economic contraction of 2008-09, the reasons for its occurrence, and its implications for the future.  Beginning with my experience in Japan at the height of the Heisei boom twenty years before the global financial crisis, the book delves into economic theory and economic history in constructing a perspective on the likely outcome for the global economy over the next ten years.

A number of pre-release readers have been kind enough to express their opinion of the book.  One of them is the notorious financial writer known as The Mogambo Guru, who in his Inimitable Mogambo Manner, (IMM), provided an amusing and colorful blurb that the publisher absolutely refused to consider printing on the dust jacket, mostly because doing so would preclude putting anything else there.  Since the notion that there could possibly be anything that needs to be said about a book that has not already been said by the Mighty Mogambo is clearly a ludicrous one that hardly merits articulation, let alone consideration, it gives me great pleasure to share with you The Mogambo Guru’s verdict.

“I heartily recommend Vox Day’s book, The Return of the Great Depression, although it is a case of a smart guy writing a smart book full of serious-yet-fascinating smart-guy economic stuff about the shameless shenanigans of the last 20 years or so, and is such a varied feast of economic and financial information and insights that a poor, borderline mental defective like me could never finish reading all of it, much less comprehending any of it, despite the highly-illuminating original graphs and charts, although I wish, I wish, I wish I could, especially in light of today’s economic turmoil.

So my recommendation is based on a shameful scheme of raw desperation and deception, which is to leave a copy on my desk, where people passing by would see it and they would think to themselves “Oh! He must be a smart guy to read such a book! We ought to fire him last!”

In my defense, if you have as little going for you as I do, you increasingly find that you must rely on those kinds of intangible goodwill benefits, hence the recommendation to buy and use the book, although one must but marvel at how much I would benefit from being able to read it!

Which I hope you can!”

And which I hope you will.  An amount of the material will be familiar to the readers of this blog, but most of it is either new or examined in more detail than is usually the case in the columns and blog posts. Among other things, the book goes into considerably more detail on Keynesian general theory,  Friedmanite monetarism, and Paul Samuelson’s conversion of general theory into modern applied Neo-Keynesian macroeconomics than I customarily do here, as it was my goal that the book will not be of benefit only to those who happen to read the book during the present situation, but also for those who do so well after the crisis has passed.

But that, as the book explains, is probably going to take a while. In the meantime, serious econobloggers and financial writers who are interested in reviews or interviews can contact me via email.