Resources Sample 2011

It is ironic that the last, and in many ways the best, book on the late financial crisis that you'll see reviewed here is by a New York Times reporter, and lays the blame where it belongs: squarely at the feet of the government and its mindless "social justice" goal of homeownership for nearly everyone. This goal was perverted by the GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for their executives' own personal gain (Fannie, under James Johnson, was as corrupt as any Wall Street firm). And the single-minded way in which Fannie spread around what was essentially bribery and influence-peddling to silence its critics was beyond anything a Wall Street malefactor would have dreamed possible. One can say all one wants about the cynical lending policies of a Countrywide Financial, but no entity bought more Countrywide mortgages, nor was a better friend to its flamboyant CEO Angelo Mozilo, than Fannie Mae. The defense of the GSEs to and beyond the bitter end by bullying politicians like Barney Frank completed the vicious circle, which ended up costing the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars. The story is clearly and dispassionately told in Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. It demands to be read.

I can never think of my friend Joe Jordan without remembering how Jimmy Breslin described Speaker "Tip" O'Neill: "a warm spring rain of a man." Joe is a Senior VP of MetLife, in charge of their Behavioral Finance Strategies; in the larger, better sense, he's a legend in the life insurance industry, incapable of getting off a plane in a town where he doesn't have friends, from the Bronx to Bangkok to Boston and everywhere in between.

When Joe was still an infant, with three older siblings, his father, a successful attorney, died suddenly. Whereupon his mother discovered that he had cashed in his life insurance policy just a few days earlier. This disaster shaped Joe's family's history. His mother went bravely out to work, and his two sisters eventually had to postpone their own college educations in order to work so that Joe's brother and he could get their degrees first. Joe went to Fordham, where he played offensive guard on the football team—the same position played earlier by one Vincent T. Lombardi, with whom Joe is in Fordham's Football Hall of Fame.

Small wonder, given his life experience, that Joe entered the life insurance industry. He was Home Life's Rookie of the Year in 1974, made MDRT the next year, went over to run PaineWebber's annuity/insurance sales and product development in the ‘80s, and then joined MetLife, where he's been a friend and mentor to thousands of advisors, and a thought leader for the company. He is that most rare and valuable person: a true student of the business.

Joe always knew he had a book in him, and has finally made it manifest. It's called Living a Life of Significance, and it's published by the American College, to which Joe is, altogether typically, donating all the revenues. (It costs $15 and can be ordered at www.theamericancollege.edu/significance.)

The spine of the book, and the great lesson that leaps out of it at you, is that we advisors do not have a moral right to our call reluctance—that we were sent into the world to try to prevent the all-too-common disaster that befell Joe's family from overtaking other families, either because someone dies too soon or lives "too long." That's why Joe established a daily contact commitment at MetLife some years ago, and it's that impulse—to make just one more call, to try to bring financial peace to just one more household—that infuses this beautiful, critically important book. Living a Life of Significance is essential reading for your practice and your soul.

Legg Mason, bless their hearts, has created a terrifically effective marketing piece out of the Time magazine serial apocalypse covers which were the subject of an item in this space last year. The title is Learning from the Lessons of Time, and it's on the "Education" page of Legg Mason's website for individual investors. Time, like all mainstream media, is first and foremost a distiller of economic and financial malaise robbed of all historical context. It feeds back to the public their most inchoate anxieties, because that's what sells magazines. And what's always particularly fascinating about Time covers is their wonderfully perverse timing: like the public to whom it panders, Time always gets most luridly bearish right at the bottom. Legg Mason graphically juxtaposes the covers, and doom-laden quotes from the accompanying cover stories, with the relentless upward trend of the equity markets. The result is thought-provoking, often hilarious, and perhaps best of all non-argumentative: you can put it in a client's hands and make your point about the pathology of pessimism without being preachy. I just love it, and you will too. Finally, a marketing piece that actually helps you "sell" a critically important long-term investment truth.