If you've been reading my recent book reviews on BloggingStocks, you know know that I've been enjoing classic (or just plain old) books on financial scandals lately: The Playboy Press' Great Business Disasters, Andrew Tobias' The Funny Money Game and the more recent Greed and Corporate Failure.

Well now I just finished John Train's (better-known for his Money Masters books) Famous Financial Fiascos, a delightful collection of 20 vignettes on corporate frauds and scandals, some well-known, some not, and none more recent than the 1950s. At just 112 pages, each event is covered very quickly, but Train still manages to tell an interesting cautionary tale, and one can't help but think of modern parallels. Beginning with the infamous Charles Ponzi, Train winds us through TulipoMania, John Law, I.O.S., Ivar Krueger, the South Sea Bubble, and Juan March, just to name a few.

His two-page indictment of the technical analysts is poignant: "technical analysts, like alchemists, seek a simple solution to a problem more complicated than they realize.... The technical analysts who try to reduce it to an orderly formula often forget that the game is changing continuously."

This is a light book that you will read easily in one volume. It's still in print, and well worth the 89 cents it will set you back used on Amazon.

Book review: John Train's Famous Financial Fiascos originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 16 Sep 2007 14:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.