Endgame: The End of The Best Supercycle And How It Changes Everything

Written by John Mauldin

Narrated by Sean Pratt

"We all know we have seen the end of an era, and now we have courtside seats to watch the Endgame unfold. We are watching the end of Act I: The Debt Supercycle. Now we will get to see how Act II: The Endgame plays out."-John Mauldin Jonathan Tepper (Chapter 1)
Hundreds of books have been written about the financial crisis that engulfed the world after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. But what if the bigger financial crisis is ahead of us, not behind us?
As John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper deftly illustrate in this controversial audio book, the crisis was more than a half-century in the making. The Great Financial Crisis, however, was merely Act I. Act II has now begun.
The massive household deleveraging and historic shift of private debt onto government balance sheets now underway all over the world represents the end of a sixty-year global Debt Supercycle. We have now entered the Endgame, a time when bankruptcies and defaults (disguised as "restructuring") will not be of households and companies but of governments. The stakes are now higher. The coming crises will offer policymakers few good choices and many bad ones. It will require extraordinary clarity and courage from leaders, courage that so far is largely completely lacking.
Yet, despite the authors' dark forecast, the message in Endgame is not all gloom and doom. The book lays out positive steps governments can take to weather the worst of the stormy days ahead, minimize the inevitable pain and discomfort most of us can expect to experience, and chart a bold new course to sustained economic growth and prosperity.
It also offers investors an abundance of useful analysis and expert advice on how to protect their assets during the worst of it and prosper from the many new opportunities that will emerge globally as they present themselves.
In Part 2, the authors take listeners on a country-by-country tour-including the United States, UK, European countries, and Japan-clearly explaining the problems each country faces, as well as the good and bad policy options open to each, and the investment pitfalls and opportunities likely to be found in each national economy.
Whether you call it the Great Recession, the Great Financial Crisis, or the Global Debt Crisis, what we are experiencing is unlike anything seen in eighty years. Now is not the time to succumb to panic and superstition. It is a time for courage and intelligent decision making informed by the brand of rational analysis and wisdom you'll find in Endgame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Jul 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781596598454

Reviews for Endgame

[miro_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

John Mauldin publishes an excellent newsletter and runs financial conferences that include the biggest names.The book explores at greater length what they have to say and is a good "state of the art" of the debt crisis as of the 2011 publication date. It feels as if it was prepared in a hurry but it still leaves the reader in no doubt about the gravity of the debt overhang and he interestingly completes a country by country analysis highlighting similarities and differences.The authors conclude with a short section on how people can protect themselves, which ultimately isn't very helpful since they say that excess debt could be resolved by inflation or deflation, each requiring quite opposite actions.However, I feel that the book falls down for the lack of a detailed exploration of the legislative sources of the crisis and an evaluation of how the problem can be fixed at a structural level. Nomi Prins' book, "It Takes A Pillage" for example, handles this aspect in a masterful way, showing the pivotal importance of the Glass Steagall Act.Also the authors don't truly explore the U.S. "Endgame" in a deeper historical sociological context. For example, the possibility of tariff protection is quickly rejected in a couple of paragraphs despite being a traditional way to promote local production and reduce a deficit. The Donald Trump variant recently gained some traction viz. 50% tariff on imports from China = production of higher priced toys in the US = greater US employment + lower deficit + children with half as many toys (does it matter?). They don't consider that the European debt crisis could be a jump off point for the U.S.E. United States of Europe that Monnet originally envisaged, considering that a shared currency needs central fiscal control i.e. central government. They don't look at the multicultural nature of American society and the tendency of this sort of non-society to fly apart under severe economic stress e.g. pre WWI Vienna.The section on likely government "financial oppression" such as coercion of the public to purchase government bonds is interesting but I feel that they needed to explore more fully their statement on P146, "But then standards got loose, greed kicked in, and Wall Street began to game the system."

[shanksmd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A tour de force. Clear explanation of current economic environs and outlook for years ahead.