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How to Listen When Markets Speak: Risks, Myths, and Investment Opportunities in a Radically Reshaped Economy Hardcover – March 26, 2024

by Lawrence G. McDonald (Author), James Patrick Robinson

4.3 82 ratings

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A New York Times bestselling author and leading expert on market risk argues that seismic shifts in the global economy will trigger a multi-trillion-dollar migration of wealth, outlining new rules of investing for the forward-thinking.

“I can’t tell you how much I learned from How to Listen When Markets Speak. The historical perspectives and insights are something every investor needs to know. Buy this book.”—Mark Cuban

From Wall Street to the White House, the fantasy of an eventual “return to normal” is still alive and well, nurtured by dangerously outdated theories. But the economic world as we know it—and the rules that govern it—are over. In the coming decade, we’ll witness sustained inflation, a series of sovereign and corporate debt crises, and a thundering of capital out of financial assets into hard assets.

Few are prepared.

Lawrence G. McDonald, founder of the economic research platform The Bear Traps Report, got a real-world education in market risk when, as a Lehman Brothers VP, he watched the firm ignore flashing warning signs before its collapse. His analysis led him to identify twenty-one indicators for gauging the health of an economy and detecting early signals of opportunity and danger.

In How to Listen When Markets Speak, McDonald unveils his unique predictive models, connecting surprising dots between past, present, and future and outlining actionable trading ideas for staying a beat ahead of the markets. Readers will learn:

• How disastrous Fed policy will collide with an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape to keep U.S. inflation near 3-5% for the next decade
• How growing demand for oil and gas, underinvestment in urgently needed energy infrastructure, and cozy Russia–Saudi Arabia relations will lift the base price of energy to historic levels
• Why hard assets and rare minerals like lithium and cobalt will outperform growth stocks, U.S. treasuries, and overcrowded passive investment strategies—and how to detect bearish and bullish trends in advance
• How passive investing and the vehicles intended to democratize finance have fueled bubbles and ideological skew by large market participants, leaving millions of 401(k)s and IRAs at risk
• Why America will likely lose its position as a global superpower and holder of the world’s premier reserve currency, and may be forced to slash Social Security, Medicare, and military spending

Rather than merely doomsaying, How to Listen When Markets Speak equips readers to make sense of our current moment, resist reactionary narratives and baseless analysis, and preserve their wealth in turbulent times. When markets speak, it pays to listen.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown Currency
Publication date

March 26, 2024
Dimensions

6.48 x 0.94 x 9.6 inches
ISBN-10

0593727495
ISBN-13

978-0593727492
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From the Publisher

The economic world as we know it- and the rules that govern it- are over.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“I can’t tell you how much I learned from How to Listen When Markets Speak. The historical perspectives and insights are something every investor needs to know. Buy this book.”—Mark Cuban, founder of Cost Plus Drugs and longtime Shark Tank investor

“Larry McDonald’s deep knowledge, experience, and insights have been invaluable in shaping my investment strategies, and How to Listen When Markets Speak is no different. It will sit on the edge of my desk, ready to refer back to frequently. I highly recommend it to anyone keen to protect their wealth in tumultuous times.”—Raoul Pal, CEO and co-founder of Real Vision

“As a journalist who is paid to be skeptical, I have been tracking Larry McDonald’s views on markets for many years. His provocative, passionate, and sometimes prophetic insights are always worth pondering, even (or especially) when you disagree—and reading his analysis has often helped me to see the situation more clearly. I don’t always sit in the same camp, but I appreciate his consistent focus on value investing. His latest book offers strong riposte to the tech hype, bull-market euphoria, and wishful thinking about a soft landing—it is thought-provoking work, particularly at a time when the global zeitgeist and order are changing in profound ways.”—Gillian Tett, columnist and editorial board at Financial Times, Provost at King’s College, Cambridge, and author of Anthro-Visio

“As soon as I finished How to Listen When Markets Speak, I took a long, hard look at my portfolio. Any investor with skin in the game needs to buy this book.”—Niall Ferguson, Stanford historian and author of The Ascent of Money and Doom

“Smart people listen carefully, and they use what they hear to continually question their assumptions. When it comes to markets and their impact on our lives, things change—even the big things. Larry McDonald's, How to Listen When Markets Speak is a consistently compelling contribution to today's debate on the future of financial markets and a challenge to assumptions that have outlived their value.”—Ian Bremmer, political scientist and president of the Eurasia Group

About the Author

Lawrence McDonald is risk consultant to hedge funds, family offices, asset managers and investors across twenty-three countries. One of Wall Street’s most respected financial experts, McDonald has made more than 1,400 media appearances. Previously, he was a vice president of distressed debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers.

James Patrick Robinson, a dedicated craftsman of narrative born into a family of writers in England, truly embraced storytelling at the University of East Anglia. Influenced by literary greats, he pursued history of art, European literature, and creative writing. Transitioning to screenwriting post-graduation, James initially adapted his father’s techno-thrillers before honing his skills in realistic dialogue and structure at The New York Film Academy. He notably adapted the bestselling Lone Survivor into a screenplay in 2007 and contributed to the research and structure of the 2009 New York Times bestseller A Colossal Failure of Common Sense. 2022 marked his debut in book writing with How To Listen When Markets Speak, co-authored for Larry McDonald. Now residing in the U.S. and managing the Robinson Speakers Bureau, James is penning his first novel in the traditional manner—longhand with navy ink on white paper, a testament to his deep-rooted passion for storytelling.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The End of an Era

It was the afternoon of March 8, 1983. A tropical breeze swept across endless acres of citrus orchards and into Orlando, fluttering the flags on the limousine pulling up in front of the Sheraton Twin Towers. Immaculate as ever, in a navy suit offset by a white linen pocket square, President Ronald W. Reagan was led to a podium where he delivered a speech that would be remembered for decades. In it, he called the USSR an “evil empire” and took steps to shore up NATO’s nuclear deterrent to counteract the Soviet Union’s.

The United States and the Soviet Union were already in an arms race that would peak three years after Reagan stepped up to that podium. The Cold War had started in 1947. By 1975, a red line had been carved right down the northern hemisphere, dividing East from West, with the East protected by a Soviet military of 5.5 million men and about twenty thousand nuclear missiles. In the next ten years the number of missiles would double. It was nothing short of a standoff, a display of muscle flexing on the grandest scale, neither camp daring to open a line of communication.

Despite that muscular display, the Soviet Union’s economy was in tough shape. The nation spanned fifteen republics, eleven time zones, and a swath of land 6,200 miles wide—from Kaliningrad in the west all the way to a desperately cold spit of land on the Chukchi Sea known as Uelen. But landmass rarely equals wealth, happiness, or opportunity. For the Soviets, it didn’t even promise a hot meal. Corruption, the absence of a free market, and a costly proxy war in the Hindu Kush, where the mujahideen were covertly supported by the Pentagon and the Saudis, severely hampered the economy. Images of breadlines and empty supermarket shelves were often seen in Western newspapers.

Reagan’s “rhetorical rearmament” achieved its intended effect of rattling his adversary. By 1985, the Soviets had amassed a total of 39,000 nuclear missiles, with close to 6,000 aimed directly at the United States. America met this threat by stockpiling over 21,000 warheads. The world was one technical fault away from total annihilation.

The big man in the White House knew that the USSR could easily buckle under a disillusioned military and an educated populace living in near squalor, with little chance of a better life. Then came the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl and the Politburo’s decision to stall the public announcement for two days. Even then, its twenty-second televised statement was vague, assuring listeners that authorities were handling the situation. The surge of radiation poisoning, of course, was not under control. And while the Politburo avoided addressing this new public health crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, the new general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and de facto leader of the country, pored over the reports of death, injury, and ruination: across great tracts of land, lives, homes, and even entire towns were torn apart. He wrote afterward that his conscience could no longer be involved with nuclear arms.

Later that same year, a black motorcade snaked through the middle of Reykjavik, Iceland, stopping at a whitewashed building known as Hofdi House. It was a blustery, sodden morning, the skies platinum above the bank of photographers in waiting. Gorbachev, in a knee-length cashmere overcoat, trotted up the steps to be greeted by President Reagan.

Reagan looked at Gorbachev for a beat, at a man born and raised in Soviet Russia under the most hard-line communist rulers: men like Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev (whose eighteen-year reign was defined by economic stagnation). And here was Gorbachev, an educated man standing before the president of the United States, against every possible communist belief. He may have been only five feet nine inches tall, but history would remember him as a giant of democracy. Gorbachev was there to discuss a nuclear arms reduction, for which he would later be given a Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan smiled at him in that classic cowboy way, and the two men shook hands as if they were already friends, the whole world watching. For the USSR, this was a giant step toward dissolution.

The concept of hope has been one of the most potent forces in the history of mankind.

That simple emotion has been responsible for more victories against the odds than any machine or weapon. It’s how the Greeks, desperately outnumbered, defeated ten thousand Persian soldiers in 490 b.c. on the plain of Marathon. It’s how Winston Churchill rallied Great Britain and its allies to fight the tyranny of Nazi Germany. And it’s how, in the last year of the 1980s, half a million citizens of East Germany staged a mass protest along the perimeter of the Berlin Wall, turning their backs on the bankrupt state. On the night of November 9, 1989, the concrete divider separating East and West Germany was finally torn down.

The Soviet Union was in free fall by late 1991. Despite Gorbachev’s hopes for radical liberalization, piecemeal reforms couldn’t save an economic system founded on centralized control. On Christmas Day, the bright red flag flying above the Kremlin, with its yellow hammer and sickle representing the solidarity between industrial proletarians and farmworkers, was lowered for the last time. Gorbachev abolished the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then resigned as president of the USSR.

The collapse of the Soviet Union became the great representation of global peace that settled like a blanket on international trade and free markets throughout the world. The bitter tensions that had plagued geopolitics since the start of the Cold War had finally been extinguished.

But what does the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s have to do with your portfolio in the 2020s?

Everything!

Because the collapse of the USSR helped shift the world from a multipolar to a unipolar order, one that revolved around a single dominant player. Backed by an outrageously robust economy and an overwhelming military force, the United States could crush challengers like ants. Under this new world order, a massive, interconnected system of global trade and security blossomed. Countries that took advantage of it prospered. Global trade went from less than $5 trillion in 1990 to $28 trillion in 2022, contributing to an increase in global GDP from $20.7 trillion to $96.5 trillion.

The unipolar world order entailed many different things across many domains—for instance, reducing the urgency of maintaining large standing armies—but for investors, its most crucial effect was its unprecedented disinflationary power. The surging supply of everything from raw materials (sourced from Russia) to finished goods and cheap labor (sourced from Asia, and especially China) stamped out inflation in Europe and the United States until 2021. Inflation went from 7 percent in the 1970s to 3 percent in the 1990s to 1.7 percent in the 2010s.

This allowed the Treasury yield, also known as the risk-free rate—the fixed rate of return on government Treasuries, which are considered to be zero risk because they are backed by the U.S. taxpayer—to decline from 15 percent in 1981 to less than 1 percent in the 2010s. Declining Treasury yields make fixed-income investments like government bonds less attractive and push investors toward riskier asset classes in search of higher returns. Price-to-earnings (PE) multiples—a measure of how much investors are willing to pay per dollar of company earnings, reflecting general market sentiment—expand when the risk-free rate goes down. Sure enough, the S&P 500’s PE ratio went from 7x in the early 1980s to 30x in the late 1990s and in 2021.

This disinflation was one of the most important contributors to the epic bull market in risk assets. Profit margins exploded as financial assets—growth stocks and bonds—took off. Investors love a stable, low-inflation environment. It lowers the cost of capital for businesses to invest in and for investors to borrow. The S&P 500 went from 323 in 1990 to 4,800 in 2021, an increase of 1,300 percent. If you’d put $1,000 in the S&P on the day World War II ended, you would have had $23,000 by 1990—but by the end of 2021, that amount would have grown to $343,000. In other words, those three decades of disinflation enabled a radically new approach to portfolio construction.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Currency (March 26, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593727495
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593727492
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.02 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.48 x 0.94 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,092 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Money & Monetary Policy (Books)
- #6 in Economic Conditions (Books)
- #10 in Wealth Management (Books)

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4.3 82 ratings

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Lawrence G. McDonald
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Lawrence G. McDonald has written a best selling book on the fall of Lehman Brothers, with Patrick Robinson, the #1 New York Times best selling author of Lone Survivor.
Global Lecture Tour
Mr. McDonald is on the lecture tour, recently speaking at Universities, Banks, Investment Firms, Law Firms and Insurance companies. His speaking engagements have been all over the United States, Europe and Asia. He has been a Keynote Speaker at over 40 venues since his book was published.
"A Colossal Failure of Common Sense - the Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers," was published by Random House 7/21/09, and hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week. It is now one of the bestselling business books in the world, translated into 12 different languages. Mr. McDonald is President of the McDonald Advisory Group based in New York City.
Mr. McDonald has been a guest and or contributor on CNBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, Fortune, CNN, CCTV China, France 24, BBC World, BBC America, Barron's, Channel 4 News London, Bloomberg TV, Fox TV, Fox Radio, CBS, PBS Frontline and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CBC News Canada, Business Week, The Economist, Die Zeit Germany, Tokyo TV, the Financial Times, Time Magazine, NPR, and the New York Post.
At Lehman Brothers
From July 2004 through September 2008, Mr. McDonald was a Vice President of Distressed Debt and Convertible Securities Trading at Lehman Brothers. He ran an extremely successful joint venture between the firm's fixed income and equity divisions. He was the most profitable trader on the convertible securities department 2006 and 2007.
The Subprime Implosion
In early 2006, Mr. McDonald was part of a faction that called the subprime crisis, then he made over $46 million for the firm during its implosion. Mr. McDonald was highly regarded as one of the most consistently profitable traders at Lehman with over $83 million in trading profits during his time with the firm.
More interestingly, Mr. McDonald was an integral part of a faction within Lehman Brothers that passionately tried in vain to stop the firm from heading down the road to destruction. Likewise, he also worked closely with Lehman's credit derivatives team and saw first-hand the design and construction of what Warren Buffett termed as "Wall Street's financial weapons of mass destruction."
Before Lehman Brothers
Mr. McDonald was Co-Founder of Convertbond.com, a website coined by Forbes Magazine as "Best of the Web" from 2000-2003, and was noted as the world wide web's premier source for convertible securities information, valuation and news.
In October 1999, before the dot-com crash, the site was successfully sold to Morgan Stanley and remains the property of the firm.
Mr. McDonald also spent over five years as a successful retail financial adviser, helping individual investors build wealth, starting with Merrill Lynch in 1990 and working with firms like CitiGroup's Smith Barney Division.
Mr. McDonald has over 15,000 followers on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, see below.
Contact
email - lgmcdonald@yahoo.com
http://twitter.com/Convertbond
http://www.facebook.com/newlehmanbook
http://www.linkedin.com/in/newlehmanbook
http://www.lawrencegmcdonald.com
See more on the author's page
James Patrick Robinson
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James Patrick Robinson comes from a world where writing was the family trade. As a young boy in England he was always fascinated by the ebb and flow of narrative, but it wasn’t until he entered the University of East Anglia, a place where John Fowles and Donna Tartt gave guest lectures in writing, that he took the craft of storytelling more seriously.
After graduating in history of art, European literature and creative writing, James dove headlong into screenwriting. Initially he adapted his father’s techno thrillers into screenplays. A few years later at The New York Film Academy he learned the art of structure, pace, realistic dialogue and the terse language designed to keep a reader turning pages.
In 2007, he adapted the #1 bestselling war story, “Lone Survivor” and wrote the first draft of the screenplay. In 2009 he not only structured the book like a feature film, he worked as a financial crash researcher for the New York Times bestseller, “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, The Inside Story on The Collapse of Lehman Brothers.” But it wasn’t until 2022, when Larry McDonald wanted a second book written, that James wrote his first book. Throughout the autumn and winter of 2022, James co-wrote the manuscript, “How To Listen When Markets Speak.”
He resides in the United States, runs the Robinson Speakers Bureau, and can often be seen with a notebook and a fountain pen. He is currently working on his first novel, writing longhand, with navy ink on white paper.
See more on the author's page

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4.3 out of 5

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ken

Great read.

Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2024

Verified Purchase

Great read, great current investment environment perspective.

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2024

Verified Purchase

Good book. Lots of valuable info.

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Daniel Dunkel

Well researched and wide ranging perspective

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2024

Verified Purchase

This book does an excellent job of detailing market history and government policies over several decades and their impact on stock market investments and psychology. As investors we are overwhelmed with real time news and Wall Street commentary daily. This book offers a macro view of a more patient strategy for recognizing market / societal trends and Fed policy moves to proactively position investments for success.

I ordered additional copies for my sons to read and plan to subscribe to the authors newsletter.

One person found this helpful

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Customer

Incredible

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2024

Verified Purchase

Wow. This is a must read. Top financial book I have read in years. Well done.

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Lindsey P.

Required reading for investors

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2024

Verified Purchase

Very well written and researched insight into the turn from a deflationary to an inflationary world and the potential impact on asset classes. Larry mixes enjoyable stories with well researched themes and draws important conclusions regarding what’s ahead.

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2024

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed reading this book. At times it felt like it is a promotional book for metals such as gold and copper. But if you ignore that, it is still a worthwhile book to read.

One person found this helpful

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Diana C. Kloorfain

Old story

Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2024

Already written by Dalio

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Kevin Stecyk

A Must Read for Investors

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2024

Verified Purchase

Although a tad euphoric or hyperbolic at times, McDonald paints a compelling picture of the changing investment landscape. We are witnessing a shift back into hard assets as the West grapples with the new geopolitical realities and the shortages of key resources. Like McDonald, I expect the next decade to be more turbulent than the past several decades since the end of the Cold War.

For those that are nimble and agile, there will be many great opportunities.

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How to Listen When Markets Speak: Risks, Myths, and Investment Opportunities in a Radically Reshaped Economy Hardcover – March 26, 2024

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