Kick the Dogma

Good non-fiction books teach you something. Great non-fiction books make you think. And the latest book from Gary Hoover, Ladder or Lottery, Economic Promises and the Reality of Who Gets Ahead , did just that. You might think, I’ve heard this story. Income inequality, rich people and their children have inherent advantages. It isn’t a fair world. Well, you’ve heard a story, but you’ve heard a diff...

Buy The Middle-Class New Deal here: https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Class-New-Deal-Restoring-Mobility/dp/0520423399

New Ep is Up! Bankers brought the global economic system to its knees in 2007 and nearly did the same in 2020. Both times, the US government bailed out the banks and left them in control. How can we end this cycle of trillion-dollar bailouts and make finance work for the rest of us?  Busting the Bankers' Club  confronts the powerful people and institutions that benefit from our broken fi...

Today we talk to historian, fund manager, and author Daniel Peris. In his fourth book, The Ownership Dividend, Daniel makes the persuasive case that we are on the verge of a major paradigm shift for investors in the U.S. stock market. Dividend-focused stock investing, he explains, has been receding in popularity for more than three decades in the U.S.; once the dominant investment style, it is now...

New Ep is up! Today we have Michael D Smith, Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon, and the author of the new book, The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World. College has been in the news a lot the last few years, mostly due to the skyrocketing cost and the student loan debt crisis. Also, the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and some rece...

New Ep is up! Today we have our first returning guest, Dr. Amy Finkelstein, economics professor at MIT, co-author (with Liran Einav) of today’s subject, the book We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care, but also co-author of Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It, the subject of an interview from earlier this year. Amy and her co-authors are experts in ins...

Welcome to Kick the Dogma, the podcast where we interview authors of books on investing, economics, behavioral finance, and business more generally. Today’s episode is an interview with Algy Hall, author of Four Ways to Beat the Market: A practical guide to stock-screening strategies to help you pick winning shares. Algy is a journalist, and just over ten years ago he started tracking the performa...

What Tight Labor Markets Do For The Poor. Another timely book and discussion, as unemployment remains near historic lows, wages and benefits rise, and the traditionally disenfranchised enter the labor force. Specifically, the book addresses structural change that occur below an already low unemployment rate (think Peter Berezin’s kinked Phillips curve ), and only at those levels of labor participa...

New Ep is up! Today we get to talk to Joe Wiggins, author of The Intelligent Fund Investor: Practical Steps for Better Results in Active and Passive Funds. Joe is also a senior portfolio manager, putting the tools he describes in the book to work every day. Joe and I agree that equity markets are not efficient, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are easy to beat for an active manager. I have a...

New Ep is up! If you aren’t already excited about insurance markets, this episode will convert you. Amy Finkelstein is a professor at MIT and co-author of Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It. Insurance is about risk management. But the markets are inefficient, sometimes wildly so. Sometimes they “function” and other times they fail, i.e., the death spiral. Either way...

On today’s episode we have Jim Edwards, former editor-in-chief of Insider’s news division, and author of Say Thank You For Everything: The Secrets of Being a Great Manager, Strategies and Tactics That Get Results. I personally had a blast talking to Jim, I know you’ll enjoy listening to him. Jim draws from a combination of his own experiences with leadership, successes and failures, leadership sty...

New Ep is up! Another take on ESG investing, this time more of a European perspective. I was joined by Becky O’Connor, editor of and contributor to The ESG Investing Handbook: Insights and Developments In Environmental, Social & Governance Investment. Becky is head of pension and savings at interactive investor. She also co-founded the ethical sustainable personal finance website Good With Mon...

…Growing Your Inner Capacity to Lead, with co-author Jennifer Garvey Berger. Jennifer joined us from the French countryside for a wide ranging interview that covered her background, her business with co-author Carolyn Coughlin, and what breathing, sleep, laughter, and evolutionary biology have to do with your on-the-job performance and leadership capabilities. You can locate their company’s websit...

New ep is up! An interview with Samuel Evan Milner, economic historian and author of Robbing Peter to Pay Pau: Power, Profits, and Productivity in Modern American. Mr. Milner has a degree in history from Harvard, master’s degrees in history and philosophy from Yale, a PhD in history from Yale, and more recently, a J.D. from University of Chicago Law School.   Think about how much inflation ge...

New Ep is up! This one has the potential to deliver the highest potential return on either 60 minutes or $20 to any parent thinking about helping a child with college. No joke. Think about it. The three biggest investments you could make in your life are for your retirement, for a home, and if you have children and decide to help them, their college education. The top line cost of 4 years of priva...

The book is an 800-year history of inflation. Three hundred pages in 35 minutes, with as much of the author’s original work quoted or referenced as possible. Learn the recurring themes in all Four Waves starting in the 12th century and ending (but not really) in the 20th century. Demand-side shocks, supply-side shocks, wages initially keeping up with inflation, then real wages falling, creating un...

“Let cannabis be kale.” The licensed weed business is more than about states generating tax revs, it’s about supporting small businesses, social justice, and more. Ag economists Dan Sumner and Robin Goldstein explain The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics. I share a story from my firefighter days, we talk about reading books in bars, and we compare California, Colorado, and Oklahoma. KTD short...

On today’s episode we have a discussion about the evolution of human behavior and how it can be used in engineering, corporate strategy, marketing, and so much more. Sam Tatam joined us from Sidney to talk about his new book Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow’s Challenges. It is such an interesting book, the most rewarding and thought-provoking book I’ve read this y...

All About ESG. That is, investing based on environmental, societal, and governance criteria, and it’s exploding. ESG has taken over from SRI, or socially responsible investing, and interested investors need to understand both impact investing and sustainable investing. But there’s a new book out by Sam Adams and Larry Swedroe that does a fantastic job bringing it all together. After going over som...

Check out the full interview on  New Books Networks .  Buy the book on Amazon . Follow Mary on Linkedin and NPR’s Planet Money . From the host of NPR's  Planet Money , the deeply-investigated story of how one visionary, dogged investor changed American finance forever. The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost it All,   is the story of how Bi...

Today’s topic is the intangible economy, what it means for competition, policy, inequality, and so much more. For fifty years, the percentage of investment in corporate America and elsewhere allocated to intangible assets has risen slowly but steadily as a percentage of the total. An increasingly intangible rich economy has a meaningful impact on the way companies are  valued , how startups a...

Kick the Dogma wraps up its first quarter. Enjoy this quick look back at prior episodes, with updates on performance, inflation, and coverage of the yield curve inverting between 2’s and 10’s. What does that mean? What are better indicators of coming recession? Enjoy, and have a great weekend. Look out for our first guest host interview on New Books Network available April 5. The subject, Jon Hask...

Rick Ferri’s career is itself a history of the investment management industry, with one notable exception. He tended to be years if not decades ahead of the pack on where the profession, the products, and the services needed to go. Rick has been an analyst and financial advisor for over 30 years, and the author of several books, including  The Power of Passive Investing ,  All About Inde...

New pod is up! Get it now on Amazon, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google. A book review of the 800-year history of inflation from author David Hackett Fischer. Three hundred pages in 35 minutes, with as much of the author’s original work quoted or referenced as possible. Learn the recurring themes in all Four Waves starting in the 12th century and ending (but not really) in the 20th century. Deman...

The Russian invasion creates a back-to-back global supply shock, just as the pain of a global pandemic was receding. Whether investment dollars and extracted commodities go into defense spending or alternative energy, we are in a new paradigm. With a new Cold War and a front creeping west, compounded by a cyber war, “buy and hold” is on hold. We go over the impact on commodities from the invasion...