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Audio Books - Good financial advice is hard to hear today
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Published: November 1, 2009
Updated: 10/31/2009 07:30 pm
Our current financial crisis has been beneficial for one group of people, and I don't mean the Wall Street bankers. The winners in this season of big losers have been the authors writing about the financial crisis -- there has been a flood of print and audio books about how to hang on to what little you've got left, how bad things are yet going to get, whose fault it is and how you can avoid all such problems in the future.
You might wonder who's buying all these books if we're all so much poorer now, but there seems to be an endless audience for financial self-help and recovery titles. Every once in a while, though, a writer comes up with a particularly interesting angle, even if the end result predicted may make our current financial malaise seem like a slight cold.
$20 Per Gallon (Hachette Audio, 8 CDs, $29.98) by Forbes magazine journalist Christopher Steiner has a great premise -- what changes will be wrought as gasoline prices continue their steady and inexorable climb? For starters, you can kiss Las Vegas, Disney World and any vacation outside of the United States goodbye -- airline and car travel will be severely restricted once gas goes over the $10 a gallon mark. And it only gets worse -- Wal-Mart recedes as oil prices climb, electric cars won't have enough electricity to recharge, and Chinese imports will stay in China because it will cost too much to ship them here.
The subtitle of Steiner's book is "How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better," but he and the reader, John Wolfe, never make clear exactly why matters will improve. Yes, local food will enjoy a renaissance, and we'll all be healthier for walking more and driving less. But the economic dislocation predicted at every $2 per gallon increase will be extreme, and Steiner's attempts to stay positive belie the very grim scenario he outlines.
Jonathan Pond's Safe Money in Tough Times (Tantor Audio, 6 CDs, $24.99) is much more traditional in its approach, and functions as more of an investment guide than a prescription for surviving what he calls "The Great Recession." As read in a slightly preachy style by Dick Hill, Pond's lecturing to the recently laid-off and struggling Americans is paternalistic, but hardly original. Save more. Spend less. For this you need to fork over $25?
You're hardly better off with Ron Paul's End the Fed (Hachette Audio, 6 CDs, $26.98), a screed that has only one message: get rid of the Federal Reserve Bank and return the country to the gold standard. This has been conservative red meat since the days of William Jennings Bryan and his "Cross of Gold" speech in 1896, and Paul has little new to add, particularly in reader Bob Craig's boring recitation. A Texas congressman and Libertarian presidential candidate, Paul found great support on college campuses last year with his charges that the Fed has robbed Americans of wealth, has cooked the financial books of the federal government, and is nothing more than an instrument of the major banks and investment firms. But his recipe for change is nonexistent, since even he acknowledges that the Fed has no intention of going out of business.
The best financial counseling I heard all month came from, of all people, Pat Robertson in Right on the Money: Financial Advice for Tough Times (Hachette Audio, 3 CDs, $22.98). The founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network has a folksy and direct style and the most down-home advice possible: desire and buy less, get rid of all but two of your credit cards, help those worse off than yourself, and thank God for what you do have.
Sure beats worrying about the price of gasoline.
Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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