Lying for Money - How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World - Dan Davies

-

ISBN: 978-1781259658
Verdict: 👍👍 

Financial fraud, a derivative of a financial crime, is an interesting topic - For someone who has spent quite a bit of time researching this topic from a regulatory and systems perspective ( transactional monitoring and pattern recognition) this book was on my reading list.

The book does not disappoint it is a nice read and I did enjoy it - although chapter 8 was a bit of  curve ball in the sense the author went all  biblical side in terms of crime - which did not interest me , but others may find it useful to read.




My highlighter did get used quite a bit and the following are just some of the bits I enjoyed seeing ;

  •  You can tell more about the structure of any industry by looking at patterns of payments than you can from any ‘five forces’ or SWOT analysis (p29)
  • People don’t check upon things which they believe to have been ‘signed off’. The threat is now inside the perimeter.   (p71/2) 
  •  Any lock made by a human can be picked by a human ( p200 )

·  

I think the best take away from the book can be found on p212 . ; 

  • There is a population of bad people out there, shaking around like the balls in a lottery machine. Every now and then , one of them will bump into your business , and they will try to do something dishonest . The question is will your control system detect it? Broadly speaking, the answer will depend on the proportion of transactions you check up on 

 


Location: London, UK

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Surrounded by Idiots – The Four Types of Human Behaviour (or, How to Understand those Who Cannot Be Understood) – Thomas Erikson

-
Image
ISBN:  978-1-78504-218-8 Verdict :👍👍 I enjoyed reading this book with its elaboration of the concepts that centre around the D ominance, I nducement, S ubmission and A nalytics ability (DISA) system for  human  communication which the Author breaks into 4 Color Types ( Red , Yellow , Blue & Green ) and says that " behaviour.Its like a  recipe  - we need to understand all the ingredients before we bake the cake " p13 The book discusses the various  behavioural  traits of individuals which the author centers around a 4 square color model, with each color representing a specific trait and some behavioral patterns associated with the colors - here are some snippets; The Quote "Only Dead Fish Go with the Flow" to describe Reds is classical where Reds are quick thinkers and one on long before everyone else. Yellows can be amusing, creative and elevate the mood regardless of who they are with         p64 " Greens are easy to hangout with..
Read more

WHAT IT TAKES - Stephen A. Schwarzman

-
Image
ISBN:  978-1-4711-8955-5 Verdict :   👍👍 You have to respect Scharwazman for what he has achieved in his long life, reinforcing to some extent the old saying that ‘ money makes money ’.This book is worth reading if you are working in finance and is quite a nice read. The book takes you down Stephen's memory lane and his life time of investing. It’s a short book and does lack clarity on the analysis, rules and logic applied on the business decisions. The book is about Stephen and the people he knows and boy does he ‘name drop’, throughout the book, to the extent it was getting boring reading another name popping up towards the end.  There are snippets on Blackstone’s Business Drivers/Methodology e.g.  Blackstone’s three tests  “It must have potential to be hugely rewarding for investors . It must add to Blackstone intellectual capital. And it must have a 10 in charge of it.”          p281  Below are some of my best bits from the book; There
Read more

The Technology Trap - Carl Benedikt Frey

-
Image
I SBN :  978-0691172798 Verdict :  👍👍   👍 This is one of those books that you have to read in full to fully appreciate, with its well-researched examples to support the concept behind the book.  The book highlights how current automation and Artificial intelligent(AI) systems trends can be used with an historical economic lens to project and address the economic, political and social affects that will arise and by using examples from the industrial revolution when technology displaced workers we can predict the effects of technologies like driverless cars. I like the structured approach to present the argument and learnt along the way with references to various paradox ( Moravec, Polanyi etc. .) which I had not come across before and had to look up  Here are some bits I highlighted in the book. however, there were quite a few so I couldn't  list them all ; The pre-industrial era did not suffer a shortage of imagination, it suffered from a shortage of realization . ” P73 Parliam
Read more