Nilesh Jasani's Reviews > The Price of Time

The Price of Time, in the best case, is a misnomer. The book is not a story of interest rates despite the occasional attempts to weave them into the narrative. Its first part provides summaries of a few most celebrated historic bubbles, followed by a long, unstructured diatribe on the state of current markets, economic structures, and policy frameworks.

There is nothing wrong with these topics. The author's attempts fall short because of how the content appears manipulated, like the title of the book, to emphasize his discomfort with the way things are. The author is right in pointing out numerous current ills from the extreme and rising inequality to market valuations, corporate abuses and policy adventurism, real-life reflexivities of financial events and externalities including climate damage, etc.

The author is not alone in listing these issues. These topics are covered continuously by a rising horde in a far more effective manner almost daily in books and journals. This book has little primary research. Worse, its reliance on the points made by others is so inconsistent that the arguments often lose credibility.

For instance, the author would lament the lack of creative destruction in one paragraph but have long sections on individual companies that go bust. He would appear to favor the Austrian school of thought and Hayek, but still, have digs at Greenspan's connections with Ayn Rand or the regulatory failures in controlling the powers of today's giants in some other sections.

The inconsistencies are worse when the author discusses two sides of any interest rate level. The book would criticize how low rates hurt the pensioners relying on interest income, but mind savers benefiting from rising wealth levels of financial instruments. The author never realizes how much the two groups overlap and why retirees worldwide have not gone up in arms against low-interest rates decades later. Take another argument in the same vein: the author would criticize low-interest rates for luring students and consumers of all types to borrow but would still want funding available to these groups all the time for the betterment of the masses.

Once again, the conclusions are not wrong. The problem is the ad hocism in the arguments used to support them. It is ok to use quotes from both Marx and Smith or Keynes and Mises to point out any unsustainability, but when it happens too often, it all begins to jangle. For example, the author does not like central banks because of their lack of policy framework. He seems to believe in the Austrian worldview that argues against fiat money, seen as the leading cause of the boom-bust cycle in the prices of financial assets and possibly also real-life goods/services. The book does not like cryptocurrencies, though - and for all the right reasons. Somehow, the author sees a solution in government-issued digital currencies...go figure!

The damage because of the lack of consistent argument framework is most when the author has to turn prescriptive. Mercifully, the book has little to offer on alternatives, although there is a section full of platitudes at the end.

A final word: History provides hardly any examples of economic successes without attendant financial/property market boom-busts, a point that goes unacknowledged. Every bubble-bust-prone system has not progressed consistently over the long term, but it is difficult to think of any society that has grown well over decades without boom-bust cycles. Unfortunately, perhaps.