July - Summer Edition - CI Investments

Book reviews
Malcolm White
Vice-President Portfolio Management
and Portfolio Manager
Signature Global Advisors
What I plan to read this summer
And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out): Wall Street, the
IMF, and the bankrupting of Argentina by Paul Blustein
Public Affairs, 320 pages
I bought this book in 2003 and recently dusted it off again.
Given the Greek situation, this book is especially relevant and
shows why – in my opinion – Greece will default, devalue its
currency and go back to the drachma.
In the 1990s, few countries were more
lionized than Argentina for its efforts
to join the club of wealthy nations.
Argentina’s policies drew enthusiastic
applause from the IMF, the World Bank
and Wall Street. But the club has a
disturbing propensity to turn its back on
arrivistes and cast them out. That was what happened in
2001, when Argentina suffered one of the most spectacular
crashes in modern history. With it came appalling social
and political chaos, a collapse of the peso, and a wrenching
downturn that threw millions into poverty and left nearly
one-quarter of the workforce unemployed.
– Public Affairs
The best book I’ve read in the past year
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics
Was Reborn by Louisa Gilder
Alfred A. Knopf, 443 pages
Entanglement is the strange property of physics where two
particles can be synced and communicate over vast distances.
Einstein never really believed in the principle – which would
infer faster than light speeds – but entanglement has been
shown to work and is at the heart of new advances in quantum
computing and communications.
This book offers an easy-to-read account of the history and
physics behind the science.
The first quarter of the 20 th century
produced two theories, relativity and
quantum mechanics, that are still
changing our universe.
With special relativity, Albert Einstein
upended the long-understood meaning
of time, space and simultaneity. With general relativity,
he swapped Newton’s law of gravity based on force for
curved space¬time, and cosmology became a science. Just
after World War I, relativity made front-page news when
astronomers saw the Sun bend starlight. Overnight, Einstein
became famous as no physical scientist before or since, his
theory the subject of poetry, painting and architecture.
Then, with the development of quantum mechanics in the
1920s, physics got really interesting. Quantum physics
was a theory so powerful – and so powerfully weird – that
nearly a century later, we’re still arguing about how to
reconcile it with Einsteinian relativity and debating what it
tells us about causality, locality and realism.
– New York Times
SUMMER 2011 PERSPECTIVE AS AT JUNE 30, 2011 13