The High Beta Rich

Robert Frank’s new book “High-Beta Rich-How The Manic Wealthy Will Take Us To The Next Boom,Bubble And Bust” is based on interviews with more than 100 people with net worths (or former net worths) of $10m or more. These include the Blixseth family, former billionaires who had to lay off all 110 staff in their enormous residence; the Siegels, who had to abandon the largest private house in the US before it was completed; and Jack Warner, who built a fortune from various business, but ended up a penniless handyman.It is also a tale of how the financial crash of 2008 has affected the US more generally. It includes numerous unemployed former butlers, unoccupied mansions and falling tax revenue for fiscally-pressed state governments. In addition, Frank tells the story of upmarket repo men who specialise in repossessing planes, yachts and the like from indebted millionaires.So basically Frank revisits the lives of the people he profiled in Richistan, and follows up on what has happened to them in the years since he wrote the book in 2006. By 2011, some of these rich people have since gone from riches to rags, or merely to less affluence. His follow up on the people whose jobs it was to serve the needs of the rich shows how many of them are now finding it hard to secure stable jobs from the rich since the 2008 .Since the book with vivid sketches of how the rich, and the formerly rich, really live  is a sequel to Richistan, published in 2007, in which he profiled the lives of the rich before the recent financial bust, do read it before starting on this one. Read more of this post