Excellent, although some of the economics was above my head. On my list to re-read after a bit of grad school.

Great book and a unique perspective (a wall streets risk arbitrager and secretary of the treasury - Robert Rubin). He applies his free market mentality to some of the most pressing international and domestic economic issues. Similar to the World is Flat or the Lexus and the Olive Tree (with a stronger economic bend), but told by someone with more expertise and experience

"The best social program is a strong economy"
-Bill Clinton

" A change-oriented culture has been central to America success and will be critical to its future economic progress"

It took me a while to slog through this book; the fault was partly mine, and partly Rubin's. While the subject matter is fascinating for me--a remarkable career in both finance and public service--Rubin's prose was passionless. Moreover, his writing was not crisp or energetic.

There were great parts of the book: an insider's look at Goldman Sachs, the Clinton administration, and some of the crucial dilemmas that Rubin faced as Secretary of the Treasury. While I generally concurred with his view of the world--that decisions are difficult and involve estimating a range of uncertain outcomes--he presented it in a rather uninteresting way. As a side point, his decision-making process and underlying philsophy contrasted sharply with that espoused by GWB in Decision Points.

If you're interested in this man's career, it's probably worth the read, but I wouldn't spend time otherwise.

Two-and-a-half stars.
158,000 words (sigh).

Rubin comes across as a reasonable, sober-minded nice guy who has lived an absolutely charmed life. His wife and kids make numerous, sometimes odd, cameos in these pages.

For many observers Bob's employment in the Clinton administration signaled the advent of what has since become pejoratively labeled "neo-liberalism," a supposed economic paradigm that is now blamed for having inadvertently given rise to its aftershock, populist Trumpism.

Unfortunately Rubin published this book too early in his career, before the most interesting chapter of his career: the 2008 financial crisis that nearly forced the closure of his employer Citicorp.

The 1990s-era financial crises in Mexico and SE Asia get in-depth reports in these pages. Bob says, in effect, that whenever a financial crisis occurs there will always be a federal government bailout because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

In the early naughties he reports that he's very worried by the Bush administration's large budget deficits, sums that when measured against today's deficits are chump change.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan makes a cameo in a scene Bob recollects this way:

My job didn’t require congressional confirmation, but I took the opportunity nevertheless to pay a couple of courtesy calls in the Senate. When I visited New York’s senior senator, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he offered a bit of historical perspective. Anything truly important in Washington took thirty-five years to accomplish, he said. Obviously Moynihan was speaking figuratively, but he was also making a useful point about the difficulty of making major changes through the political system—a lesson we would learn for ourselves when trying to reform health care.

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During the late 1990s Ruben worried that the stock market was wildly overvalued. He makes the interesting observation:

Another problem [with overvalued assets] is that there could be irresistible political pressure to make up for shortfalls in accounts for people who retire when market conditions are adverse.

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Rubin states repeatedly that he'd like to ameliorate the suffering of America's urban, inner-city poor, but he never describes his understanding of the problems nor his ideas on how to ameliorate them. Nonetheless, I was struck by his repeated mention of inner-cities. What follows are his riffs on inner-cities:

I had some direct exposure to the problems of inner cities at meetings of a neighborhood group called the 28th Precinct Community Council in central Harlem in the 1970s.

. . . it is just wrong that a country as wealthy as ours does not provide the resources to successfully address poverty that passes from generation to generation. The more I learned about these issues, the more I was convinced that there were approaches that would work if adequately supported. I also came to believe that the problems of the inner cities greatly affect all of us—no matter where we may live or what our incomes may be—through crime, the deterioration of public schools, the costs of social ills, and the lost productivity of a large group of people who are not being equipped to realize their potential. The belief that affluence can insulate is illusory. And that helps explain why I am a Democrat.

The country remained in denial about serious social issues as well. Our public education system was deeply troubled, and life in the inner cities was getting worse. I wondered whether the country would muster the political will to address its problems. The alternative to facing up to these problems, as I discussed at a dinner Bob Strauss held for me in Washington after I became co-head of Goldman Sachs, was the risk of inexorable national decline.

In addition to health care, which we took as a given, my memo listed five “legacies”: (1) an effective human capital program of high-quality education and training; (2) progress on the problems of the inner city; (3) deficit reduction; (4) an expansion of global trade; and (5) implementation of a rational approach to regulation.

The strong economy made a real difference for inner cities, and our policies, including the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and increased funding for Head Start, helped reduce poverty. (In the view of many, welfare reform had a significant impact as well, although I had serious reservations about this legislation.) But the fundamental problem of an urban underclass cut off from the mainstream of American society remains, and we still lack a federal effort commensurate with the problem.

. . . if we wanted to talk about spending money on education and programs for the inner city, people weren’t going to listen to us unless we talked about those programs in the context of a balanced budget.

Another focus of mine, which was less typical for a Treasury Secretary, was poverty and the distress of inner cities as critical economic issues.

I learned very quickly, however, that advancing programs to help the poor—especially for minorities living in inner cities—was very difficult. Many people object to the idea of government assistance for the poor on principle; even well-designed programs meant to encourage work instead of welfare faced strong opposition.

All sorts of groups could bring great pressure to bear when their concerns were at stake: environmentalists, labor, the elderly, business, and many, many others—but not the poor. You couldn’t count on a major letter-writing campaign in support of food stamps or inner-city job programs.

The CRA required lending institutions, when seeking regulatory approval, to demonstrate that they had invested in their communities. This measure had greatly increased the availability and flow of credit in inner cities. After the 1994 election, however, we faced constant efforts to roll the program back in one way or another. One argument was that the CRA was simply a way for community and political groups to extort money from lending institutions. CRA almost surely had been misused in some instances—and we were again fully supportive of reforms.

[Upon retiring from Treasury] I knew I wanted to stay involved with issues relating to the inner cities, and LISC, which provides funding and technical assistance for urban and rural community development....

[Al Gore] also had a strong focus on inner-city problems.

It was in the context of thinking about inner cities and poverty here in the United States that I first came to focus on the idea of a “parallel agenda.” What this means is that market-based economics and integration with the wider economy, the fundamental policies for growth, should be allied with a “parallel” set of policies to help fulfill the needs that markets will not adequately meet, such as a reasonable social safety net and retraining programs for those workers dislocated by change.
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Maybe in his next memoir he'll proffer some ideas on how to ameliorate inner-city problems, reduce ever-growing budget deficits, and prevent bank collapses like the one that should have culled his employer Citicorp in 2008.

Fun read. Covers his life from GS to White House and then later in Citigroup. Has interesting anecdotes about Financial Crisis that plagued world economy one event after another and how they fought it off.

Insightful book on the Treasury work.

I found it fascinating to read how someone high in finance handled complicated financial, political and interpersonal challenges. Among his many jobs, Robert Rubin was co-chariman of Goldman Sachs and US Treasury secretary. It was interesting to read his thought processes as he navigated many tough decisions and sticky situations. The book is warmly written.

MANY PEOPLE CAN ACKNOWLEDGE CRITICSM AND ADVICE, BUT RELATIVELY FEW INTERNALISE IT AND ALTER THIER BEHAVIOUR IN A SIGNIFICANT WAY

Financial models are useful tools. But they can be dangerous because reality is always more complex than models.

So far: see the world of through the eyes of a man who went from a Goldman Sachs partner to the Treasury Secretary - excellent insight in economics, White House, and much more...

Good book, liked his outlook

A book about Rubin's upbringing and professional experience in banking and politics.

Takeaway
Nothing is for sure. Life is more about odds, choices, and trade-offs. There is no definitive answer. One would be better off focusing on building good process for decision making than judging solely on the outcome because bad decisions can produce good result due to randomness or luck. Conversely, good decisions can produce bad result and one should expect losses as part of the business. Risk taking is unavoidable in life. Think analytically and probabilistically in a mental decision tree. And the only way to refine our odds is through better knowledge and deeper understanding.

Things I enjoyed
o The Powell Doctrine: use overwhelming force in military intervention to secure certainty of result
o Write things down: Rubin often carried a legal pad to keep notes and wrote his analysis down. This is a good practice to keep track of things and hone one's thinking. He said often when a point of clarity is reached, a correct answer would present itself.
o A Way of Life by William Osler: deal with fear of failure by living life in "day-tight compartments"
o Rubin also handled stress and uncertainty by thinking of a failsafe fallback position.
o He also tried to adopt the right frame of mind by focusing on the job in hand instead of worry about the outcome. i.e. mindfulness of present moment
o His philosophy teacher Demos taught: not only to understand the logic of an analysis, but to find the point at which the edifica rested on hypothesis, assumption, or belief.
o Always be skeptical. Never take propositions at face value.
o Find fulfillment within oneself instead of searching outside
o The importance of being sincere: Gus vs. Clinton
o Clinton has unusual listening skill: he made the person not just heard but understood with great sincerity
o Alan Greenspan a master in Q&A
o Even a trader as good as Rubin has no ability in knowing where the market will go short term. The only rational way to profit is to invest based on long term prospect. Example: he felt the market was too high years before the Internet Bubble.
o Company performance is judged by short-term result. This is not ideal but net benefit still over downside because it can avoid longterm cheaters. (I think just like democracy not ideal but can avoid dictators)
o Free trades forces America to become more competitive.
o Overreaction is part of human nature.
o Take profit while the market is good because market sentiment can change very quickly.

This is the autobiography of Robert Rubin who was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors during the first Clinton administration and Secretary of the Treasury during most of the second Clinton administration. He wrote the book in 2003 so much of his opining on economic matters sounds quaint and dated. He gives detailed accounts of the handling of US guarantees on loans to Mexico and Indonesia in the 90s to prevent economic collapse of those countries. He had no way of knowing that the global economic collapse of 2008 would make everyone forget the third world economic fires he put out in the 90s.

His expressed concern for federal budget deficits sounds archaic, especially coming from a Democrat. He castigates Republicans for squandering the budget surpluses of the last Clinton years on the Bush tax cuts of 2001. He takes a lot of pride in those balanced budgets, not realizing that 20 years later Democrats wouldn't care and Republicans would deny they ever happened. I am sure he is dismayed that currently the only substantive difference in the Democratic and Republican positions on federal budget deficits is that Democrats no longer pretend that they think deficits are bad.

The book itself was fairly interesting, reminding me of a lot of things that I was ignoring during the 90s. He drops a lot of names of the movers and shakers of the last quarter of the 20th century, however, with the exception of Hillary Clinton and Bono, readers under 40 may well struggle to recognize the names.