Could be interesting if you’re into state economics or the Clinton administration. Besides that, it had a couple of good anecdotes about the nineties emerging market busts, and some good insight into what could constitute eficiente macroeconomic policy for developing nations. Not very interesting and not worth the read from my point of view.

Wanted to like this book more and enjoyed some stories, but several chapters were repetitive and bland. Three chapters covered foreign markets in danger of collapsing and causing a cascading effect around the world all amounted to essentially the same story and led to a sense of deja vu because of how similar the explanations were. Also too much name dropping/listing which ivy league schools various people attended.

Terrific book.

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.

This is fine. I like Rubin, but the past decade hasn't been great to his reputation. Spends a lot of time talking about Clinton years, which would be interesting - except that he wasn't really part of the inner circle. His views on uncertainty are good. But just read Black Swan instead.

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.

A must read if you want to understand the current position of "too big to fail". Rubin was at the place where this trend started and now, knowing how things turned out, this is the place to go for insight into our times and the history of how we got here.

This book isn’t just about Robert Rubins career and time in the White House: it’s about being decisive with impartial information and a changing set of circumstances. There is a certain amount of risk that is inherent in the situation.

It's a little bit dry at times, but I enjoyed getting to know the very down to earth thinking of this very reserved public figure. Rubin's approach of thinking "probabilistically" is very valuable for anyone.

It's also interesting reading his thoughts on the Asian financial crises of the late 90s which were in many ways very similar to the global financial crisis which occurred in the late 2000s.

What have we really learned that will prevent another crisis?

Rubin has the most humble and sincere narrative. As an introvert myself, I immensely resonate with a lot of his view points and decisions. The first three chapters of this book offer a lot of genuine advice to intellectually driven yet professionally aspiring people. However, while that kind of narrative is refreshing for the first 100 pages, it gets tiring as one reads on. After all, most people buy this book to gain insights of what happened in the boom and bust of the 90s to 00s, not a prolonged self-analysis on strengths and weaknesses. I actually could not finish the book, as it drags on and on about who did this and who said that, but it always misses the key points of the stories. I think this book should not be read as a history recount, but an unrefined diary that aims at an audience comprised of only Rubin himself.

Hmm, not entirely sure what to make of this.

Rubin is clearly a competent and clever guy, integral to two of the biggest challenges the Clinton administration engaged in, the currency and debt crises in Mexico 1994 and Thailand/ROK/Indonesia 1997.

And while this book has some moments when the drama of those days are well captured (chapters 8 & 9 are particularly good) this is about the driest read since my last college textbook:

"I met the head of the IMF, we discussed the crisis, then I spoke to Alan Greenspan, then I spoke to President Zedillo, then I tried to persuade a republican senator then we had a meeting with the German Chancellor. We agreed on a final figure."

"I was dating a girl, she had a friend named Judy, I thought she was beautiful, we started dating, we got married, we had a one day honeymoon, I went back to work."

Has Rubin had a personality bypass?

How on earth do you meet so many people, craft so much important policy AND work in Wall Street during a massive boom and one of the biggest busts in history and make it about as interesting as staring at TV static?

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