ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
GREEN AND SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTING
General Perspective
Robert J. Shiller, Irrational
Exuberance (2nd ed ’05)
Describes the psychology of
speculation, herd behavior, “new era” theories, our misdirected attention to
gyrations in the market, “celebrity” opinion, trivial factoids and compromised
research analyses. Offers
inflation-corrected statistics re market returns and housing prices, and charts
stock prices relative to dividend current value.
Richard Bookstaber, A
Demon of our own Design: Markets,
Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation (’07)
Describes statistical
arbitrage, the convergence spread trade, and other hedging techniques. Warns us of the dangers of borrowing
short-term while investing long-term, extreme leverage, complexity, tight
coupling, and the speed of the transactions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The
Black Swan: The Impact of the
Highly Improbable (’07)
Describes our focus on
minutiae, blindness to risk, our scorn for the abstract, retrospective
distortions, our tendency to “tunnel” and focus on a small number of sources of
uncertainty, and our deference to professionals, who are skilled at narrative,
and smoke us with elegant and tight mathematical models based on erroneous
premises.
John Hussman publishes a weekly
commentary on market climate - valuations and the quality of market
action. See his essays re risk
assessments, defensive hedging techniques, futility of short-term forecasting,
role of the Federal Reserve, and investing for the full market cycle.
Green Investing
Descriptions of “green” and
sustainability focused movements, including triple bottom line investing,
relocalizing, community development banks, and the health and sustainability
life style movement.
www.profitingfromcleanenergy.com
A guide to trading green in
the wind, ethanol, fuel cell, carbon credit industries by Richard Asplund. Links to indexes, clean energy and
exchange traded funds.
Greener World Media, The
State of Green Business (65pp – ’08)
Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond
Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak
(’05)
A retired geologist provides
a primer on the history, challenges, and technologies of fossil fuel extraction
and processing, and outlines our current vulnerabilities.
Two organizations providing
information on firms specializing in green and fair trade products, along with
reports detailing corporate environmental, labor and advertising abuses:
Eric Janszen, The Next Bubble: Priming the Markets for Tomorrow’s Big
Crash (Harpers – February 2008)
Paul Piersma
April, 2008