Books in Brief

Supermoney, by “Adam Smith” (Random House, 301 pp., $7.95). Form a company, issue shares, go public, and you have created a New, Improved Money, Smith argues. You can convert your stock into groceries or a yacht—money it is. It is taxed, favorably, as capital gains rather than income—better than money. Earlier this year the Levitz brothers of Pottstown, Pa. went public with their $60,000-a-year furniture business, banked $33 million in old-fashioned cash, and still have $300-million worth of their stock—-Super-money. That’s about all Smith has to say on the subject, except that supermoney can easily be and often is debased. Most of the book is given to largely unrelated essays: on shifty accounting practices; on the near-collapse of the market two years ago, as the liquidity crisis, the brokerage house failures, the worst bear market since ’29, and the bankruptcy of Penn Central converged one awful weekend; on Benjamin Graham, dean of security analysts. Blended in are bits of Street gossip and moody reflections on the dramatically changing attitudes and expectations of production workers. The longest single chapter (61 pages) tells of Smith’s unhappy investment in a hot-shot American-managed Swiss bank that went spectacularly broke speculating in cocoa, taking with it the royalties from The Money Game. (Graham could have warned him away from schemes promising radical departures from established business practices.) Apart from the unbecoming effort to stitch these disparate essays together under the “supermoney” rubric, and some lousy printing, Smith’s book is thoughtful, readable, and well worth the investor’s attention.

T. J. WHEELER

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Supermoney, by “Adam Smith” (Random House, 301 pp., $7.95). Form a company, issue shares, go public, and you have created a New, Improved Money, Smith argues. You can convert your stock into groceries or a yacht—money it is. It is taxed, favorably, as capital gains rather than income—better than money. Earlier this year the Levitz brothers of Pottstown, Pa. went public with their $60,000-a-year furniture business, banked $33 million in old-fashioned cash, and still have $300-million worth of their stock—-Super-money. That’s about all Smith has to say on the subject, except that supermoney can easily be and often is debased. Most of the book is given to largely unrelated essays: on shifty accounting practices; on the near-collapse of the market two years ago, as the liquidity crisis, the brokerage house failures, the worst bear market since ’29, and the bankruptcy of Penn Central converged one awful weekend; on Benjamin Graham, dean of security analysts. Blended in are bits of Street gossip and moody reflections on the dramatically changing attitudes and expectations of production workers. The longest single chapter (61 pages) tells of Smith’s unhappy investment in a hot-shot American-managed Swiss bank that went spectacularly broke speculating in cocoa, taking with it the royalties from The Money Game. (Graham could have warned him away from schemes promising radical departures from established business practices.) Apart from the unbecoming effort to stitch these disparate essays together under the “supermoney” rubric, and some lousy printing, Smith’s book is thoughtful, readable, and well worth the investor’s attention.

T. J. WHEELER