Six Months of Panic - How the Global Financial Crisis Hit Australia

Few Australian writers can match Trevor Sykes' understanding of the murkier waters of Australian business, as readers of his Pierpont column and his magisterial works The Bold Riders and Two Centuries of Panic have shown. He has now turned his eagle eye on what has become known as the GFC, and the waves of panic that began with the subprime crisis in America and flowed with tsunami-like force across Europe, Asia and Australia. This was a crisis which was borne from an excess of greed, and immorality, and Sykes singles the Wall Street banks out for particular blame. He explains how the subprime phenomenon came about, and how the fall of Lehman brothers marked the beginning of the slide. Inevitably the crisis reached Australia, with Centro and MFS the first dominoes in the chain. With the same blowtorch he earlier applied to the likes of Alan Bond he dissects the questionable dealings which caused the fall of high flyers like Allco, Babcock and Brown, ABC and many more, and summarises the pain and harm caused by the myriad small companies and individuals feeding from the frenzy.

 

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire? - The James Packer Story by Paul Barry

The unauthorised biography of Australia's richest man, James Packer. WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE? is the story of James Packer's desperate battle to win his father's love and respect. It's also a tale of billion-dollar bets gone disastrously wrong. But above all it's the portrait of a troubled relationship between a dominant father and dutiful son. In this powerful sequel to his number one bestseller, 'The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer', Paul Barry shows how James's father kept his grip on the empire even as he lay close to death. And he reveals what drives his heir. As a child James was derided by Kerry as too soft, too close to his mother, or simply 'a loser'. Since then he has struggled to make his father proud - in the only way the Packers know - by making money. Having seen Kerry lose hundreds of millions in the world's casinos, James chose to bet billions of dollars on buying them instead. Then came the global financial crisis and he almost lost the lot. As markets hit rock bottom in early 2009, Australia's richest man was $4 billion poorer and no longer on top of the heap. He was smoking again, putting on weight and shutting himself off from friends. Years earlier, far smaller losses in One.Tel had pushed him to the brink of a nervous breakdown and made him seek salvation in Scientology. Can James survive this time? Will he bounce back? Or was his father right?

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