The Midas Touch

British journalist Anthony Sampson spent the 1980s watching capital markets drift further from the real economy, and this book is his reckoning with what that meant. Through interviews with Paul Volcker, Sir James Goldsmith, and Akio Morita, among others, he traces the decade's money culture across the US, Japan, Britain, Latin America, and Africa, arguing that short-term speculation was widening the gap between wealthy and debt-burdened nations. The geographic scope and interview access are genuinely impressive. The prescriptive sections, though, are thinner than the reporting — Sampson is stronger on diagnosis than cure — and some conclusions have dated since publication. Still a valuable piece of financial journalism for adults interested in how the modern global economy took shape.