Bonds Are Not Forever: The Crisis Facing Fixed Income Investors

Interweaving compelling, and often amusing, anecdotes from author Simon Lack's distinguished thirty-year career as a professional investor with hard economic data, this engaging book skillfully reveals why Bonds Are Not Forever. Along the way, it provides investors with a coherent framework for understanding the future of the fixed income markets and, more importantly, answering the question, "Where should I invest tomorrow?"

Bonds Are Not Forever chronicles the steady decline in interest rates from their peak in the 1980s and the concurrent drop in inflation during that period. Lack explains how those two factors spurred a dramatic growth in borrowing among both governments and individuals. Along the way, Lack describes how a financial industry meant to provide capital needed to drive productivity and economic growth became disconnected from Main Street and explores the grave economic, social, and political consequences of that disconnect.

• Provides practical solutions for avoiding the risk of falling bond markets and guaranteed negative real returns on savings
• Explains how the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2007–2008 led to massive borrowing by governments as they attempted to offset a sharp fall in economic activity
• Details how the trends of exploding debt and a financial sector that has grown much bigger than it needs to be have dramatically changed the game for savers

Offering a uniquely intimate, yet analytically thorough look at the coming fixed income crisis, Bonds Are Not Forever is must reading for investment professionals, as well as retail investors and their advisors.

Simon A. Lack has worked as a trader and hedge fund investor for more than thirty years. Following twenty-three years with J.P. Morgan, he founded SL Advisors, LLC, a Registered Investment Advisor, in 2009. Much of Simon's career at J.P. Morgan was spent in North American Fixed Income Derivatives and Forward FX trading, a business that he ran successfully through several bank mergers and culminated in his overseeing fifty professionals and $300 million in annual revenues. In addition, Simon Lack sat on J.P. Morgan's investment committee, allocating over $1 billion to hedge fund managers and founded the J.P. Morgan Incubator Funds, two private equity vehicles that took an economic stake in emerging hedge fund managers. Currently, Simon chairs the Investment Committee of Wardlaw-Hartridge School in Edison, New Jersey, and also chairs the Memorial Endowment Trust Investment Committee of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Westfield, New Jersey. He is the author of The Hedge Fund Mirage: The Illusion of Big Money and Why It's Too Good to Be True, which received high praise from the mainstream financial press, including theEconomist, theFinancial Times, and theWall Street Journal. Simon makes regular appearances on cable business shows as an expert on hedge funds and investing. He is a CFA charter holder.