Wealth Secrets of the One Percent

May 18, 2015
This exhaustively researched, misleadingly titled tome by economics consultant Wilkin claims that nearly every enormous fortune is founded on a “wealth secret,” a slightly dodgy, if not actively illegal, strategy. The author aims to provide guidance to those who are interested not just in a “minor” increase in their fortunes, but in achieving private-island, personal-jet, “diamond-encrusted light fixtures” levels of wealth. Acquiring billions takes both smarts and luck, and all of the world’s living billionaires—there are over 1,600—had both. The author tells the stories of individuals, companies, and groups throughout history that attained astronomical wealth, including J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Circuit City, and neoliberal-era Indian industrialists. What he offers are not so much secrets as lessons derived from well-documented success stories: “don’t be the best, be the only”; “bigger is still better”; own your own business; network like a fiend. While the history is intriguing, the tone and approach—presto-change-o magical thinking—are not. Readers looking for a shortcut to wealth are likely to be disappointed. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management.

June 15, 2015
Of robber barons, monopsonists, and oligarchs, in which it's revealed that the free market is anything but free. Want to become "obscenely" rich, as the subtitle of this illuminating book has it? Well, the best bet is to be born that way. The next best bet is to have a "wealth secret," the better-mousetrap sine qua non for building an empire. Economic forecaster Wilkin, head of business research at Oxford Economics, has good fun looking at how some fabulously rich people got to be that way. Though he teases a bit with the thought that you and I can "exploit their wealth secrets to become fabulously rich" as well, in the end, his book becomes a subtle, between-the-lines indictment of capitalism as it is mostly practiced these days. For instance, as Wilkin notes, the aspiring wealthy person doesn't want a level playing field-far from it. Nor does he or she want competition, for competition is messy and tedious, and "when masters of wealth secrets compete, they do not compete in the market" but instead, the courtroom and other arenas where they can effectively destroy their enemies without having to face them on the shelves and divide the market. This was the way of the great 19th-century robber barons, too, as with John D. Rockefeller, "strangling his competitors with cartels," and his ilk, who regarded competition as "that oppressive force that prevents great men from achieving fortunes commensurate with their greatness." Thus it is in emerging markets, where Wilkin counsels would-be monopolists to head, since corrupt political systems favor creative and extralegal ways of securing the startup money necessary to become a tycoon. And besides, he writes, "it's good to go where no one else wants to go." Against this backdrop, so-called natural monopolies like Microsoft look benign. Eye-opening and sure to make libertarian heads explode.

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July 1, 2015
Business research executive Wilkin studies some of the people throughout history who have become enormously wealthy and their methods. He reviews ancient Rome, where the richest were hugely rich, and investigates the nineteenth-century so-called robber barons, whose wealth has never been equaled in the U.S. Considering the banking sector, he indicates that less than five-percent of more than 1,600 global billionaires are bankers; those seeking billions should look to the emerging world. Yet banking has produced thousands of multimillion-dollar fortunes for the one percent top income earners. The key to great fortunes is wealth secrets, and Wilkin presents seven of them: create legislated monopoly businesses with no competition, use profits in retail and software to attract modern-day wealth seekers, do business where no one wants to go (e.g., Russia), and secure unlimited access to capital with government guarantees.Wikin shows us that the extremely wealthy are good at doing one thing above all else: preventing other people from doing what they are doing. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)