Accounting Book Review (Book Review Sample)

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Alex Berenson, the author of the book Numbers, a graduate of Yale University attained a degree in both economics and history. He worked for The Denver Post and The Street.com and later he went to work as a reporter in the year 1999. In this book, Alex gets to analyze the mistakes that took place in corporate America. He also examined the patterns that connected Tyco, Enron, Computer Associates and other corporate scandals.
However, according to the book the "Numbers”, it explains how many investors never know anything about how the stock market works until they get to lose their money or property in the stock market, and by that they are all left asking the question what happened to their investments. Therefore, Alex tries to explain how the USA stock market got to lose $8 trillion in three years. Today’s view of how the stock market lost such amount of money is said to be inevitable due to the random rise of the stock in the 1990’s. However, in the book it is said that, calamities like these might be seen happening more often in the future and that investors should be ready to find a solution in case it ever happens. One of the biggest question the book makes use ask ourselves is how did investors change irrational and started making big investments? According to the question, it is hard to say that investors were lured due to a change in technology and all that was promised to come with the "new era”, since there was also an evident rise in technology industries at that time. However, due to lack of a strong answer to the question, "why the stock market was hit”, the only possible thing left to blame was fraud. After blaming the stock market hit on fraud, questions like this arose, "to what limits were investors coned by accountants who were loyal to their corporate employers?" and also were security analyst forced to give affirmative feedback on stock written by their own investment bankers? Moreover, to what extent were executives willing to lie and steal to increase their stock value.
The title of this book the "Number”, can be used to describe a company’s profit that is given to each outstanding share of the stock. The readers of this book are also told that "cult of the number" is what has been making things unclear on Wall Street. As you read the last chapter of the book. In this book from the chapter, the boom of 1920 up to the chapter in the book titled "truth," the number is arranged as a long series of the stock market. In the beginning chapters, they show how the governments un- proportional efforts to come up with a method to implement a common ground for all accountants in order to multiply financial disclosure.
In the chapter titled "The Number Is Born," Alex elaborates how readers can easily understand the exited market of the late 1990’s, they should know about a prior series of event. He also says the commissions that brokers got while any transactions were fixed. Therefore, since the brokers had no competition, they switched their competition, and they all changed to doing research. Alex judgment reached the limits in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. He says in those days, "Institutional investors used their commissions to sponsor over $100 million researches every year”. However, this changed on 1 May, 1975. On this report it shows that, on this day, the justice department antitrust action got rid of fixed commissions, and with this, there was the introduction of discount brokers, and they also lowered trading profits. In the early 1980’s, the market moved up, and brokerage companies had less quit doing researches. At this time, the only complaints people were gettin...