Rating: - NOT YOUR FATHER'S MARKET-A NEW WORLD ORDER
El Erian lays out in sophisticated format his understanding of the changes that have come about in today's global economy and capital markets. He challenges us to examine what we write off as background noise which just may be a sea change in market fundamentals. He reminds us that " Black Swan" events may be more prevalent going forward than previously thought and to prepare for such events. He states that emerging markets are going to be prominent in capital flows going forward and that we should embrace sovreign wealth funds as permanent sources of investment capital with long term investment objectives. This thought provoking work gives us a new working asset allocation on page 198 that should challenge our thinking in this business.

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Rating: - Financial genius is before the fall.
I was so disapointed with this book that I decided to write a review. But I must confess that there is not much else to add after reading the reviews of Bojko and David Harper. They hit the nail on the head: if you have some basic understanding of finance and economics and if you follow the news with some regularity then there is nothing to learn from this book. Coincidentally Mr El-Erian worked at Harvard not long ago managing Harvard's endowment fund before joining PIMCO. Just recently Harvard announced some staggering losses at its endowment fund due to the financial crisis. Apparently Harvard did not see the collision described by Mr El-Erian in his book. As Galbraith once remarked "financial genius is before the fall".

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Rating: - Well written and full of insights
This book is well written and full of valuable insights.

Frankly I don't understand others' complains of the writing style. It's actually a pretty well written book, with no problem with its sentences / grammar whatsoever.

One thing for sure: this book is not written for those day traders and market timers. You got to have some background in Economy / Finance to better appreciate the insights of the book.

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Rating: - Browse it in a bookstore
I was fooled by all the recommendations on the jacket and by the Economist's annual best-read list. If you must, browse the first two chapters (just look at the graphs) in a bookstore. The author promises much in the beginning of each chapter (the promises can extend to several pages: I will demonstrate.., I will draw on...) but never delivers. He quotes from the works of many (many of those recommend the book on the jacket) but it appears he quotes without reading, either from the jacket or Wikipedia. Often, the quotes are without substance, just elegant phrases (sounding meaningless without context), not the main theme or event, so that the author did not have to explain them. The language is vacuous. A few graphs' axes are not probably labeled. There should be a black-list of the scholars who recommend the books without reading; that's a kind of dishonesty.

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Rating: - Disappointing
Poorly written. He admits he's splitting his audiences and the result is a mess of a book where the big themes are well known to even the most remedial investor. If you're really interested in his ideas all that's needed is a video interview search of which there are numerous.