Review: The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

The business style of the world's richest man is refreshingly candid, but his private life is fiendishly complex says Robert Colvile Earlier this year, Warren Buffett was anointed as the world's richest man. But as the financial crisis shreds reputations - not to mention entire economies - he is looking like the world's wisest, too. As with the dotcom boom, the Asian crisis of 1997 and virtually every other crisis of the past 50 years, Buffett saw it coming. Not only that: he railed against its causes, most notably the chaotic profusion of derivatives - "financial weapons of mass destruction", in his phrase - that is dragging the world's biggest banks to their knees. The fact that the 78-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, is now buying again - snapping up portions of Goldman Sachs and General Electric - is one of the few things... [read full story]