That’s Franck with a CK. Nicknamed Franck The Tank. Why, I have no idea.

Born and raised in France, I became an American citizen twenty five years ago. My grandfather Sroul had to leave Poland in the Twenties, then Germany, but did not have the papers for the steamboat. He stayed on the Riviera, while his trunk landed somewhere in New Jersey, at the baker’s daughter he was supposed to marry. From these memories, I got a knack for liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. I am an engineer by education, an investment and real estate advisor by trade, and an amateur historian when things get out of whack in my world. I write for my sons, and for all the young adults and older folks who are curious to know, “what happened, really?”

My first book was about the worst decade on Wall Street, 1998 – 2008. Drawing on thirty five years of salt mine experience, first at Brown Brothers Harriman & co, then with my own boutique Capital Max known as The Other Street, I tried to illustrate how the market’s decline was about as bad as it gets, and why the following decade should be spectacularly good. Luckily it was, Schumpeter on steroids. This book is different, a mix of historical facts and hypotheticals, a non-fiction fiction book, yet it follows the same principle – we all focus on recent events while losing track of how they developed. Hopefully, I got the ending wrong this time. If all goes well, Israel may not have to nuke Iran.

Sroul’s trunk is likely gone by now, or maybe in an attic somewhere, but I found a meme which I keeps in my sons’ quarters – so that the memories live on. This book is for my wife Sally, and our sons Maxime, Sasha-Raphael, Gabriel, and Noah, who are my oxygen.

And to my Dad, without whom my family and I would have never made it Home. To America.