100 books like The Mystery of Overend & Gurney

This fascinating read tells the story of the rise and then spectacular fall of the once celebrated hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.

What made LTCM so attractive to Wall Street investors was its stable of "dream team" quants and financial minds, led by the laconic John Merriweather. Merriweather (featured in the opening Chapter of Liar's Poker) was a former Solomon Brothers bond-trading guru, who after leaving the firm amid a scandal managed to assemble a team of financial powerhouses that included two Nobel Laureates as well as a cadre of respected traders.

From 1993 to 1997 LTCM's returns were first-rate; the sky seemed the limit for this small band of supertraders, professors, and modelers who arrogantly considered themselves a cut above the rest of The Street.

But in 1998, it all came crashing down...and right quick. Having believed their financial models could accurately predict price action not just in… show more.

A classic account of an extraordinary 18th-century British financial and political scandal. The South Sea Bubble centred on the joint-stock South Sea Company, which was founded in 1711. The South Sea Bubble was an ambitious scheme to simultaneously pay off the British government's enormous debts while simultaneously getting rich in London's newly created stock market. The company was given a monopoly of trade with South America but had little prospect of success. The Bubble was an early Ponzi scheme that promised vast returns to early and well-connected investors.

Its collapse in 1720 ruined thousands of shareholders from all walks of life, many of whom had bought their shares on credit, and caused huge problems to banks and goldsmiths unable to collect the loans they had made to speculators to purchase stock. A public uproar ensued and the subsequent investigation revealed widespread fraud by insiders and corruption in the Cabinet.

And here we are, in the Roaring Twenties, the decade that showed a nation how much trouble an unruly Wall Street can cause the country! The late John Brooks of The New Yorker had a gift for romping through important financial history in the most entertaining way possible. I discovered this gem of his when I was new to covering Wall Street; I’ve turned to it countless times since, both for the facts and for the fun! 

In an accessible language and with multiple real-life examples, Madrick systematically critically engages every humdrum idea of principle attributed to the presumed success of capitalism. Following to a great extent Karl Marx’s lead on the self-destruction of the economic system we call capitalism, Madrick updates the critique to the 21st century and shows, time and again, why capitalism is not only prone to recessions and depressions but will bring about its own demise.

An apropos warning about the inevitable collapse of all empires that live beyond their means.

Wrought with historical references to past collapsed empires including the Roman and British, understand how the US is going down the same destructive path as the previous empires.

This book also explains how the high standard of living in the US and other Western economies is sponsored by the poorer, harder-working Asian countries that make something of value.

Issuing massive amounts of debt and printing money to pay for it isn’t a sustainable way to run an economy.

As everyone knows at this point, anything Michael Lewis writes will be enormous fun to read, while being about something really important—something he’ll make you care about even if you didn’t when you started the book.

In this case, the subject is people who bet on the direction of mortgages (and thus, house prices), and how those who bet on a huge plunge were right. This book has an amazing cast of characters, all richly drawn: some are smart, some are not so smart; some are excellent schmoozers, some can barely tolerate human interaction; some care a lot about money, some care more about being right, especially if everyone else is wrong.

Each book I've recommended cries out to be made into a movie. This one actually was.

This book follows a year in the lives of the occupants of a London street and the people who work for them. The guaranteed wealth of those who are lucky enough to own houses in the street – where property prices have soared – is contrasted with the struggles of those who keep the lives of the homeowners on track: the Polish builder, the Hungarian nanny, the Kamal family who run the shop at the end of the road. This is a moral fable about money, but it’s also a witty, perceptive story that gallops along and is hard to put down.

Much of personal finance relies on the premise that you will achieve your goals by investing in economic growth.

One narrative says we can play our part in tackling climate change by shifting our investments towards sustainable growth – for example, backing green technologies and carbon capture. However, Latouche questions whether economic growth is compatible at all with living within our planet’s resources.

He argues that we have to detach from the cycle of over-consuming and over-producing that is implicit in targeting economic growth and instead shift to a goal of maximising human wellbeing. His radical alternative is a world where we work less, share more, and respect nature.

It is arguably the only real solution to the climate crisis, but powerful vested interests stand in the way of its adoption.

Co-author Ken Rogoff taught my PhD course in Global Economics while he was a visiting professor at NYU (from Princeton). We used Foundations of International Macroeconomics as our textbook; Ken was writing the book with Maurice Obstfeld. When I turned in a handful of pages to him with editorial corrections, he hired me to edit the rest of the book and a research paper for him! It caused quite a stir among my peers when Ken thanked me by name when the article was published (JEL, June 1996). This book traces eight hundred years of financial crises to demonstrate that they are, in fact, predictable. Economists and policymakers are taken by surprise only because they do not learn the lessons from one crisis to the next.

Sometimes the obvious pick is still the right pick, and anyone interested in the history of financial shenanigans – outright frauds or merely weapons-grade idiocy – has to read Kindleberger.

There’s a reason why it remains a stone-cold classic that bears reading (and re-reading) almost half a century after it was first published.