I studied Mathematics – the art of solving a problem by making it as general as possible, then attacking it with a combination of different techniques. By profession, I am a technologist, but the problem that interested me wasn’t technical – I wanted to know why, when most people are basically well-meaning, the world was in such a mess! Early on in my career, I came to believe that better collaboration was part of the answer. Later, I saw how you also needed the right kind of communities. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about psychology, biology, systems theory, learning theory, anthropology, history, management, economics, finance, and more. I’m still learning.
I can’t say how much I love this book. It explains everything we know intuitively about economics but find hard to justify. Hudson was one of the few who saw the 2008 crisis coming, and he is still one of the few who know what we must do now. Taking the discussion of David Graeber’s extraordinary 2011 book Debt: The First 5000 Years to the next level, Hudson shows how Bronze Age rulers understood economic instability better than we do. When people get into serious debt, their personal crises not only destroy their own lives but ripple outwards to derail society, by giving their creditors enough power to compete with governments. To avoid society being run into the ground, governments must start cancelling debts – as they did long ago.
In ...and forgive them their debts, renowned economist Michael Hudson – one of the few who could see the 2008 financial crisis coming – takes us on an epic journey through the economies of ancient civilizations and reveals their relevance for us today. For the past 40 years, in conjunction with Harvard’s Peabody Museum, he and his colleagues have documented how interest-bearing debt was invented in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and then disseminated to the ancient world. What the Bronze Age rulers understood was that avoiding economic instability required regular royal debt cancellations. Professor Hudson documents dozens of these these royal…
I have cross-disciplinary expertise (ethics and moral philosophy, philosophical anthropology and moral psychology), and my work focuses on personalist virtue ethics, moral human development, and the links between ethics and economics; I am a person who loves nature and animals, and I’m thrilled to do good work. I was educated and worked internationally, with academic degrees in different Europe countries and the USA, and 30 years of work and academic experience in Europe, the USA, and SE Asia. I live with my family near London, U.K.. I am passionate about enabling a more sustainable society that however remains rooted in human dignity and avoids instrumentalizing the person
A brilliant short history of capitalism, and how it all evolved until we got to today’s late or hyper-capitalism.
I love the way the book draws from social and economic history, to show how economic, social, and personal relations and ways of life have been weakened is something that starts from the 14th century but also evolved locally as much as in more universal ways.
In this authoritative and accessible book, one of the world's most renowned historians provides a concise and comprehensive history of capitalism within a global perspective from its medieval origins to the 2008 financial crisis and beyond. From early commercial capitalism in the Arab world, China, and Europe, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization, to today's globalized financial capitalism, Jurgen Kocka offers an unmatched account of capitalism, one that weighs its great achievements against its great costs, crises, and failures. Based on intensive research, the book puts the rise of capitalist economies in social, political, and cultural context, and shows how their…
I'm a journalist and author writing (mostly) about labour rights and the politics of the fashion industry. This work has taken me to Bangladesh, Kenya, Macedonia, and the Topshop warehouses in Solihull. I am the author of Foot Work – What Your Shoes Are Doing To The World, an exposé of the dark origins of the shoes on our feet. My award-winning first book Stitched Up – The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, is available in six languages and was selected by Emma Watson for her "Ultimate Book List".
A classic book on the pain that fashion inflicts on both people and planet. This book does an excellent job of showing how the exploitation of people is inseparable from the exploitation of the biosphere. It is a searing critique of the fashion industry and its voracious appetite for evermore profit, and how this short-termist model is driving us towards disaster.
An expose on the fashion industry written by the Observer's 'Ethical Living' columnist, examining the inhumane and environmentally devastating story behind the clothes we so casually buy and wear.
Coming at a time when the global financial crisis and contracting of consumer spending is ushering in a new epoch for the fashion industry, To Die For offers a very plausible vision of how green could really be the new black.
Taking particular issue with our current mania for both big-name labels and cheap fashion, To Die For sets an agenda for the urgent changes that can and need to be…
Since I began to study history at the university, I have always wondered why things could get so wrong in Europe in the 1930s. The key to understanding this crucial period of world history was the failure of economic policy. In the course of my studies, many of my questions have been answered, but I am still wondering about the extent of human and institutional collapse. Hence, to me, the Great Depression is such a fascinating topic that you can never leave once you started doing research about its causes and consequences.
Our view of the Great Depression was changed by the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008. No one has a better grasp of the similarities and differences between the two major economic shocks of the last 100 years than Barry Eichengreen. Most interesting are Eichengreen’s reflections about the right and wrong lessons the firefighters of the 2008 financial crisis drew from the Great Depression.
The two great financial crises of the past century are the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession, which began in 2008. Both occurred against the backdrop of sharp credit booms, dubious banking practices, and a fragile and unstable global financial system. When markets went into cardiac arrest in 2008, policymakers invoked the lessons of the Great Depression in attempting to avert the worst. While their response prevented a financial collapse and catastrophic depression like that of the 1930s, unemployment in the U.S. and Europe still rose to excruciating high levels. Pain and suffering were widespread.
I ended up in financial journalism by happenstance (it was pretty much the only corner of the media world that was still hiring when I graduated in the early 2000s). But I fell in love with it. To understand the world, you have to understand money. Whether you like it or not, it is the hidden wiring that binds us all together. I’ve found that reading history books on finance and economics has helped me better understand what is going on today, so I hope the books on this list will help you do the same.
This is, for want of a better word, financial porn.
It won’t explain the underlying issues or even proximate triggers for the global financial crisis of 2008, but no one has ever written a financial book as titillating as Too Big to Fail. Sorkin really brings you into the rooms of power and conveys the sweaty panic that gripped the financial system as it careened over the edge.
They were masters of the financial universe, flying in private jets and raking in billions. They thought they were too big to fail. Yet they would bring the world to its knees.
Andrew Ross Sorkin, the news-breaking New York Times journalist, delivers the first true in-the-room account of the most powerful men and women at the eye of the financial storm - from reviled Lehman Brothers CEO Dick 'the gorilla' Fuld, to banking whiz Jamie Dimon, from bullish Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to AIG's Joseph Cassano, dubbed 'The Man Who Crashed the…
I am a writer and reporter who has spent two decades covering complicated topics for a wide audience. This started when I covered Wall Street for Bloomberg News, where I spent 17 years as a reporter, and continues to this day with my own crypto media company, DeCential Media. My love of distilling new technologies to their essence is what informs the best of my writing and comes with the added bonus of being able to interview and learn from some of the smartest people in tech and finance.
This is my favorite book about the financial crisis of 2008. Richard had unparalleled access to Bill Ackman, one of the savviest investors around, and tells this story with amazing detail and insight. Everyone knows The Big Short, but Confidence Game is the book to read to really understand what created the credit crisis of 2008.
An expose on the delusion, greed, and arrogance that led to America's credit crisis The collapse of America's credit markets in 2008 is quite possibly the biggest financial disaster in U.S. history. Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff is the story of Bill Ackman's six-year campaign to warn that the $2.5 trillion bond insurance business was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Branded a fraud by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and investigated by Eliot Spitzer and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ackman later made his investors more than $1 billion when bond…
I'm a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh, and for almost fifty years I’ve researched a large variety of topics, from the story of the guidance systems of nuclear missiles to the instantaneous auctions that, today, determine the ads you are shown online. But I keep returning to the topic of trading and the global financial system. The processes that lie behind this shape our lives in profound ways, but they are often both complicated and opaque. We need reliable guides for them, and the authors and books that I am recommending are among the very best guides!
The global financial crisis that erupted in 2008 was a shocking event. Britain’s cash machines came within a few hours of stopping working, and the global banking system would have collapsed were it not for unprecedented multi-billion-dollar government bail-outs. Gillian Tett, trained as an anthropologist, became a financial journalist but kept on applying her fieldwork skills. Almost alone in her new profession, she grasped the huge risks that were developing underneath the radar and wrote about them in the Financial Times. Her book, Fool’s Gold, was one of the first books written about 2008’s giant crisis and remains one of the best.
To my mind, Tett is the world’s top financial journalist, and I’ve always learned a great deal from her pioneering in-depth reporting.
'A truly gripping narrative . . . The fact that Tett is able to reproduce such raw private communications is a tribute to her journalistic abilities' Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times
'Her blow-by-blow story is an impressive piece of detective work. She pulls back the curtain on a closed, unaccountable world of finance' Will Hutton, Guardian
In the mid 1990s, at a vast hotel complex on a private Florida beach, dozens of bankers from JP Morgan gathered for what was to become a legendary off-site meeting. It was a wild weekend. But among the drinking, nightclubbing and fist-fights lay a more…
I am associate professor at Prague University of Economics and Business.My passion is to discover blank spaces in the economy, for which standard mainstream economic models have not provided answers yet. I was usually fascinated by biased behavior of individuals, which might lead to substantial implications at aggregate level. This has led me to narrow my focus on behavioral macroeconomics with special emphasis on monetary theory and policy, vibrant field with a great potential. After all, experimental economics seems to be a wonderful tool to examine phenomena, which is hard to grasp or for which there is no available data, such as money illusion, coordination failure, bank runs or Modigliani-Cohn hypothesis.
I like this book especially due to its ability to illustrate money illusion in a very unconventional context.
Normally, money illusion means that people take nominal variables as proxy for real variables, which leads to suboptimal choice having real effects on the economy and affecting business cycle.
However, to my great surprise this book claims that even economic experts might suffer from some kind of money illusion, because they tend to misinterpret what is happening in the monetary system. This offers a very interesting explanation of recession and suggests that economists have not targeted adequate variables.
Unconventional suggestion to practice nominal GDP (gross domestic product) targeting instead of targeting the money supply is “outcome” of unique author´s vision called market monetarism. Inattention of policymakers to development of nominal GDP is blamed to be the direct cause of recession.
The first book-length work on market monetarism, written by its leading scholar.
Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It's happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of the 21st century.
Foregoing the usual relitigating of problems such as housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to…
I’ve always been interested—a vast understatement to anyone who knows me—in what makes people tick. I’ve focused on analyzing business actors – bankers, lawyers, investors, executives, shareholders, and others. What do they want? Some combination of money, power, or prestige? How does loving to win fit in? How about hating to lose? When is enough (money/power/prestige) enough? What do they think is ok to do to get what they want? What do they think is not ok? Amazingly, as a law professor, I can pursue that interest as part of my job, and – I think and hope – do so in a way that might help lawmakers, regulators, and policymakers do better.
This book tells the story of how an interest rate (“LIBOR,” for London Interbank Offered Rate) used to set mortgage, credit card, and auto loan rates was manipulated. Sounds important, but maybe not so interesting? Wrong.
You don’t need to have the slightest interest in LIBOR to love this book. What really propels the book is the human story, intricately but compellingly told. We learn who the LIBOR manipulators were, how and why they did what they did, and the dynamics of the community they created.
We learn, too, about the institutions – huge financial institutions – that nurtured and lavishly rewarded these people, and the regulators who took rather too long to catch them.
Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year!
'Will snare you in its web of deceit ... A brilliant investigative expose' - Harlan Coben, bestselling thriller author
'Reads like a fast-paced John le Carre thriller, and never lets up' - New York Times book review
The Spider Network is the almost-unbelievable and darkly entertaining inside account of the Libor scandal - one of the biggest, farthest-reaching financial scams since the global financial crisis - written by the only journalist with access to Tom Hayes before he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Full of exclusive details, and…
I am the recognized expert on work-life balance, harmony, and integrative issues, and since 2009, hold the registered trademark from the USPTO as the “Work-Life Balance Expert®." I'm the author of several popular books including Breathing Space, Everyday Project Management, Simpler Living, and The 60 Second Organizer. My books have been featured in 68 of the top 75 American newspapers and, in two instances, advertised in Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. I offer hands-on strategies for a balanced career and life to audiences from Singapore to San Diego, with clients as diverse as Novo Nordisk, Worthington Steel, Lufthansa, American Law Institute, Wells Fargo, the IRS, and more.
The authors maintain that everybody experiences flashes of insight: those moments when an "aha!" reaction leaves us feeling enlightened and empowered. I have felt this and you probably have too. Insights are the bits of knowledge in different parts of ourselves and they can be harnessed into a more integrated and effective whole.
Learning To Use What You Already Know explains how you can encourage insight. Consider that each of us knows more than we think we do. Thus we can employ a reflective process, described in the book, that integrates our conscious and unconscious resources, and prompts our perceptions of everything from getting along with coworkers, to being a visionary leader, to coping with technological change.
Here are what I consider to be some of the book’s amazing takeaways: Life repeats itself until we learn. Lack of fit is not failure. If you get it right the first time,…
Is there a way to encourage the kind of "aha!" perceptions that leave us feeling enlightened and empowered? Are there methods for facilitating the flashes of understanding that make us holler "eureka!" or smile with quiet contentment? Though insights may feel like they come out of the blue, Stumpf and DeLuca make us aware of the process behind the flash so that we can stimulate our capacity for learning and growth. Beginning with the premise that each of us knows more than we think we do, Stumpf and DeLuca provide a reflective process that integrates all of our conscious and…
