The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

Roger Lowenstein · 281 pages

"John Meriwether, a famously successful Wall Street trader, spent the 1980s as a partner at Salomon Brothers, establishing the best - and the brainiest - bond arbitrage group in the world. A mysterious and shy midwesterner, he knitted together a group of Ph.D.-certified arbitrageurs who rewarded him with filial devotion and fabulous profits. Then, in 1991, in the wake of a scandal involving one of

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers

Lawrence G. McDonald, Patrick Robinson · 351 pages

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now. What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers--right from the belly of the beast.In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDo

Liar's Poker

Michael Lewis · 298 pages

Liar's Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street during the 1980s. This bestselling and hilarious book blew the doors off Wall Street's boardrooms and introduced the world to the writing of Mich

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 400 pages

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves

Andrew Ross Sorkin · 600 pages

A real-life thriller about the most tumultuous period in America's financial history by an acclaimed New York Times Reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Alice Schroeder · 1,255 pages

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite

Sebastian Mallaby · 482 pages

Based on unprecedented access to the industry, including three hundred hours of interviews, economist/journalist Sebastian Mallaby tells the inside story of hedge funds, from their origins in the 1960s and 1970s to their role in the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Wealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls have become the It Boys of 21st century capitalism. Ken Griffin started

The Myth of the Rational Market: Wall Street's Impossible Quest for Predictable Markets

Justin Fox · 382 pages

Chronicling the rise and fall of the efficient market theory and the century-long making of the modern financial industry, Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market is as much an intellectual whodunit as a cultural history of the perils and possibilities of risk. The book brings to life the people and ideas that forged modern finance and investing, from the formative days of Wall Street through

A Short History of Financial Euphoria

John Kenneth Galbraith · 113 pages

How is it that, with all the financial know-how and experience of the wizards on Wall Street and elsewhere, the market still goes boom and bust? How come people are so willing to get caught up in the mania of speculation when history tells us that a collapse is almost sure to follow? In A Short History of Financial Euphoria, renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith reviews, with insight and wit,

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America

Greg Farrell · 471 pages

This book tells the intimate, fly-on-the wall tale of the decline and fall of an American icon. With one notable exception, the firms that make up what we know as Wall Street have always been part of an inbred, insular culture that most people only vaguely understand. The exception was Merrill Lynch, a firm that revolutionized the stock market by bringing Wall Street to Main Street, setting up off

Confidence Men

Ron Suskind · 515 pages

Draws on hundreds of hours of interviews and in-depth research to relate the complete story of the nation's financial meltdown, from the trading floors of lower Manhattan to the power corridors inside the Beltway.

Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street

Neil Barofsky · 279 pages

In this account of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Neil Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush and Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In behind-the-scenes detail, he reveals proof of the extreme degree to which our government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything

Jason Kelly

F.I.A.S.C.O.: Guns, Booze and Bloodlust - The Truth About High Finance

Frank Partnoy · 254 pages

F.I.A.S.C.O. is an insider's diary, a shocking education in the jungle of high finance in the 1990s from New York to Tokyo. It tracks the progress of a young Morgan Stanley salesman as he learns the ropes of this sophisticated jungle, where billions of dollars are lost in the creation and trading of securities so unlikely and so complicated that almost nobody - certainly not the unwary or underedu

Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No One Can Pay

John Lanchester · 240 pages

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives

Satyajit Das · 343 pages

The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History

David Enrich · 528 pages

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

Rana Foroohar · 388 pages

"Eight years on from the biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008 still remain unlearned--and our financial system is just as vulnerable as ever. Many of us know that our government failed to fix the banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. But what few of us realize is how the misguided financial practices and philosophies that nearly top

Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy

Barry Ritholtz, Bill Fleckenstein, Aaron Task · 332 pages

An engaging look at what led to the financial turmoil we now find ourselves in Bailout Nation offers one of the clearest looks at the financial lenders, regulators, and politicians responsible for the financial crisis of 2008. Written by Barry Ritholtz, one of today's most popular economic bloggers and a well-established industry pundit, this book skillfully explores how the United States evolved

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy

Mervyn King · 430 pages

The former governor of the Bank of England recounts his country's experiences throughout the Great Recession while outlining a blueprint for recovery-era capitalism that is more resilient to modern boom-and-bust cycles.

All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera · 389 pages

According to the authors, both business journalists, no one has put all the pieces of the financial crisis together. This title explores the motivations of everyone from CEOs and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers and Wall Street traders. It goes back more than twenty years to reveal, how Wall Street, the mortgage industry, and the government conspired to change the way Americans bought t

Security Analysis

Benjamin Graham, David L. Dodd · 770 pages

Security Analysis is often referred to as the bible of value investing. It has been described by Warren Buffett as the best investment book he has ever read. Originally written in the 30's by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, it has been updated over the years, and remains relevant in the age of electronic trading.

Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short (and Now Complete) Story

David Einhorn · 426 pages

How far will some unscrupulous companies go to keep the truth about their dealings from the American investor? Farther than the eye can see, according to this account by Einhorn, the founder of Greenlight Capital, a long-short value-oriented hedge fund. Einhorn's firm has achieved greater than a 25 percent annualized net return for its investors since 1996, proof that Einhorn can literally put his

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

Charles R. Morris · 256 pages