The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“What Michael Lewis points out very forcefully is that they were deliberately created by Wall Street banks in order to produce non-transparent securities that could not be adequately evaluated by the rating agencies, which then could be sold to less sophisticated investors, who would buy the idea that this junk debt actually had triple A ratings. So what this book does quite brilliantly is show that there was actually a high degree of intentionality in creating the crisis. “ Read more...

Francis Fukuyama recommends the best books on the The Financial Crisis

Francis Fukuyama, Political Scientist

“If I had any criticism of the book, it’s that he makes it seem too obvious. It becomes mysterious how anyone could have been confused.” Read more...

The best books on Unexpected Economics

Tim Harford, Economist

“Michael Lewis, to me, is the preeminent narrator of the financial crisis. He is the guy who constructs the story better than anybody else.” Read more...

The best books on Causes of the Financial Crisis

Barry Ritholtz, Fund Managers & Investor

“It tells us the difficulty markets have in correcting group think. You really have to be quite Aspergerish to take a stand against the crowd. In fact one of Lewis’s heroes, as it were, is hedge fund manager Michael Burry, who clearly had serious socialisation problems.” Read more...

The best books on Economics in the Real World

John Kay, Economist

You may have already seen the excellent movie adaptation of The Big Short, but the book is even better and worth reading, too. The story John Carreyou tells in Bad Blood is incomplete without the context of the 2008 financial crisis. In one way, Silicon Valley was hermetically sealed off from the worst of it; the tech industry there underwent a massive boom in 2010. But in another, even though it didn’t hit until four years after Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to found Theranos, those who would have benefited most from the dream the company hyped as reality—full-scale blood testing with the simple prick of a finger, at home and your local drugstore—were those who were hit hardest by the collapse. 

From our article Books like Bad Blood