Sebastian Mallaby's Latest Work Named to Top 50 Favorite Business Books by Bloomberg
Favorite 50 Business Books, From ‘Adam Smith’ to ‘The Zeroes’
By: Bloomberg
Compiled by: James Pressley
Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- With so many business books spilling from the shelves, we’re often asked for a comprehensive list of recommendations. Here’s an updated roster of 50 top titles published since June 30, 2009.
“Adam Smith” by Nicholas Phillipson (Yale). This “intellectual biography” documents how Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” grew out of the Scottish Enlightenment.
“Aftershock” by Robert B. Reich (Knopf). The former U.S. Labor Secretary explores how 30 years of growing income inequality helped bring on the Great Recession.
“The Big Questions” by Steven E. Landsburg (Free Press). The Armchair Economist dips into physics, mathematics and economics to answer the eternal questions of philosophy.
“The Big Short” by Michael Lewis (Norton/Allen Lane). The author of “Liar’s Poker” tells the story of a loner with a glass eye and other outliers who shorted the subprime market.
“Broke, USA” by Gary Rivlin (HarperBusiness). Rivlin, a tireless reporter, takes a queasy journey through what he calls “Poverty Inc.,” where the rich get richer by lending to the working poor.
“Chasing Goldman Sachs” by Suzanne McGee (Crown Business). A disturbing account of how Goldman Sachs Group Inc. became a seductively successful Pied Piper, luring rival banks down a path to destruction.
“A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” by Lawrence G. McDonald with Patrick Robinson (Crown Business). McDonald, a former trader at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., offers a scathing inside look at how the firm became a house divided.
“Crash Course” by Paul Ingrassia (Random House). A poised account of Detroit’s slide “from glory to disaster.”
“Crisis Economics” by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm (Penguin Press/Allen Lane). The prescient New York University professor explains why booms and busts occur.
“The Devil’s Casino” by Vicky Ward (Wiley). A look at the destructive rivalry among Richard S. Fuld Jr. and four other men who rose to power at Lehman in the 1980s.
“Diary of a Very Bad Year” by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, n+1 and Keith Gessen (Harper Perennial). Gessen, a founding editor of literary magazine n+1, presents an arresting clutch of interviews that he says he conducted with an anonymous hedge-fund manager during the crisis.
“The End of Wall Street” by Roger Lowenstein (Penguin Press). A decade after capturing the hubris of Long-Term Capital Management LP in “When Genius Failed,” Lowenstein reports on what he calls “the mother of all bubbles.”
“Exiles in Eden” by Paul Reyes (Holt). The disturbing memoir of a man who cleaned out foreclosed properties in Florida and witnessed the squalor of the housing bust.
“The Facebook Effect” by David Kirkpatrick (Simon & Schuster). An engrossing and scrupulously fair history of how Mark Zuckerberg built the social-networking website.
“Fault Lines” by Raghuram G. Rajan (Princeton). The University of Chicago professor shows why our flawed financial order risks driving us “from bubble to bubble.”
“In Fed We Trust” by David Wessel (Crown Business). The Wall Street Journal columnist shows how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other policy makers dug into an emergency tool kit to keep the financial system afloat.
“Freefall” by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Norton/Allen Lane). The Nobel Prize-winning economist describes the flawed theories and misguided policies that wrought the meltdown.
“Googled” by Ken Auletta (Penguin Press). Is Google Inc. a force for good -- or for ill? Auletta explores this vital topic in exhaustive detail.
“The Greatest Trade Ever” by Gregory Zuckerman (Broadway/ Viking). A reconstruction of John Paulson’s trade against the housing bubble.
“The Great Reset” by Richard Florida (Harper). The crisis could allow Schumpeterian “creative destruction” to sweep away obsolete systems and make room for innovation, Florida says.
“High Financier” by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press/Allen Lane). The Harvard historian presents a fresh assessment of how and why Siegmund Warburg rose to fame in postwar London.
“How Markets Fail” by John Cassidy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Allen Lane). Cassidy traces the dangerous emergence of what he calls “utopian economics.”
“Identity Economics” by George A. Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton (Princeton). Decisions that shape our lives often hinge on our perceived place in society, not solely on a calculation of financial costs and benefits.
“The Invisible Hands” by Steven Drobny (Wiley). The co- founder of Drobny Global Advisors frets that taxpayers may end up bailing out pension plans. He blames Harvard’s class of ‘69.
“I.O.U.” by John Lanchester (Simon & Schuster; published as “Whoops!” by Allen Lane). Warren Buffett mingles with a Mafia don and zombies in this mischievous primer on the crisis.
“Keynes” by Peter Clarke (Bloomsbury). A succinct account of the life and work of the English economist.
“King of Capital” by David Carey and John E. Morris (Crown Business). A useful primer on private equity as viewed through the story of Stephen Schwarzman and Blackstone Group LP.
“The King of Oil” by Daniel Ammann (St. Martin’s). The story of billionaire commodity trader Marc Rich.
“Last Man Standing” by Duff McDonald (Simon & Schuster). A biography of Jamie Dimon, one of the few Wall Street executives to emerge from the crisis with his reputation intact.
“The Last of the Imperious Rich” by Peter Chapman (Portfolio). An alternative history of U.S. business, politics and economics as refracted through the prism of Lehman Brothers.
“Meltdown Iceland” by Roger Boyes (Bloomsbury). A reconstruction of how Icelandic oligarchs frolicked as the island sank under debt.
“More Money Than God” by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press/Bloomsbury). A storied history of hedge-fund luminaries, from Alfred Winslow Jones to Ken Griffin.
“No One Would Listen” by Harry Markopolos (Wiley). A first-person account of the struggle to convince the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard Madoff’s returns were mathematically impossible.
“On the Brink” by Henry M. Paulson Jr. (Business Plus). The former U.S. Treasury secretary describes his fight to prop up the financial system.
“Past Due” by Peter S. Goodman (Times Books). A richly reported look at how Americans became profligate borrowers partly because the U.S. economy isn’t creating enough good jobs.
“Priceless” by William Poundstone (Hill and Wang). Companies, restaurants and even artists exploit psychology to extract more cash from the rest of us, as Poundstone shows.
“The Quants” by Scott Patterson (Crown Business). A behind-the-scenes look at the turbulent lives of four quants, including Ken Griffin.
“The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns” by Alan C. Greenberg (Simon & Schuster). The former chairman, a self-described “bald guy wearing a bowtie,” tells his side of the story.
“Selling America Short” by Richard C. Sauer (Wiley). A former SEC attorney takes us on a lively tour of his fraud investigations.
“The Shadow Market” by Eric J. Weiner (Scribner). A bleak survey of how China and other flush authoritarian governments deploy financial means to achieve geopolitical ends.
“The Sugar King of Havana” by John Paul Rathbone (Penguin Press). An evocative mixture of history and memoir that traces the rise and fall of Cuban sugar magnate Julio Lobo.
“SuperFreakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Morrow/Allen Lane). Why suicide bombers should buy life insurance and hookers work overtime around the Fourth of July.
“13 Bankers” by Simon Johnson and James Kwak (Pantheon). Unless too-big-to-fail banks are broken up, they will trigger another meltdown, the authors say.
“This Time Is Different” by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (Princeton). Wherever you open this landmark study, you’ll find proof that debt-fueled expansions have ended in financial ruin for 800 years.
“Too Big to Fail” by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking/Allen Lane). A cinematic reconstruction of how the top dogs of Wall Street and Washington struggled to save the system (and their own skins).
“Traders, Guns & Money” by Satyajit Das (FT Prentice Hall revised edition). Das, who has worked at Merrill Lynch & Co. and Citigroup Inc., brings a trading-floor perspective to this acerbic primer on the delights and dangers of derivatives.
“War at the Wall Street Journal” by Sarah Ellison (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). An inside look at Rupert Murdoch’s takeover.
“What the Dog Saw” by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown/ Allen Lane). The author of “The Tipping Point” is back with a new collection on topics including Nassim Taleb and Enron Corp.
“You Are Not a Gadget” by Jaron Lanier (Knopf/Allen Lane). The virtual-reality pioneer dismantles the tropes of the “Web 2.0” online culture and calls for a more humanistic digital future.
“The Zeroes” by Randall Lane (Portfolio). A farcical memoir of the financial bubble as seen by the creator of Trader Monthly and Dealmaker.
(James Pressley writes for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
--Editors: Jim Ruane, Mark Beech.