Money Talks: Our best “beach reads”

“Barbarians at the Gate” is still a gripping read, a full 37 years after the events on which it reports. The story of KKR’s acquisition of RJR Nabisco, at the time America’s biggest-ever leveraged buy-out, has everything: larger-than-life characters, swashbuckling financial innovation and last-minute bids and counter-bids. The dramatic tension makes the book hard to put down.

Rachana Shanbhogue, Business affairs editor

Published in 1992, this guide to Spain’s second-city is packed with morsels. Here are two: one “low”, one “high”. Low first: Hughes revels in the scatological strain he detects in Catalan culture. Barcelona’s (now buried) rivers were traditionally the cagallel (turd-bearer) and merdanca (shit-stream); Catalan nativity scenes include a caganer, a defecating boy figurine. And high: 19th-century Spanish land reform has British roots. Exile in England, breathing in market liberalism, was what convinced the statesman Juan Álvarez Mendizábal to later expropriate and auction off church lands in order to build a landowning middle class—a more robust approach to NIMBYism than is usual today.

Archie Hall, US economics editor

Huawei is one of the world’s most mysterious and controversial companies. Within China it is heralded as something akin to a national hero, having broken from its reliance on foreign technology. To the American government it is a national-security risk and a Communist Party tool. Eva Dou, a journalist, takes readers closer to the truth. “House of Huawei” is a painstakingly researched account of the company’s rise and investigation of where it might take China in the future. Ms Dou’s reporting suggests American sanctions will not be able to stop Huawei from innovating.

Don Weinland, China business and finance editor

Ted Kaczynski is best known for causing immense fear and destruction by posting bombs to his enemies, before being apprehended in 1996. His manifesto, “Industrial Society and its Future”, rambles, with Kaczynski blaming everything from corporate greed to environmental destruction on “leftists”. But it is still worth reading. Elon Musk claims to find it interesting; so do many academics. And behind the insanity, Kaczynski makes a thought-provoking claim: that technology, despite raising living standards, is bad for humans. The author mimics ideas found as far back as Adam Ferguson, a rival to Adam Smith, who argued that when an industrial society takes care of people’s every need, they become weak and sad. Yes, you may be a genius at financial modelling. But can you fix a tap, grow crops or deliver a baby? And if not, what kind of human are you?

Callum Williams, Senior economics writer

Told in a confessional, deadpan voice, this is a memoir of a boy from the South Side of Chicago who would go on to become the first black economics professor with tenure at Harvard University. Motel rooms, parallel affairs, prostitutes, cruising the streets for crack cocaine and rehab go hand-in-hand with a love for mathematics and a burning desire for both status and intellectual accomplishment. Mr Loury has lived recklessly and produced an impressive body of work, notably in his contributions to welfare economics and game theory.

Fani Papageorgiou, Money Talks editor

The end of the first world war began a bitter struggle over who should pay for it. Nearly half of America’s national debt comprised loans to the European Allies, much of it raised by selling bonds to the general public. Ms Eicher’s gripping new book tells how Winston Churchill, then in charge of Britain’s Treasury, fought Andrew Mellon, his American counterpart, over how much would be repaid.

Joshua Roberts, Capital markets correspondent

Margaret, from the idyllic English coast, arrives in a smoggy northern city on the brink of a cotton-mill strike. She is torn between the millworkers, their masters and finding a husband. Then the mill owners—nearly bankrupted by the strike—are offered a potential reprieve by financial speculation on a distant venture. A split ensues, between those too moral to gamble their fortunes and those willing to take a stake. Written in 1855, after Gaskell moved to Manchester, this is a searing social portrait of industrial Britain, which tells you everything you need to know about men in finance. Margaret eventually chooses the man with upstanding morals. She also has to bail him out.