The financial mess of the past few years has been a boon for books and below is a sampling of what is currently on our shelves.
Andrew Ross Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail" provides a blow-by-blow account of the crisis and reads like a thriller. Nomi Prins, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, presents a fascinating look at the culture and practices of Wall Street and the consequences that we now live with. The book, "It Takes a Pillage", coupled with the ongoing prodigious research posted on her website, are critical to understanding and deciphering the mess. John Lanchester, a novelist, lends his talents to understanding the crisis in "IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay". Dwight Garner handsells the book in the New York Times.
Charles Geisst writes about the marketing of consumer debt in "Collateral Damaged". Alistair Milne takes a scholarly and instructive approach in "Fall of the House of Credit: What went wrong in banking and what can be done to repair the damage". John Gillespie and David Zweig's "Money for Nothing" focuses on corporate boards and their role in the mess.
"This Time is Different": Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff) is a comprehensive historical look at financial crises, and reminds us that short memories can wreak heavy damage.
Finally, Joseph Stiglitz weighs in with "Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy". His analysis of the crisis and the steps taken to address it, provides interesting and important insight to the debate.
We'll be watching in the coming months as Nouriel Roubini, Richard Posner, Roger Lowenstein, Yves Smith, and Simon Johnson and James Kwak arrive on our shelves. It should be a very interesting year.
p.s. "How Markets Fail" by John Cassidy (informative and enlightening.
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