Reading this book had a profound impact on me–as did the author himself. I had the privilege of meeting Colin Mayer in his wood-paneled office and interviewing him for my own book—an experience that deepened my respect for his thinking. I found myself nodding in agreement as he laid out how far corporations have drifted from their true purpose.

I was struck by his call to move from ownership to stewardship and how closely it aligned with my own belief that purpose must sit at the heart of business. His critique helped sharpen my understanding of corporate governance and reaffirmed my beliefs in the need for a better way forward for business and its relationship with society.

This book informed my macroeconomic thinking on the way banks and companies have long been twined and the complex decisions that ultimately somebody—whether company boards or government regulators—need to make when they fail.

This was a perfect study for my own research into the near collapse of the early Hormel company and the reason why it still exists today; Sorkin’s chosen title would apply. Companies have an impact, both good and sometimes bad, and our regional and national economies often suffer from their hubris and greed.

Sorkin’s master storytelling kept me riveted and mesmerized all the way through six hundred and forty pages. 

A gripping portrait of a Dickensian financial scandal that led to the last English bank run before the run on Northern Rock in 2007. Founded in 1800 and controlled by Quakers, the firm that was to become Overend and Gurney grew to become London’s leading discount house, specialising in the safe business of discounting bills of exchange. In the 1850s, it became more aggressive and was eventually investing depositors’ funds in highly speculative ventures that promised spectacular profits that never materialised. When market conditions became adverse, Overend and Gurney found itself in dire straits. The Bank of England refused to bail it out and Overend and Gurney was run out of business in 1866. Its failure led to a major financial crisis, the ruin of many investors, and the directors being put on trial in the Old Bailey for fraud.

A classic account of an extraordinary 18th-century British financial and political scandal. The South Sea Bubble centred on the joint-stock South Sea Company, which was founded in 1711. The South Sea Bubble was an ambitious scheme to simultaneously pay off the British government's enormous debts while simultaneously getting rich in London's newly created stock market. The company was given a monopoly of trade with South America but had little prospect of success. The Bubble was an early Ponzi scheme that promised vast returns to early and well-connected investors.

Its collapse in 1720 ruined thousands of shareholders from all walks of life, many of whom had bought their shares on credit, and caused huge problems to banks and goldsmiths unable to collect the loans they had made to speculators to purchase stock. A public uproar ensued and the subsequent investigation revealed widespread fraud by insiders and corruption in the Cabinet.

Levinson is a rare thing among economists: he is willing to admit what we don’t understand.

This book argues that global productivity declined in the 1970s compared to the 30 years after World War II, and no one knows why. It seems that, under capitalism, economic growth is normally just very slow, and the fast postwar growth was the aberration. But what really matters is how political leaders responded, making a series of bad decisions to try to appease people’s over-inflated expectations of growth. And this happened all over the world, from the U.S. to Germany to Japan to Latin America. This is the book that let me understand every aspect of modern life in the last 50 years—from stagnant wages to the roller-coaster casino economy to political dysfunction to gig companies.

Co-author Ken Rogoff taught my PhD course in Global Economics while he was a visiting professor at NYU (from Princeton). We used Foundations of International Macroeconomics as our textbook; Ken was writing the book with Maurice Obstfeld. When I turned in a handful of pages to him with editorial corrections, he hired me to edit the rest of the book and a research paper for him! It caused quite a stir among my peers when Ken thanked me by name when the article was published (JEL, June 1996). This book traces eight hundred years of financial crises to demonstrate that they are, in fact, predictable. Economists and policymakers are taken by surprise only because they do not learn the lessons from one crisis to the next.

Focusing on the financial crisis of 2008 Adam Tooze’s book shows the transition from a geopolitical to a geo-economic world order in which the political destiny of old nation states is determined by the needs of international financial industry – including the rearrangement of global governance and the erosion of democracies.

I admire the way in which Adam Tooze demonstrates the entanglement between financial capitalism, crises, and the rise of populist and right-wing movements in Europe and the US.

King was the head of the Bank of England during the financial crisis of 2008. He declared full deposit insurance for the entire United Kingdom private banking system, with no deposit premiums required. This ended the run on the banks that spilled over into the streets of the UK during the crisis, when the Bank of England at first decided not to take care of Northern Rock, a private retail bank that was headed towards insolvency.

King provides a whimsical and sharp review of the private and central bank system before and after the crisis that builds very much on Charles Goodhart and Walter Bagehot. King laudably faults economists and the Economics profession for thinking that establishing negative real interest rates worldwide is the answer to central bank crises (in his newly added Introduction to the paperback edition of his 2016 hardback by the same name). Yet King sides with… show more.

An apropos warning about the inevitable collapse of all empires that live beyond their means.

Wrought with historical references to past collapsed empires including the Roman and British, understand how the US is going down the same destructive path as the previous empires.

This book also explains how the high standard of living in the US and other Western economies is sponsored by the poorer, harder-working Asian countries that make something of value.

Issuing massive amounts of debt and printing money to pay for it isn’t a sustainable way to run an economy.

When I was an investment banker in the 80s and early 90s, the prevailing mantra was that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. Nevertheless, I wondered whether slicing and dicing mortgages into different classes of derivatives and selling them to other financial institutions actually added value to the real economy. 

This book made it clear to me that it does not and shows how the overgrowth of the financial sector—rising from four to five percent of GDP in the 1970s to over eight percent in the 2000s—caused the Great Recession of 2008. This explosion of debt was used almost exclusively to buy existing assets, thus crowding out lending for plant, equipment, and research.

The Recession is over, but financialization, a powerful and independent factor undermining US industrial policy, continues unchecked.