Book REview
The Top 100 Financial History Books
as voted by members of the Museum, with commentary
on selected books by Gregory DL Morris
Title: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Author: Edwin LeFevre
Year of Publication: 1923
Still in print 88 years after first being published, there is no small
irony that the top-ranked book on this list is, technically, fiction;
nor that it exposes the wretched excess and carnival atmosphere
of the financial markets. Has nothing changed? How far from
this cautionary tale have we come? Michael Milken? Bernie
Madoff? Those miscreants were real, as was trader Jesse Lauriston Livermore, the thinly-disguised subject of Reminiscences.
In the tradition of Daniel Drew, Livermore was a bear raider,
known as The Great Plunger, a sewer of fictional value and confidence. The quality of Reminiscences, however, is palpably real. The language, while a little
dense, is redolent of the age, and the chapter format is practically a how-to guide.
Title: The Big Short
Author: Michael Lewis
Year of Publication: 2010
Journalism is called the first draft of history. This recent
book, destined to become a definitive classic of our time, is
one of those rare cases where the same reporter who did the
original work also got to go back and finish the job. Lewis
details — clearly and thoroughly — the backstory of how the
demons of financial engineering like collateralized debt obligations were first summoned and then escaped into the wider
economy. This is a brave and unapologetic work, proving two
things: that people dealing with billions of dollars in someone
else’s money should take a Hippocratic Oath, and also that in some reporting there is no
such thing as objectivity, only fairness. If that strays from the sepia-toned view of journalism then Lewis restores the luster with his exhaustive research and corroboration. Reading
it is like reading The Guns of August: the outcome is known, but the venality and callousness that lead to it are gut-wrenching.
Title: Manias, Panics, and Crashes
Author: Charles P. Kindleberger
Year of Publication: 1978
To laugh or cry? Kindleberger is a mighty foil to the prevailing
moods of the dismal science: even the best books on financial
history tend to be deadly earnest or tediously self-righteous.
Manias is clever, witty, wry. If we are all fools for love, we are also
fools for money. To be sure, the scholarship is as rigorous as any
other work on this list. But it is delightful in that all this insight
and analysis comes through a light turn of phrase and fluid writing. Dick Sylla, chairman of the Museum’s board of trustees,
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