I want to learn about how finance works. Books? Podcasts?
May 22, 2018 9:05 PM   Subscribe

I really appreciated The Big Short, both the book and the movie, and I realize I have no idea how banking actually works beyond a Miracle on 34th Street level. I want to learn, but I don't need a degree or a job in finance, I'm just curious how it actually works. Where do I start?
posted by gofargogo to Work & Money (14 answers total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
The two things I always recommend are Matt Levine's daily colum "Money Stuff" for fun, digestible stuff, and this book for questions more like "what's the difference between a broker and a dealer", "what does an order book look like", "how do high-frequency traders make money?".
posted by The Notorious B.F.G. at 10:40 PM on May 22, 2018


Best answer: I really like "How to speak money" by John Lancaster which is effectively a glossary of financial and economic terms. It's also reasonably funny.

One of the best things about it is at the end he lays out a great "Further reading" section which lead me to Ha-Joon Chang's "23 things they don't tell you about capitalism" which is great. But there are recommendations for most areas of economic and financial thought.
posted by DoveBrown at 11:43 PM on May 22, 2018


Best answer: America's Bank is about the creation of the Federal Reserve, which is key to understanding modern banking.

There's a literature of financial catastrophe that will be a useful corrective as you read blandly optimistic economic textbooks and the like, where markets always function perfectly and traders are uniformly intelligent and social welfare-maximizing. When Genius Failed, about the collapse of an over-leveraged hedge fund, is a classic of the genre, and not as dated as it should be. Gillian Tett's Fools' Gold covers some of the same material as The Big Short but with much more attention to technical detail.

Matt Levine is smart and about as entertaining as it's possible to be in his field, but as a newbie I would approach him with some wariness--he is a big industry shill, and, because he's so smart, it's rather subtle to pick up on. In general, the fields of finance journalism and academia are so intellectually captive to the industry that you've got to be skeptical at all times.
posted by praemunire at 12:49 AM on May 23, 2018 [4 favorites]


Best answer: If you're looking more for a download on investment banks and trading, I highly recommend How the Trading Floor Really Works.

It's one of the only books I've ever read that's accessible to someone outside of finance. Most of what's written is so jargon-heavy as to be impenetrable.
posted by hellomiss at 3:34 AM on May 23, 2018


Dig through the Planet Money podcast archives - there are definitely some relevant episodes.
posted by chrisamiller at 5:59 AM on May 23, 2018


Best answer: The Wall St Journal put out a series of guides back in the 90s, maybe a little dated but good introductory material (produced by Lightbulb Press, apparently a publisher specializing in "plain english" financial guides).
posted by Bron at 7:04 AM on May 23, 2018


The podcast Planet Money (mentioned above, and second checking out the early archives) started as a way to explain the financial crisis following the success of a This American Life episode The Giant Pool of Money, which you should definitely give a listen to.
posted by General Malaise at 7:33 AM on May 23, 2018


I would add Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom (pdf) by Doug Henwood
posted by lathrop at 8:00 AM on May 23, 2018


Response by poster: These are all great! Thank you!
posted by gofargogo at 8:28 AM on May 23, 2018


It may not be explanatory enough, but I find reading The Economist's Finance & Economics section to be written well for practitioners and learners alike. They go in-depth on the big themes of the industry, like interest rates, and give the Econ 101 reasoning for why things happen that way. I particularly like their regular columns such as Buttonwood's Notebook for the more academic and less newsy stuff.
posted by hexaflexagon at 12:47 PM on May 23, 2018


I learned a lot about Wall Street and the history of finance from Sheelah Kolhatkar's (page-turning) book about the downfall of the biggest hedge fund in history (Stephen Cohen's SAC) -- Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street.
posted by mylittlepoppet at 1:14 PM on May 23, 2018


This was great and amazingly clear on the complex instruments like derivatives.
Gillian Tett's book Fool's Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:33 PM on May 23, 2018


I'll second Matt Levine's columns. He's good, and clear. Although I've worked in the industry and have a finance PhD, he still manages to point out things in ways I hadn't thought about.

More generally, you can periodically check DealBook (from the New York Times), the Wall Street Journal's markets section, the Economist's finance and economics section (mentioned above), and just google around when they mention something you don't quite understand (investopedia helps for this). If you do this with semi-regularity, you'll get the hang of things and you'll see that a lot of the material sort of repeats.

If you want to learn more about the politics and finance intersection, Ben White at Politico has a very good daily newsletter called Morning Money, as well.
posted by An Economist at 3:53 PM on May 23, 2018


Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn! Starts with beginner-level personal finance, delves much deeper into American finance/banking systems later.
posted by quatsch at 6:22 PM on May 23, 2018


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