This is the ultimate reference book for history of financial crises. Authors constructed a unique database covering data series from every single major financial crisis in the span of last 800 years, conducted a thorough research and wrote their findings in this book.

This is exactly why I find “This Time is Different” so fascinating – it is completely based on facts.

This book is an absolute must read for everyone interested in economics and financial markets.

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To sum up all books reviewed.

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The author contends that the reason why capitalism succeeds in the west and fails everywhere else is legal structure of property rights. Functioning legal property rights system enables the capital to flow freely through the economy enabling it to be employed to create economic growth. I do not agree in full with that…my view is that this is just one of the reasons. Nevertheless this is an interesting and worthwhile book to read.

The most interesting aspect of the book for me is a comparison of legal structure of property rights structure across countries and through history and their interaction with economic development. The book also provides lots of empirical data on legal systems across the globe.

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After reading Niall Ferguson’s great essay in the yesterday’s WSJ, I can recommended a great book (accompanied by TV series on DVD) from the same author.

Author tells the story of money and it’s importance in building today’s civilization. Niall Ferguson writes in comprehensive langue and uses anecdotes and specific historical events to paint a broader picture of past and present global economy…

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This is an excellent book on history of financial speculation. Edward Chancellor focuses on speculative manias: from the ones in Rome, through tulip mania in Holland to Japanese bubble in 1980s. Book is interesting and relative easy to read. Main line of thought which probably inspired the author is that investment bubble never change, but the majority of the […]

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In short you get exactly what the title says: history of interest rates. It’s probably the only such concise material on the subject. Like all the history books it’s not a lot of fun to read but a lot of useful information is in there, especially tables and charts with interest rate data. The reader is off […]

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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore – to this day one of most famous financial speculators of all time. In short, Mr. Livermore started trading at young age; he earned first $1,000 at age of fifteen; during his life he experienced major successes and failures; he earned $3,000,000 and $100,000,000 (something like $1.3 billion […]

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Contrary to books title which is in my view to extreme, this is balanced and well written book on today’s energy situation and all the accepts of finding, developing , using crude oil and it’s importance for civilization. I have stated my view on peek oil theory couple of times in my posts. I’ll repeat it once more: It is […]

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This is an essential book for everyone who wants to take deeper look into option trading world, especially from practical (trader) standpoint. The book provides: an overview of option basics (both theoretical and practical), an overview of basic option trading strategies and introduces the concept of delta neutral trading. The author avoids all the big formulas we were taught at faculty and focuses […]

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I have been thinking for a while on starting my book review series and here comes the first one. I am going to try to point to books which I find most useful in improving my understanding of the markets and most interesting and fun to read. My first review will be a short one and it […]

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