● The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression
By Scott Sumner
Summary via publisher (Independent Institute)
Economic historians have made great progress in unraveling the causes of the Great Depression, but not until Scott Sumner came along has anyone explained the multitude of twists and turns the economy took. In The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Sumner offers his magnum opus—the first book to comprehensively explain both monetary and non-monetary causes of that cataclysm. Drawing on financial market data and contemporaneous news stories, Sumner shows that the Great Depression is ultimately a story of incredibly bad policymaking—by central bankers, legislators, and two presidents—especially mistakes related to monetary policy and wage rates.

● Collapse and Revival: Understanding Global Recessions and Recoveries
By M. Ayhan Kose and Marco E. Terrones
Summary via publisher (IMF)
The world is still recovering from the most recent global recession associated with the 2008–09 financial crisis and the possibility of another downturn persists as the global economy struggles to regain lost ground. But, what is a global recession? What is a global recovery? What really happens during these episodes? As the debates about the recent global recession and the subsequent recovery have clearly shown, our understanding of these questions has been very limited. This book tracks the global business cycle through the destruction of a global recession to the renewal of recovery, drawing on four majorepisodes in the past half century.

● Lehman Brothers: A Crisis of Value
By Oonagh McDonald
Summary via publisher (Manchester University Press)
Using extensive documentary evidence and interviews with former Lehman employees, Oonagh McDonald reveals the decisions that led to Lehman’s collapse, investigates why the government refused a bail-out and whether the implications of this refusal were fully understood. In clear and accessible language she demonstrates both the short and long term effects of Lehman’s collapse.

● Digital Wealth: An Automatic Way to Invest Successfully
By Simon Moore
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
Digital Wealth: An Automatic Way to Invest Successfully reveals core investment strategies that you can leverage to build long-term wealth. More than a simple review of traditional investment strategies, this innovative text proffers digital investment techniques that are driven not by people but by algorithms. Supported by asset allocation research, the secrets shared in this forward-thinking book have underpinned cutting-edge investment firms as they integrate algorithm-based strategies. In addition to presenting key concepts, this groundbreaking resource explains how these concepts can give you an edge over the professionals on Wall Street through details regarding achieving financial security and meeting financial goals rooted in a firm foundation in behavioral finance, portfolio tilts, and modern portfolio theory

● The Art of Trend Trading: Animal Spirits and Your Path to Profits
By Michael Parness
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
The Art of Trend Trading bucks the trend of technicality to show readers how instinct and strategy can unite to bring about consistent investment success. Rather than diving ever-deeper into the overdone world of complicated modeling and forecasting techniques, trader, CEO, and bestselling author Michael Parness explains how making intuition a part of your investment strategy tends to result in more long-term profit. Using animal spirits as a metaphor and tool, Parness helps readers understand how their natural tendencies may run counter to their strategy, and how this dichotomy may be the shackle holding them back from true market success. Readers will learn how this perspective lifted Parness from homelessness to making millions in both Bull and Bear markets, and will start developing their own market instinct as they refine and tune into their own natural intuition.

● America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality
By Clement Fatovic
Summary via publisher (University Press of Kansas)
If, as many allege, attacking the gap between rich and poor is a form of class warfare, then the struggle against income inequality is the longest running war in American history. To defenders of the status quo, who argue that the accumulation of wealth free of government intervention is an essential feature of the American way, this book offers a forceful answer. While many of those who oppose addressing economic inequality through public policy today do so in the name of freedom, Clement Fatovic demonstrates that concerns about freedom informed the Founding Fathers’ arguments for public policy that tackled economic disparities. Where contemporary arguments against such government efforts conceptualize freedom in economic terms, however, those supporting public policies conducive to greater economic equality invoked a more participatory, republican, conception of freedom. As many of the Founders understood it, economic independence, which requires a wide if imperfect distribution of property, is a precondition of the political independence they so profoundly valued.

● The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans
By Bruce E. Baker and Barbara Hahn
Summary via publisher (Oxford University Press)
The Cotton Kings relates a colorful economic drama with striking parallels to contemporary American economic debates. At the turn of the twentieth century, dishonest cotton brokers used bad information to lower prices on the futures market, impoverishing millions of farmers. To fight this corruption, a small group of brokers sought to control the price of cotton on unregulated exchanges in New York and New Orleans. They triumphed, cornering the world market in cotton and raising its price for years. However, the structural problems of self-regulation by market participants continued to threaten the cotton trade until eventually political pressure inspired federal regulation. In the form of the Cotton Futures Act of 1914, the federal government stamped out corruption on the exchanges, helping millions of farmers and textile manufacturers.

● Small Stocks, Big Money: Interviews With Microcap Superstars
By Dave Gentry
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
Small Stocks, Big Money provides first-hand perspective and insider information on the fast world of microcap investing. In a series of interviews with the superstars of small stocks, you’ll learn how to discover the right companies and develop a solid investment strategy with a potentially big payoff. Each chapter includes a short bio of the investor in question, and provides key insight into the lessons learned from the investments that made them millions—or in some cases, hundreds of millions. You’ll learn each investor’s top stock picks, and how they originally chose the investments that became their gold mines. Whether you’re a professional investor or a novice, this book is a unique and valuable source of information for anyone interested in the volatile world of small stocks and big money.

● Who’s to Blame for Greece?: Austerity in Charge of Saving a Broken Economy
By Theodore Pelagidis and Michael Mitsopoulos
Summary via publisher (Palgrave Macmillan)
The Euro constitutes the crowning achievement of a prolonged process of integration between European states. It incarnates the vision for a united and prosperous Europe: the attainment of major political goals through the promotion of closer economic cooperation. However, the 2009 crisis brought the EU head-to-head again with its perennial threat – the short-term interests of member states. Greece’s economy symbolizes in many ways the Euro area’s economic problems and divergent interests as it amasses most of the economic disadvantages characterizing the Euro area’s economy itself. After almost five years since inception of the crisis, Greece’s economy today is in the headlines again – this time for the so-called political risk. This book discusses the economic and political challenges to Greece and the EU member states.

● How Would You Like to Pay?: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money
By Bill Maurer
Review via Inside Higher Ed
In the end, How Would You Like to Pay? is of interest less for what it says about the future (the author makes no predictions — which, given the Isis debacle, seems prudent) than for how it encourages the reader to pay attention to nuances of the present. It’s a primer of the anthropological imagination — and a reminder that money is too important a matter to leave to the economists.