Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

I listened to the audiobook version of 3 books by Adam Tooze in the past year and found them to be excellent for understanding how finance works, through 3 separate case studies/examples if you will .. 1. The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order describes how most of the current global financial structures were formed, through the lens of WW1 policy 2. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy .. moves you forward to WW2/post-depression economy 3. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (recommended elsewhere in this thread) .. brings things up to current times

A few of my faves. Non-Fiction By Adam Tooze: Crashed, and Wages of Destruction. Both excellent economic histories, the former covering the recent financial crisis and its aftermath, the latter on the Nazi economy. Tooze does an excellent job coming up with larger trends and global narratives, I'm often amazed at just how much he's able to keep in his head. By Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law. A quick, informative, yet more than thorough enough on the factual, legal prevention that American employed over the majority of the 20th century to prevent black Americans form participating in the housing market, both personal home ownership and public housing (a major institutional driver of household wealth and success tarting in the early 20th century). By Jeffrey Lockwood: Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier. I had no idea the American frontier was home to devastating largest-in-the-world locust plagues that suddenly disappeared near the end of the 19th century. By Peter Brannen: The Ends of the World. A great primer on mass extinctions and their often geologic causes.…