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Resources for Understanding Money

Posted on:March 21, 2020

An Ask HN came up recently, asking for recommendations for resources on understanding money. I gave it a few days before diving in to collate all of the recommendations. For additional information about any of the items on the list, feel free to search for keywords on the Hacker News webpage itself.

These are sorted in order of appearance, from top to bottom, which I believe is a rough estimate of quality. Many items on the list have also been recommended more than once.

Note that I have not read or watched most of these recommendations, so I cannot offer any personal commentary. I will, however, be pulling some of these into my own reading queue, so feel free to check that out.

Web columns, blogs, other resources

  1. Money Stuff by Matt Levine
    • You might get paywalled by Bloomberg, but you can read his stuff through his newsletter.
  2. Felix Salmon
  3. Financial Times (specifically Alphaville)
  4. Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders
  5. Understanding Money Mechanics
  6. How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio (Youtube)
  7. Resources by the Bank of England
  8. The Money Creation Paradox

Online courses

  1. Economics of Money and Banking - Coursera

Books

  1. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Lefèvre)
  2. The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Admati, Hellwig)
  3. Introduction to Finance: Markets, Investments, and Financial Management (Norton, Melicher)
  4. Macroeconomics and the Financial System (Ball, Mankiw)
  5. The Mystery of Banking (Rothbard)
  6. Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt)
  7. Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly (Quiggin)
  8. A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Including a Life-Cycle Guide to Personal Investing (Malkiel)
  9. Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor (Bogle)
  10. The Alchemy of Finance (Soros)
  11. Fixed Income Securities: Tools for Today’s Markets (Serrat, Tuckman)
  12. Incerto series (Taleb)
  13. Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises (Dalio)
  14. Concise Guide to Macroeconomics (Moss)
  15. Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners (Harris)
  16. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Ferguson)
  17. Debt: The First 5000 Years (Graeber)
  18. Financial Statements: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Reports (Ittelson)
  19. The Nature of Money (Ingham)
  20. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Pistor)
  21. American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation (Quinn)
  22. Payments Systems in the U.S. (Benson, Loftesness, Jones)
  23. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Ahamed)
  24. The Long and the Short of It: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People who Aren’t in the Industry (Kay)
  25. Economix: How and Why Our Economy Works (and Doesn’t Work) in Words and Pictures (Goodwin, Burr)
  26. The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy (King)
  27. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and the Government Bailout Will Make Things Worse (Paul, Woods)
  28. The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (Stockman)
  29. The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank (Wendel)
  30. The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals (Kuznetsov)
  31. The Limits to Capital (Harvey)
  32. Security Analysis (Graham, Dodd)
  33. How to Read the Financial Pages (Brett)
  34. Stigum’s Money Market (Stigum, Crescenzi)
  35. The Economist Guide to Financial Markets (Levinson)
  36. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (Mazzucato)
  37. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Reisman)
  38. The Future of Money (Lietaer)
  39. Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Wheelan)