Invest Your Own Fucking Money!

The title of this posting is the title of another one of my blogs. That blog, which I plan to revive, has been inactive since last November. It's purpose is to provide information about the financial markets to people who want to rely on themselves rather than brokers or other financial advisors when making investment decisions.

I put together the reading list below for a twenty-five year old acquaintance who wants to learn about finance and economics.

These two books will provide you with a historical background:

The Drunkard’s Walk (Leonard Mlodinow)

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (Peter Bernstein)

This one is an enjoyable comic novel:

A Tenured Professor (John Kenneth Galbraith)

These four will explain about how different segments of the markets crashed and burned (or didn’t) over different portions of the past twenty-five years:

The Myth of the Rational Market (Justin Fox)

Mr. Market Miscalculates (James Grant)

Fooled By Randomness (Nicholas Nassim Taleb)

The Black Swan (Nicholas Nassim Taleb)

This is a left-wing critique (which I rather like) that explains how so many American corporations become the unfortunate creatures they are today:

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (Thomas Frank)

And this is a novel from the 1970s by (in my opinion) the greatest American novelist of the 20^th century; it’s about a 9-year old boy who puts together a huge industrial conglomerate:

JR (William Gaddis)