Woohoo! Cross Podcast Challenge off the list! For my last book, I picked Man vs. Markets by Paddy Hirsch, who is the Senior Producer of Marketplace for American Public Media. For those of you who are not nerds, it's a segment on NPR.
I'd say the book is a finance primer, with a bit of economics thrown in. It starts off very basic with what it means to hold a stock, and continues on to more complicated things like credit default swaps and quantitative easing. It looks at Wall Street, the Fed, and the Treasury and their roles in the economy. The last chapter basically explains what happened to lead up to everything with Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and the whole mid-September 2008 debacle. It was really easy to understand and is clearly meant for people who know nothing about finance and economics, however, if you know a little but want to know more, this is the book for you. I found the last chapter to be much easier to understand than Too Big to Fail (which I also recommend because it offers a more in depth description of EVERYTHING that happened, but you will need to devote at least a week or two, if not more, to that one, and constantly look up financial terms if you really want to understand).
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