2013 Wall Street Reading List

Washington Post reporter Neil Irwin tells the story of the financial crisis and the euro crisis through the three central bankers who fought them: Ben Bernanke at the Fed, Mervyn King at the Bank of England and Jean-Claude Trichet at the ECB. It is one of the clearest accounts of how central banks act in a panic and why their choices still drive markets.

A former Galleon Group trader's memoir of rising from a Morgan Stanley trainee to one of the Street's most powerful healthcare traders, and of the drug-fueled after-hours culture that came with it. It shows plainly how hedge funds' commission dollars buy information and favors from the sell side, and what that world cost the author personally.

Bloomberg Businessweek's Brad Stone tells how Jeff Bezos left the hedge fund D. E. Shaw to sell books online and built Amazon into a retailer, logistics network and cloud computing giant. Winner of the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award, it shows how a company that long ran near breakeven used cash flow and patience to dominate retail.

Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman tells how a handful of independent wildcatters, not Exxon or Chevron, cracked shale with fracking and horizontal drilling and turned American oil and gas output around. A character-driven account of boom, leverage and bust that energy investors and credit analysts will recognize.