2016 Wall Street Reading List

Nike founder Phil Knight's memoir covers the 18 years between a Stanford term paper about Japanese running shoes and Nike's 1980 IPO. For finance readers it is one of the most honest accounts of what it means to run a fast-growing company short of cash: bankers cutting off credit, a supplier turning rival, and a customs bill that could have ended it all.

Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Alan Greenspan, which won the 2016 FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, argues that the Fed chairman was neither a naive ideologue nor an infallible maestro. Greenspan understood the dangers of leverage and asset bubbles better than almost anyone and still did not act. It is the essential account of how modern central banking and modern finance grew up together.

German novelist and journalist Norman Ohler argues that the Third Reich ran on drugs. The methamphetamine Pervitin was sold to civilians and issued to soldiers by the millions, and Hitler grew dependent on injections from his personal doctor. It was a bestseller and drew sharp criticism from historians. For business readers it is also a story of a pharmaceutical industry and a state that fed each other.

J. D. Vance's memoir of growing up between Middletown, Ohio, and his family's Kentucky hollow, raised largely by his grandparents while his mother struggled with addiction. Published months before the 2016 election, it became the most debated book about the white working class. Finance readers will find a ground-level view of deindustrialization and of what holds back social mobility.

Michael Lewis tells the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the Israeli psychologists whose work on heuristics, biases and prospect theory showed that human judgment fails in predictable ways. It is a book about friendship and its unraveling, and it also explains where behavioral finance and much of Moneyball's logic came from.

Harvard behavioral economist Iris Bohnet argues that diversity training rarely changes minds, so organizations should redesign their processes instead. The book is a research-backed toolkit for hiring, evaluation, promotion and team design. It is useful for any bank, fund or company that wants to stop losing talent to bias it cannot see.

Rana Foroohar argues that finance stopped serving American business and started running it: buybacks over research, financial engineering over products, and banks that make more from trading than lending. Through Apple, GE, Ford and commodities markets, she shows how shareholder-value thinking reshaped corporate America and who paid for it.

The sequel to Sapiens turns from humanity's past to its next project. Harari argues that with famine, plague and war largely tamed, people will chase longevity, engineered happiness and godlike powers, and that algorithms and data may end up displacing the liberal humanism modern economies run on. Big-picture speculation, not a finance book, but a provocative frame for thinking about AI and work.