2022 Wall Street Reading List

The Carlyle Group cofounder interviews 23 leading investors, among them Stan Druckenmiller, Seth Klarman, Larry Fink, Sam Zell, Mary Callahan Erdoes and Mike Novogratz, and arranges the conversations by asset class, from public stocks and real estate to buyouts, distressed debt, venture, crypto, SPACs and infrastructure. It is a guided tour of how professionals in each corner of the market think.

A former Fed vice chair tells the story of sixty years of American macro policy, from Kennedy's tax cut to the pandemic rescue, across twelve presidents and eight Fed chairs. For anyone who trades rates or reads the Fed, it shows how today's playbook came out of stagflation, Volcker, Reaganomics, the 2008 crisis and COVID-19, and how politics shaped each turn.

The New York Times business investigations editor turns from banks to Big Law, using Jones Day as his case study. He follows the firm's growth from a Cleveland practice into a political and corporate powerhouse that defended tobacco and drug companies, staffed the Trump White House and worked on 2020 election litigation. It shows what top law firms will do, and for whom, when the fees are large enough.

Bloomberg's senior ETF analyst explains how Jack Bogle's decision to make Vanguard owned by its own fund investors set off a migration of trillions of dollars toward low-cost funds. The book follows that shift through active management, ETFs, financial advice and trading apps. It is less a biography than an account of how one fee structure reshaped the asset management business.

The former Morgan Stanley CEO tells his own story, from a North Carolina mill town to the bond desk, the Dean Witter merger, his ouster by Phil Purcell, Credit Suisse First Boston, and the September 2008 run that nearly sank Morgan Stanley. It is a candid look at how a Wall Street firm is run, and how its leader manages people under pressure.

A Wall Street Journal energy reporter traces how Pacific Gas and Electric went from building California's power system to pleading guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter after its equipment started the 2018 Camp Fire. Utility investors and credit analysts get a detailed case study of deferred maintenance, regulatory failure and climate risk.

The 2022 FT Business Book of the Year tells how the semiconductor went from a Cold War military project to the chokepoint of the global economy, concentrated in a handful of firms such as TSMC and ASML. For investors it explains why chips sit at the center of US-China rivalry, supply-chain risk and the valuations of the world's largest technology companies.

Two Bloomberg reporters reconstruct the 2011 attack on the tanker Brillante Virtuoso in the Gulf of Aden, the car-bomb murder of the surveyor investigating it, and the insurance fraud behind both. A true-crime story that doubles as a look at how shipping, marine insurance and the Lloyd's market can be gamed, and how rarely anyone pays for it.

The Of Dollars and Data blogger and Ritholtz Wealth Management executive answers the standard personal finance questions with historical market data rather than rules of thumb: how much to save, whether to buy the dip, lump sum or gradual investing, rent or buy, and when to sell. His answer for most people is to keep buying income-producing assets through good markets and bad.

The Financial Times reporter who exposed Wirecard tells how a German payments company inflated its business through partners in Asia, reached the DAX, and spent years attacking the journalists and short sellers who doubted it, until €1.9 billion turned out not to exist in June 2020. A first-hand account of a fraud that auditors and regulators missed.

A former poker champion and decision researcher argues that quitting is a skill, not a failure, and that sunk costs, loss aversion and identity keep people in losing jobs, projects and positions far too long. For anyone who manages a portfolio, a pipeline of deals or a career, it offers practical tools such as kill criteria and quitting coaches.

The Kochland author tells the story of the Fed's post-2008 zero-rate and quantitative-easing era through Thomas Hoenig, the Kansas City Fed president who dissented in 2010. Leonard argues that years of easy money inflated asset prices, fed leveraged lending and widened inequality. Investors get a sharply argued, contested account of the policy regime that shaped a decade of markets.

A financial historian's case that interest is the price that coordinates capitalism, and that a decade of near-zero rates after 2008 fed bubbles, zombie companies, weak productivity and inequality. Read it for the long history of credit, from Mesopotamia to quantitative easing, and for a sharp critique of modern central banking.

The Wall Street Journal's chief Fed reporter tells the inside story of Jerome Powell's first years as chair: Donald Trump's public attacks over interest rates, then the March 2020 panic, when the Fed cut rates to zero, bought bonds on a vast scale and lent to markets it had never backstopped before. It is the closest thing to a minute-by-minute record of how the modern crisis playbook was written.

A history of venture capital from Arthur Rock and Fairchild Semiconductor to Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, SoftBank and the unicorn era, built on interviews with the investors themselves. It explains the logic of the business: most bets fail, a few return the fund many times over, and that skewed math shapes how VCs pick, back and fight with founders.

Mary Childs tells the story of Bill Gross, the former blackjack card counter who co-founded Pimco and built the Total Return Fund into the largest bond fund in the world, and who was then forced out of his own firm in 2014. Along the way she explains how active bond management became one of the most powerful businesses in finance.