2023 Wall Street Reading List

Rob Copeland's unauthorized history of Bridgewater Associates argues that the world's largest hedge fund ran less on Ray Dalio's celebrated rules-based machine than on Dalio's own instincts, with radical transparency working as a tool of control. Read it to see how far a manager's story about its process can drift from the process itself.

Bloomberg investigative reporter Zeke Faux followed the money through the 2021 crypto boom, from Tether's opaque reserves and Sam Bankman-Fried's Bahamas penthouse to scam compounds in Cambodia. The result is a funny, skeptical field guide to how speculative manias draw in fraud, and to the warning signs that were visible all along.

Two former arbitrage traders, one of them a Long-Term Capital Management co-founder, argue that the costliest investing mistake is not what you buy but how much. Bad sizing of risk and spending, they show, explains why old fortunes vanished. A rigorous, practical guide to the Merton share, Kelly betting and expected utility.

Stanford historian Jennifer Burns wrote the first full biography of Milton Friedman built on his archives, tracing how a boy from Rahway, New Jersey became an economist rivaled in influence only by Keynes and a founder of modern American conservatism. For finance readers, it explains where monetarism and today's arguments about the Fed came from.

Michael Lewis spent about a year shadowing Sam Bankman-Fried before and after FTX collapsed in November 2022, and this is his portrait of the Jane Street trader turned crypto billionaire. It is a close-up study of a strange mind and a firm with almost no controls, and the most debated book of Lewis's career for how much benefit of the doubt it gives its subject.

Diana Henriques tells how Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal brought Wall Street under federal oversight, pitting Joseph Kennedy and William O. Douglas against New York Stock Exchange president Richard Whitney. For anyone in markets, it explains where the SEC and today's investor protections came from, and how hard they were to win.

Two schools of extreme-risk thinking collide here: Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel's Black Swan tail hedging, which earned Universa a reported 4,000-plus percent in the early-2020 crash, and Didier Sornette's Dragon Kings, crises he believes can be forecast. Scott Patterson's book is a clear primer on tail risk, put options and the cost of ruin.

Princeton economic historian Harold James sorts 170 years of crashes into two kinds: supply shocks, which tend to push the world economy to knit together, and demand shocks, which tend to make it retreat. For anyone weighing inflation, supply chains or deglobalization risk, it offers a historical test for which kind of crisis we are in.

A prosecutorial case against the buyout industry, built on Apollo and Leon Black's takeover of the failed insurer Executive Life and a long run of deals at nursing homes, hospitals and retailers. Anyone who works with private equity, or invests alongside it through a pension, should know the argument, the fee mechanics and the political risk it describes.

The authors of *All the Devils Are Here* turn their 2008 method on Covid, tracing America's failures to decisions made long before 2020: offshored supply chains, hospitals run for margin and private equity in nursing homes. Finance readers will recognize the pattern of efficiency that leaves no slack for a shock.

Two Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporters reconstruct the fight for control of Sumner Redstone's CBS and Viacom, from his companions' grab for his fortune to Les Moonves's ouster. It is a case study in what happens to boards, controlling shareholders and succession plans when the founder will not let go.

Economic geographer Brett Christophers explains how Blackstone, Brookfield, Macquarie and their peers came to own housing, water systems, toll roads and farmland through closed-end funds built to buy, reprice and sell. For anyone in alternatives or infrastructure, it is the clearest statement of the critique your industry now faces.

The founder of Nalanda Capital, which manages about $5 billion in listed Indian stocks, uses evolutionary biology to argue for a very patient strategy: avoid big risks, buy high-quality businesses at fair prices and then hold them almost forever. It is a quality-investing manual built on foxes, frogs and sea urchins instead of spreadsheets.

Morgan Housel's follow-up to The Psychology of Money flips the forecasting habit on its head: instead of guessing what will change, he catalogs the behaviors that never do, such as greed, fear, envy and the pull of a good story. It is a short, story-driven book about risk that helps investors stop betting on predictions and start building for surprises.

Two political scientists explain how the plumbing of globalization, from dollar clearing and SWIFT messaging to undersea cables and chip supply chains, became a tool of American coercion. For anyone who trades, lends or does compliance across borders, it explains why sanctions risk now sits in every deal and why rivals are racing to build workarounds.

Two UCL economists argue that governments and companies have come to rely on McKinsey, BCG, Bain and the Big Four accounting firms in ways that drain their own expertise, create conflicts of interest and cost far more than they deliver. A pointed critique of one of the most powerful industries that business school graduates join.

The former Goldman Sachs co-senior partner and Treasury secretary explains the probabilistic method he has used for six decades: write down the possible outcomes, assign odds, and choose on expected value. Part decision manual and part memoir, it shows how a risk arbitrageur's habits carried over to crisis management in Washington.

An actor with an economics degree and a tech journalist set out to learn whether crypto was a scam and spend the book showing that it was. Built on interviews with Sam Bankman-Fried, Alex Mashinsky and Brock Pierce, it is a skeptic's field report on the 2020-2022 bubble and a clear guide to the leverage, hype and stablecoin games behind the crash.

A federal prosecutor who served as the Justice Department's special counsel for private equity lays out the industry's playbook (leverage, fees, sale-leasebacks, dividend recaps) and follows it through retail, nursing homes, health care, prisons and local government. It is the prosecution's case against the buyout model, with a reform agenda attached.

The story of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a Ghanaian con man who spent the 1970s and 1980s selling investors shares in a nonexistent fortune supposedly hidden in Swiss banks by Kwame Nkrumah. Yeebo's prize-winning account shows how a plausible story, official cover and greed for outsized returns kept an advance-fee fraud alive for two decades.