Debt is not a book whose message can be boiled down to a few bullet points. It is a lengthy study of the power of debt, and how it shapes human society. As the author states in the introductory chapter, “This book is a history of debt, then but it also uses that history as a way to ask fundamental questions about …

Pierce Brown - Golden Son and Morning Star

These are books two and three, respectively, of the Red Rising trilogy, which as a whole are a very entertaining piece of science fiction. Taking place about a thousand years from now, people have colonized other planets and the human species has h group: ideal specimens …

Sheelah Kolhatkar’s Black Edge tracks the insider trading case against the hedge fund SAC Capital and its founder Steven Cohen in the mid 2010s.

Interesting bits:

• You might want to just watch the PBS Frontline documentary To Catch a Trader if you aren’t interested enough to read the book.
• The complete lack …

• Lewis is a masterful story teller, and I find the topics he picks to be fascinating
• His tendency to lionize his characters feels problematic at times. In the big short you had Steve Eisman, in Flash Boys you have Brad Katsuyama. The portrait painted is of David v. Goliath
• The HFT programmer, Sergey Alynikov, is a …

Showdown at Gucci Gulch* chronicles the tax reform effort in the early-mid 80s during the Reagan administration. This was a notable law making effort as it closed many tax loopholes while removing roughly 4M lower income people from the tax rolls. All of this occurred during a Republican administration who had recently …

The Color of Law is an examination of the explicit policies and laws that lead to segregation in American housing. Often times, the policy failures were as much about the actions not taken, such as a failure to

• Withholding of permits for developers unwilling to enforce segregating policies

• Sometime the author …

• Manipulation of the LIBOR (London Inter-bank Offered Rate), a summary of the situation can also be found here
• Sometimes called the most important number in the world because so many financial attributes use it as a level for their own rates.