To this end, Portfolio Adviser began putting together a list of ‘summer reads’ for those looking for a greater insight into the mechanisms behind the markets.
Given that there is more than a grain of truth to the old cliché about learning from the past being the only way to prevent repetition, we thought we would start with the academic approach to economic history. So, our first call was to Cass Business School professor David Blake, who suggested two books that should prove useful if one is looking to get a better handle on the historical context of the current global financial situation.
The more recent of his twosuggestions, published in 2010, is called Alchemists of Loss: How modern finance and government intervention crashed the financial system and is written by academic Kevin Dowd and investment-banker-turned-journalist, Martin Hutchinson. The book’s website purports to “show how modern finance combined with easy money threatened to bring down the world financial system”.
Blake’s second suggestion is a book that has been around for a little longer. First published in 1954, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929 is well known for providing one of the more definitive views on the causes and effects of the Great Depression.
Before we had time to garner any other suggestions, however, Hargreaves Lansdown beat us to the punch with a collection of suggestions from well-known fund managers. Indeed, Galbraith’s book was also the suggestion of Sebastian Lyon, manager of the Troy Trojan Fund and the Personal Assets Trust, who said of the book: “This is a real page-turner and just shows how bubbles form and what happens when they collapse. It is a lesson in human behaviour. The mindless, rampant speculation that we experienced seventy years later during the dot com boom was familiar to those who had read this book.”
According to Laith Khalaf, senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown and compiler of the list that follows, financial reads don'thave to only consist of charts and numbers. “it may come as a surprise, but some are real page-turners,” he says, “Many focus on history and human behaviour, and the lessons these can teach us about investing today.”
Click here for the suggestions of some of the City’s leading lights
