Financial History and Panics
The long record of crises — what breaks, who is left holding it, and which arrangements survive the stress. Central banking has its own entry; so does the anatomy of a bubble.
301 books · 49 people behind it
Start here
- The Ascent of MoneyNiall Ferguson, 2008
- Lords of FinanceLiaquat Ahamed, 2009
- Lombard StreetWalter Bagehot, 1873
The people behind it 49
Each person holds a book in this entry or names it in their own tags.
Investors 10
JG
James Grant4 books hereCD
Charles D. Ellis3 books here
Ray Dalio3 books hereEC
Edward Chancellor2 books herePL
Peter L. Bernstein1 book hereSH
Sidney Homer1 book hereDE
David Einhorn1 book hereJT
John Train1 book hereKF
Ken Fisher1 book hereBB
Barton Biggsnamed in their tagsAcademics 9
BE
Barry Eichengreen6 books hereFP
Frank Partnoy4 books hereNF
Niall Ferguson4 books hereAS
Adam Smith3 books hereCP
Charles P. Kindleberger3 books hereJK
John Kenneth Galbraith2 books hereMF
Milton Friedman2 books here
Robert J. Shiller1 book hereSH
Sidney Homer1 book hereJournalists 30
Michael Lewis7 books hereRL
Roger Lowenstein6 books hereRC
Ron Chernow6 books hereJB
John Brooks6 books hereJG
James Grant4 books here
Andrew Ross Sorkin4 books hereFP
Frank Partnoy4 books hereNF
Niall Ferguson4 books hereCD
Charles D. Ellis3 books hereGZ
Gregory Zuckerman3 books hereWD
William D. Cohan3 books hereDK
David Kynaston3 books hereDY
Daniel Yergin2 books hereJK
John Kenneth Galbraith2 books hereSM
Sebastian Mallaby2 books here
Bethany McLean2 books hereCB
Connie Bruck2 books hereEC
Edward Chancellor2 books hereFL
Frederick Lewis Allen2 books hereGT
Gillian Tett2 books hereCR
Charles R. Morris2 books here
Edwin Lefevre1 book herePL
Peter L. Bernstein1 book hereJT
John Train1 book hereWP
William Poundstone1 book hereJR
John Rothchild1 book herePA
Philip Augar1 book hereSP
Scott Patterson1 book hereLH
Lara Hoffmans1 book hereBB
Barton Biggsnamed in their tagsBooks 301
Joseph de la Vega · 1688 · The first book ever written about trading a stock market, from 1688.
Ibn Khaldun · 1858 · Fourteenth-century theory of dynastic cycles, taxation and the rise of states
Walter Bagehot · 1873 · Still the reference on how a panic should be met.
Constantino Bresciani-Turroni · 1937 · The contemporary economist's study; still the technical reference on the hyperinflation.
Milton Friedman, Anna Jacobson Schwartz · 1963 · The founding work of monetary history; the Depression chapter changed policy.
Charles P. Kindleberger · 1973 · Classic account with Creditanstalt as the hinge of the crisis.
Charles P. Kindleberger · 1984 · Six centuries of banking, coinage and crises across the continent.
Barry Eichengreen · 1992 · The scholarly case that the gold standard transmitted the Depression.
Milton Friedman · 1992 · Monetary episodes as short essays; the accessible way into Friedman.
Barry Eichengreen · 1996 · Short history of the international monetary system; the standard survey.
Barry Eichengreen, Marc Flandreau · 1997 · Edited collection of the core academic papers.
Jean Strouse · 1999 · The definitive Pierpont Morgan biography, complementing Chernow's house history.
Allan H. Meltzer · 2003 · The institutional history from the inside of the minutes.
Ron Chernow · 2004 · Chernow on the man who built American public credit and its bank
T1 Fool's Gold
Gillian Tett · 2009 · The J.P. Morgan derivatives team that built the modern credit swap.
Liaquat Ahamed · 2009 · Four central bankers and the gold standard's road to the Depression; Pulitzer winner.
Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff · 2009 · Eight centuries of default and crisis data assembled in one place.
Barry Eichengreen · 2011 · The dollar's reserve status and what would end it.
Barry Eichengreen · 2015 · The Depression and the euro crisis compared.
Adam Tooze · 2018 · 2008 as a global dollar-funding crisis, not an American one.
Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves, Kris James Mitchener · 2021 · The long history of state borrowing and when it is sustainable.
Ferdinand Pecora · 1939 · The investigator's own account of the hearings that produced the SEC
B. H. Liddell Hart · 1944 · Liddell Hart on why the lessons of history are so rarely applied
Frederick Lewis Allen · 1949 · The short classic account, written while the memory was still live.
Will Durant, Ariel Durant · 1968 · A century of history compressed into recurring patterns and rates
John Brooks · 1969 · Wall Street from 1920 to 1938, told through its people.
Joseph R. Daughen, Peter Binzen · 1971 · The largest US bankruptcy of its era and a merger-integration failure.
John Brooks · 1973 · The 1960s conglomerate and performance-fund boom.
T2 Beyond Greed
Stephen Fay · 1982 · The Hunt brothers' attempt to corner silver and the 1980 collapse.
Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich · 1986 · The revisionist case that the inflation had real benefits before it broke.
Vincent P. Carosso · 1987 · Scholarly firm history; the archival base later popular biographies drew on.
Steven B. Webb · 1989 · How expectations and fiscal credibility ended the inflation almost overnight.
Christopher Wood · 1992 · Written from Tokyo as the bubble deflated; the classic contemporaneous account.
Gerald D. Feldman · 1993 · The scholarly standard; corrects Fergusson on who gained and who lost.
Jeremy J. Siegel · 1994 · Siegel’s long-run evidence that equities beat other asset classes.
Ben S. Bernanke · 2000 · The credit-channel research a future Fed chairman later acted on.
Maury Klein · 2001 · The best single narrative of 1929 itself.
Paul Blustein · 2001 · The IMF inside the 1997 crisis, reported from the negotiating rooms.
Maggie Mahar · 2003 · The seventeen-year bull market as one continuous argument.
Frank Partnoy · 2003 · Places WorldCom in a decade of engineered corporate deception.
Russell Napier · 2005 · Four great bottoms studied through contemporary newspaper reporting.
T2 Medici Money
Tim Parks · 2005 · Renaissance banking, branch networks and the origins of modern finance.
T2 Tulipmania
Anne Goldgar · 2005 · The archival demolition of the tulip story everyone repeats.
Richard M. Bookstaber · 2007 · A risk manager on how hedging machinery creates the crashes it insures against.
Robert F. Bruner, Sean D. Carr · 2007 · The crisis that produced the Federal Reserve.
William L. Silber · 2007 · The 1914 closure of the exchange, and how the dollar took over.
Fintan O'Toole · 2009 · Written in the wreckage; angry but specific about tax breaks, planning and regulatory capture.
David Marsh · 2009 · How the single currency was negotiated, by a reporter who watched it.
Benjamin Roth · 2009 · A small-town lawyer writing it down as it happened, 1931 onward.
Andrew Ross Sorkin · 2009 · The September 2008 week in which WaMu failed, from the regulators' side.
Gary Gorton · 2010 · 2007-08 read as a classic run on repo, not on retail deposits.
Scott Patterson · 2010 · Places Simons's fund inside the wider quant industry it seeded.
Gary Gorton · 2012 · Why short-term debt is information-insensitive until suddenly it is not.
Kirsten Grind · 2012 · The only full account, by the local reporter who covered the collapse.
David Nasaw · 2012 · Joseph Kennedy: film, liquor, market operations and the first SEC chairmanship
Alan S. Blinder · 2013 · The clearest economist's account of the crisis and the policy response.
Neil Irwin · 2013 · Bernanke, Trichet and King through the crisis; central banks as FX actors.
Benn Steil · 2013 · Keynes, White and the design of the postwar currency order.
Charles W. Calomiris, Stephen H. Haber · 2014 · Why some countries have banking crises and others do not; politics, not luck.
Mauricio Drelichman, Hans-Joachim Voth · 2014 · Philip II's serial defaults, and why bankers kept lending anyway.
Lodewijk Petram · 2014 · How VOC shares actually traded: brokers, forwards, options, settlement.
William N. Goetzmann · 2016 · Finance as a technology, from Mesopotamia forward.
Asgeir Jonsson, Hersir Sigurgeirsson · 2016 · The fullest technical account of the collapse and the capital-controls recovery.
T2 Fear City
Kim Phillips-Fein · 2017 · New York's 1975 near-default and who bondholders can actually discipline.
David Enrich · 2017 · The Libor rigging scandal told through the traders who ran it
Ray Dalio · 2018 · The beautiful deleveraging: how policymakers try to engineer the outcome.
Laurence M. Ball · 2018 · Academic rebuttal to the claim that rescue was legally impossible.
Tom Nicholas · 2019 · Academic history tracing venture back to whaling voyages.
William Quinn, John D. Turner · 2020 · A comparative bubble triangle: marketability, money and speculation.
T2 Default
Gregory Makoff · 2024 · The NML Capital litigation and pari passu, told from the restructuring side.
Murray N. Rothbard · 1963 · The Austrian account of 1929 and the policy response that followed
Michael Cannon · 1966 · The Melbourne property mania and bank collapses of the 1890s.
Roy W. Jastram · 1977 · The long-run purchasing-power series that grounds gold inflation-hedge claims.
John Train · 1985 · Short catalogue of manias and frauds across four centuries
Naomi R. Lamoreaux · 1985 · Why the first merger wave happened and why most of it disappointed.
T3 Junk Bonds
Glenn Yago · 1990 · How non-investment-grade credit first financed borrowers banks would not touch.
Hope Lampert · 1990 · The rival account, published months after Barbarians.
Aurel Schubert · 1991 · The definitive study of the bank failure that broke Central European finance.
Fenton Bailey · 1991 · British view of Drexel; more interested in the instrument than the man.
David Kynaston · 1994 · The four-volume history of the world's oldest continuous financial centre.
Isabel Vincent · 1997 · Companion investigation into Swiss banks and looted wartime assets.
T3 John Law
Antoin E. Murphy · 1997 · The scholarly treatment of Law as economic theorist and policymaker.
Anthony B. Perkins, Michael C. Perkins · 1999 · Written before the crash, naming Yahoo among the overvalued.
T3 Millionaire
Janet Gleeson · 2000 · John Law, the Mississippi bubble and the invention of paper money in France.
Philip Augar · 2000 · How Big Bang handed the City's investment banks to foreign owners.
Charles R. Geisst · 2001 · History of the private Wall Street houses, Salomon included; Open Library unreachable.
Murray N. Rothbard · 2002 · The Austrian counter-history of American banking; polemical but factual.
Shalendra D. Sharma · 2003 · Country-by-country anatomy of the crisis, reform and recovery.
Andrew Adams · 2004 · The UK trust sector's own blow-up: gearing, cross-holdings and collapse.
Charles R. Geisst · 2004 · The standard single-volume institutional history.
Leo Goodstadt · 2007 · How Hong Kong's banks and bank crises shaped the miracle economy.
Alex Brummer · 2008 · By the Daily Mail City editor; Northern Rock as the opening of the crisis.
Brian Walters · 2008 · The main dedicated narrative account.
Robert J. Samuelson · 2008 · The 1965-1982 US inflation and the Volcker disinflation.
Roger Boyes · 2009 · Contemporaneous reporting on the collapse and the Icesave dispute.
Adam Michaelson · 2009 · Insider account by a Countrywide marketing executive; the one dedicated book.
T3 Why Iceland?
Ásgeir Jónsson · 2009 · By Kaupthing's former chief economist; insider view of the funding model that failed.
Peter Chapman · 2010 · The long institutional history, cotton broker to bankruptcy.
Michael W. Hudson · 2010 · Origination-floor reporting on the subprime lenders Countrywide competed against and copied.
Alan C. Greenberg, Mark Singer · 2010 · Memoir by the firm's longtime chairman 'Ace' Greenberg.
T3 Whoops!
John Lanchester · 2010 · Clearest lay explanation of the UK funding model; Open Library unreachable.
Tom Lyons, Brian Carey · 2011 · Anglo Irish Bank's chairman in his own words, from recorded interviews.
Frederick Taylor · 2013 · Modern retelling with more on the stabilisation and the Rentenmark.
Donal Donovan, Antoin E. Murphy · 2013 · Sober macro account by a former IMF official; the counterweight to the journalism.
Eirikur Bergmann · 2014 · Political economy of the boom, the Icesave dispute and the aftermath.
Jennifer Taub · 2014 · Thrift regulation and deposit-funded mortgage lending: the system WaMu exploited.
Philip Haslam, Russell Lamberti · 2014 · First-hand accounts of trading, saving and pricing through the collapse; the modern companion to Fergusson.
David Kynaston, Richard Roberts · 2015 · Authorised modern history of HSBC, the territory's dominant financial institution.
David Kynaston · 2017 · The Bank of England from 1694, by its best narrative historian.
Jared Bibler · 2021 · Insider account by the investigator who built the market-manipulation cases.
T3 Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
Robin Wigglesworth · 2021 · History of indexing; Bogle and Vanguard are its central thread.
Ben S. Bernanke · 2022 · Insider account of the Fed from Burns through the QE era.
Bessie R. James, Marquis James · 1954
Sidney Homer, Richard Sylla · 1963
James Grant · 1983 · Open Library unreachable during build; title listed on grantspub.com books page
William Greider · 1987
John Kenneth Galbraith · 1990
Bryan Burrough, John Helyar · 1990
Peter L. Bernstein · 1992 · Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
Robert V. Keeley · 1996
Lars Tvede · 1997 · Tvede on how credit and business cycles drive asset prices.
George P. Baker, George David Smith · 1998
Reed Massengill · 1999
Edward Chancellor · 1999
Joseph Jung · 2000 · Authorised 150-year corporate history; Open Library unreachable during this pass.
Robert J.Shiller · 2000
Peter L. Bernstein · 2000 · Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
Charles D. Ellis · 2001
Joseph Jung · 2002 · Commissioned historical study of the wartime record.
Carlota Perez · 2002
Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, Mike Staunton · 2002
Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind · 2003
Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind · 2003
Charles D. Ellis · 2004
Roger Lowenstein · 2004
Andrew Carnegie · 2006
William D. Cohan · 2007
Robert F. Bruner, Sean D. Carr · 2007
David Einhorn · 2008
James Grant · 2008
Michael Lewis · 2008
Helga Drummond · 2008 · Academic case study.
Barton Biggs · 2008 · Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
William D. Cohan · 2009
Franco Bruni, David T. Llewellyn · 2009 · Edited academic volume from SUERF.
T. J. Stiles · 2009
Benjamin Roth · 2009
Joseph Tibman · 2009 · Pseudonymous insider account.
Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff · 2009
Andrew Ross Sorkin · 2009
Rodney N. Sullivan · 2010 · Edited collection of Graham's own writings and interviews
Niall Ferguson · 2010
Sebastian Mallaby · 2010
Jasmina Hasanhodzic · 2010 · Bloomberg Press. Open Library API unreachable this pass.
Viral V. Acharya, Matthew Richardson, Stijn van Nieuwerburgh, Lawrence J. White · 2011
William D. Cohan · 2011
Gregory Zuckerman · 2013
T4 Stress Test
Timothy F. Geithner · 2014
Timothy F. Geithner · 2014
James Grant · 2014 · Open Library unreachable during build; title listed on grantspub.com books page
Valur Ingimundarson, Philippe Urfalino, Irma Erlingsdottir · 2016 · Academic collection on blame, protest and institutional reconstruction after 2008.
Bhu Srinivasan · 2017
Tom Wright, Bradley Hope · 2018
James Grant · 2019 · Open Library unreachable during build; title listed on grantspub.com books page
Christopher Leonard · 2022
Edward Chancellor · 2022 · Open Library unreachable during build; title confirmed on edwardchancellor.com
Roger Lowenstein · 2022
Andrew Ross Sorkin · 2025
Meb Faber · 2026 · The Idea Farm, July 2026 — Open Library has no work record; the 2025 Faber title is not yet catalogued
unverified
Roger Lowenstein
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Edward Chancellor
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Sunil Sheoran
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