Hey hubski,
Lately I've been increasingly interested in finance, accounting, and macroeconomics. I am also working on some software that has accounting functionality. Anyways, I recently read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', and I've been inspired to read some more books (I'm not much of a reader typically). Do you know of any non-textbooky novels that go into finance, similar to the extent that ZatAoMM goes into motorcycle maintenance, even though it't not really 'about it'? I'm pretty sure I have to read cryptonomicon, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Cheers!
Tyler Cowen, the mind over at Marginal Revolution, a very popular economics blog, wrote a textbook which I acquired and am reading. Really great stuff.
I could give you a link that may blow your fucking mind, if you want. It's free, in public domain, and riddled with controversy. But, it has called what's happening right now in the world financial mess. I'm a music school dropout, currently betting against the common knowledge of business and economics in today's age. I would read The Art of War. coming from voices at the upper levels of Wall Street, Aswath Demodaran http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ is worth reading about but... With just a little bit of google and some time away from technology, you may learn more about macro economics in the next 15 years simply going online and checking the data, observing where the money is going, and not paying any attention to the spin. nearly everyone is spinning today. I'm focusing almost entirely on how to value an asset, which, is the million dollar question, which everyone forgets to apply in this ridiculously manic era of currency movement.
not directly finance related, but Nassim Taleb's Black Swan explores some very cool ideas. also here's a large collection of pdfs of finance related books, enjoy
Well, from what I understand of the black swan is that Nassim, according to his theory, knows there will be a Hitler (black swan) but the predictability of when it will happen in the future is the issue of contention. If you got to a close enough of a timeline where you were able to oversee the various factors that contributed to the rise of hitler and nazism, then yes there is predictability, but that's because you were given so much information. Why the distate for taleb? Even though his ideas might not flow smoothly in the context of history, he has made fortunes out of assuming underlyings of black swans and it's served him pretty well.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable In case you missed it, that's Taleb basically saying that nobody predicted the 1933 burning of the Reichstag in 1914. It's hardly novel to suggest that predicting specific future events twenty years out is foolish - but Taleb leverages that basic idea to state that it's stupid to even try because the future is unpredictable. Here, even further: We'll set aside the make-work project of the Maginot Line. We'll set aside the fact that France was way too busy with trying to extract reparations out of the Germans (which they never succeeded in doing). We'll ignore the idea that perhaps a giant wall against the Huns was the sort of thing that the French needed to make the countryside livable again. We'll bypass the notion that the Treaty of Versailles was supposed to keep the Germans from developing advanced weaponry that could fly the fuck over the Maginot Line. OBVIOUSLY it's because nobody can predict anything. Taleb's whole schtick is that you shouldn't try too hard to figure out future events because whoopsie daisy nobody in 1914 predicted September 11. My whole point is that fuckin' Tom Clancy wrote a NYT bestseller in which terrorists fly planes into buildings so the whole "nobody could have predicted" thing is useless at best. Joe Francis has made a fortune as well. He's still an asshole.Just imagine how little your understanding of the world on the eve of the events of 1914 would have helped you guess what was to happen next. (Don't cheat by using the explanations drilled into your cranium by your dull high school teacher). How about the rise of Hitler and the subsequent war? How about the precipitous demise of the Soviet bloc? How about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism? How about the spread of the Internet?
The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific. The French, after the Great War, built a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion-Hitler just (almost) effortlessly went around it. The French had been excellent students of history; they just learned with too much precision. They were too practical and exceedingly focused for their own safety.
Most of the finance books I've read are quite niche -- Flash Boys will get you up to speed-ish on HFT, and it's an easy read, but it assumes you start with basic knowledge. And the really, really depthful books, like Secrets of the Temple or Demon of Our Own Design... basically unreadable. I actually recommend investopedia, 90 percent of the time it has good explanations for the financial terms you'll come across in FT, Wonkblog, etc. For accounting, read the first few chapters of a basic textbook.
I liked http://www.peakprosperity.com/crashcourse as a basis primer. I don't agree with all his ideas on peak oil but its a good explanation for fractional reserve backing and basics of financial economics.
...so you'll have to elaborate, because I hated the fuck out of Persig, because he knows fuckall about zen and fuckall about motorcycle maintenance. That part where he runs out of gas on the side of the road? And then discovers his backup tank? I mean, FFS. The thing of it is, there are plenty of easy-to-digest non-fiction books about finance and economics. It's actually a lot less complicated than it's made out to be - I mean, this is the industry that Business majors go into. And I could probably give you notes and recommendations on a couple dozen of them. Cryptonomicon would not be one of my recommendations.
Haha I can see where you are coming from. Like I said, I'm not well versed when it comes to novels, and ZatAoMM is not really a great example. What I meant was that although it wasn't a manual on motorcycle maintenance, I learned what a 'Tappet' was, and a bit about combustion engine behavior in different altitudes. I'm looking to learn about interest rates, optimum currency area, etc. Perhaps I should just spend a while on wikipedia :)
Naaah. Wikipedia is boring. We can do better than that. Can you give me 45 minutes? Because you need your head cracked open on fractional-reserve banking and from there, the rest will flow.
is it possible in today's society, where the power structures are so rigid, to ever take power away from the bankers? will we just have to wait until there are ethically responsible ones?