Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom

This masterpiece of a book is a dense and detailed look at Wall Street — the players (household investors, businesses, banks, hedge funds, the Fed, and others), the theories (Modigliani-Miller theory, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, etc.) and the renegade thinkers (Keynes, Marx, Friedman, Minsky, etc.). It is simply a marvel as Doug Henwood packs large amounts of information into each sentence, and writes in a lively and sharp-witted prose. Unfortunately, the audience for a densely-written left-wing book on high finance is small, so it is now out of print (but available here in PDF) and has at present only nineteen reviews on Amazon. It also is over twenty years old and badly in need of an update; if I were a wealthy benefactor, I would offer to commission Henwood to do a comprehensive rewrite.