New Books in Finance

Eric Ries shares how financial 'gravity' pulls great companies away from their founders' purpose, and his solutions in his new book Incorruptible (Authors Equity, 2026) Join us for a uniquely provocative conversation between our host, Richard Lucas, and renowned entrepreneur and "Lean Startup" author Eric Ries on his new book, Incorruptible. Moving beyond the surface-level summary, Richard inten...

The book places special emphasis on the relationship between corporations, managers, and shareholders. Drawing on Lynn Stout’s influential work on corporate governance, the authors challenge the common belief that corporate law requires managers to maximize shareholder value at all times. In reality, corporate directors and managers are expected to exercise business judgment that balances long-ter...

In today’s world, it is almost impossible to go through the day without interacting with a bank—whether through a salary payment, a debit card, a credit card, or a digital ID used to access public services online. Yet this intimate relationship between households and banks is relatively recent. In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Orsi Husz, Professor at Uppsala University, about...

In this episode, Jeremy Sosabowski, CEO and co‑founder of AlgoDynamix, reveals how his company is reinventing market forecasting through behavioral analytics rather than traditional fundamentals or news. By decoding real‑time transactional order flow, AlgoDynamix predicts price movements (hours or days in advance) based on what traders are actually doing — a fresh, practical edge for smaller hedge...

Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans examines the impact of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic restructuring programmes during active conflicts. Using a critical political economy perspective, the book explores how these restructuring efforts affect vulnerable communities’ survival amid...

In Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World, the distinguished banker, executive, and historian Paolo Zannoni examines the complex relationship between states and banks that has changed the world. Drawing on in-depth archival research, he explores seven case studies: the republic of Pisa, seventeenth-century Venice, the early years of the Bank of England, imperial Spain, the Kingd...

In The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025) Donald Chew profiles key figures in the development of modern corporate finance while emphasizing their counterintuitive lessons for shareholders, companies, and countries. He deals with such questions as: Why did the stagflation of the 1970s...

Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, New York Times' journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative Davos Men-members of the billionaire class-chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man's wake...

China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs), specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group from the 1980s through 2025. Using a combination of new qualitative findings and quantitative datasets, the authors observe that China has taken an evolving approach to the BWIs i...

In The City's Defense: The Bank of England and the Remaking of Economic Governance, 1914-1939, Robert Yee examines how the City of London maintained its status as an international financial center. He traces the role of the Bank of England in restructuring the domestic, imperial, European, and international monetary systems in the aftermath of the First World War Responding to mass unemploymen...

Winners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed: a provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy. Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century - widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world - many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evide...

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World...

Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider – but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. “Effective Altruism” and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumani...

On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025) by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research o...

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium an...

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium an...

The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist inv...

In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (U California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely, a former hedge fund worker takes an ethnographic approach to hedge funds. Manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? She gives readers an insider perspective on the phenomenon. Facing an unpredictable and risky stock market, hedge fund workers work long hours a...

In The Land Trap (Portfolio / Penguin), Mike Bird—Wall Street editor at The Economist—reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influence over the modern world. From the speculative land grabs of colonial America to China's real estate crisis today, Bird shows how fortunes are built—and destroyed—on the bedrock of land. Tracing three centuries of history, Bird explores how land quietly b...

In The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2023), the authors Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian conceptualise how gender, debt, and capitalism are related. For over ten years, the researchers have been working in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu, observing a credit market that specifically targets Dalit women. The book highlights...

Are you looking for an alternative to a career path at a big firm? Does founding your own start-up seem too risky? There is a radical third path open to you: You can buy a small business and run it as CEO. Purchasing a small company offers significant financial rewards--as well as personal and professional fulfillment. Leading a firm means you can be your own boss, put your executive skills to wor...

“If I had been enslaved for a year or two, I might not be able to believe in humanity any more.” “I am a victim of modern slavery.” These chilling words come from a Taiwanese female lured by a fake job offer, only to be sold into a scam compound in Cambodia. She is not alone. She is one of thousands deceived into this industry—people who left home hoping for a better life, only to find themselves...

Alex Imas is the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Professor of Behavioral Science, Economics and Applied AI and a Vasilou Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has taught Negotiations and Behavioral Economics. He is a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Applied AI and the Human Capital & Economic Opportunity, an NBER Faculty Research Associate, and a CESifo Re...

Silicon Valley wants to disrupt finance, and it might just succeed. In FinTech Dystopia, professor Hilary Allen offers an accessible, irreverent, and occasionally furious account of how tech elites are quietly taking over the financial system and making it worse in the process. Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of conversations with policymakers, journalists, and regulators, A...

Joseph E. Stiglitz has had a remarkable career. He is a brilliant academic, capped by sharing the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the Nobel Peace Prize, and honorary degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and more than fifty other universities, and elected not only to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters but the Royal Society and the British Academy;...