When starting out in business journalism, understanding not only the history of the industry but also the creative minds that fundamentally changed the landscape of reporting on business or finance can greatly benefit any reporter. Here are some nonfiction books recommended by award-winning business journalist Diana Henriques, who has written several nonfiction books detailing financial events in history. She recommends the following books for business journalists starting out in the industry:
Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR’s Fight to Regulate American Capitalism examines the results of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts in regulating U.S. capitalism after the 1929 stock market crash through the New Deal. The book won the “Best in Business Book” award from The Society of Advancing Business Editing and Writing, as well as the Best Book of the Year by Bloomberg.
“Business journalism was born on the back of regulatory regime,” Henriques said. “Any business journalist has to know their way around the documents that are generated by our regulatory regime, some of them at the SEC, some of them at other regulatory agencies. Insurance companies, famously, are regulated at the state level.”
A First Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, The Worst Day in Wall Street History analyzes a separate point in time, the 1987 stock market crash, which she describes as the starting point of “modern” financial disasters.
“It was unlike all of the previous market crashes, but every subsequent crash has been like 1987,” Henriques said.
Written under the pen name Adam Smith, The Money Game provides insight into the people of Wall Street and financial affairs. Using a sense of humor and wit, the nonfiction book, published in 1976, was written by George Goodman, who was known for his PBS television series, “Adam Smith’s Money World.” He was a prolific journalist in the financial world, helping start Institutional Investor Magazine and worked as executive editor of Esquire in the 1970s.
In Flash Boys, Lewis tells the story of a small group of individuals who band together to investigate and expose the U.S. stock market that has been rigged to benefit insiders. In an interview with CBS, Lewis explains how even savvy investors are at a disadvantage without access to high-frequency trade technology.
“The wonderful thing about Michael’s book Flash Boys is that it shows you what is new,” Henriques said. “High frequency trading and the use of market technology is fundamentally new.”
Too Big to Fail is the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system – and themselves – after the economic crisis that brought the world to the brink. Sorkin uses exclusively reported details to recount all the drama and turmoil to reveal how some of the most powerful people in finance and politics collectively decided the fate of the world’s economy.
“Too Big to Fail just can’t be beaten,” said Henriques. “It covers the actions at the very highest level, people in the major Wall Street banks, people in the Treasury Department, people in Congress and in the White House coping with what they thought could be the next great depression if they didn’t make the right decisions and had no clue what decisions to make.”
“The late John Brooks was an anomaly,” Henriques said. “He was someone who could make business journalism in the 50s and 60s intriguing and interesting to the readers of The New Yorker, who obviously were more interested in literary, theatrical, musical, political, and cultural developments than they were in economic and business developments.”
The Go-Go Years is a dramatic retelling of the growth stocks in the 1960s that led to market crashes a decade later. The term “go-go” stocks comes from the prominent stock trading based on high growth that happened during this time.
“I discovered his work when I was a very young journalist, and with the works of a few other people, he was one of my idols. He was one of the people that inspired me to believe that business journalism could be accessible to the general reader, and that has been my mission as a business journalist, to bridge the idea that the business section in the newspaper is what you hand to somebody else and you read the rest of it.”
A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation is an insight into why markets crash. The author attempts to shed light on this predicament through his own expertise as a member of hedge funds like Moore Capital and Ziff Brothers, as well as being the risk manager for firms on Wall Street like Morgan Stanley and Salomon Brothers. This expertise has allowed him to analyze the modern mechanics of Wall Street and what the future looks like for capital markets.
“It looks at the advent of algorithmic trading and new trading strategies, and the impact that they’ve had on market instability in a way that anybody can understand,” Henriques said. “No charts, no formulas, no Greek symbols, just a great narrative.”
