By Compiled by James Pressley and Bloomberg
With so many business books being published each month, the Bloomberg team is often asked for recommendations. Here are 30 of their favourite hardbacks published this year.
YOUR SAY: What Australian or international business books have captured your attention this year?
Cover of The Facebook Effect.
Adam Smith by Nicholas Phillipson (Yale/Allen Lane). This "intellectual biography" documents how Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" grew out of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Aftershock by Robert Reich (Knopf). The former US Labor Secretary explores how 30 years of growing income inequality helped bring on the Great Recession.
All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera (Portfolio). A detailed account of how the financial crisis bubbled up from a volatile, and bipartisan, mixture of government meddling and laissez-faire.
American Colossus by H.W. Brands (Doubleday). A big, brash narrative history that shows how capitalism triumphed over democracy between 1865 and 1900.
The Big Short by Michael Lewis (Norton/Allen Lane). The author of Liar's Poker tells the story of a loner with a glass eye and other outliers who shorted the subprime market.
Broke, USA by Gary Rivlin (HarperBusiness). Rivlin, a tireless reporter, takes a queasy journey through what he calls "Poverty Inc.," where the rich get richer by lending to the working poor.
Chasing Goldman Sachs by Suzanne McGee (Crown Business). A disturbing account of how Goldman Sachs Group Inc. became a seductively successful Pied Piper, luring rival banks down a path to destruction.
Crash of the Titans by Greg Farrell (Crown Business). An exhaustive reconstruction of how Merrill Lynch & Co. sealed its own fate by becoming more bullish on bonuses than on America.
Crisis Economics by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm (Penguin Press/Allen Lane). The prescient New York University professor explains why booms and busts occur.
Dealings by Felix Rohatyn (Simon & Schuster). A memoir of the Lazard Freres banker's life in finance and politics.
The Devil's Casino by Vicky Ward (Wiley). A look at the destructive rivalry among Richard Fuld Jr. and four other men who rose to power at Lehman in the 1980s.
Diary of a Very Bad Year by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, n+1 and Keith Gessen (Harper Perennial). Gessen, a founding editor of literary magazine n+1, presents an arresting clutch of interviews that he says he conducted with an anonymous hedge-fund manager during the crisis.
The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein (Penguin Press). A decade after capturing the hubris of Long-Term Capital Management LP in When Genius Failed, Lowenstein reports on what he calls "the mother of all bubbles."
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick (Simon & Schuster). An engrossing and scrupulously fair history of how Mark Zuckerberg built the social-networking website.
Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan (Princeton). The University of Chicago professor shows why our flawed financial order risks driving us "from bubble to bubble."
Freefall by Joseph Stiglitz (Norton/Allen Lane). The Nobel Prize-winning economist describes the flawed theories and misguided policies that wrought the meltdown.
The Hellhound of Wall Street by Michael Perino (Penguin Press). A page-turning history of how Ferdinand Pecora's investigation into the Crash of 1929 helped lawmakers curb abuses on Wall Street.
High Financier by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press/Allen Lane). The Harvard historian presents a fresh assessment of how and why Siegmund Warburg rose to fame in postwar London.
Identity Economics by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (Princeton). Decisions that shape our lives often hinge on our perceived place in society, not solely on a calculation of financial costs and benefits.
The Invisible Hands by Steven Drobny (Wiley). The co- founder of Drobny Global Advisors frets that taxpayers may end up bailing out pension plans. He blames Harvard's class of '69.
More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press/Bloomsbury). A storied history of hedge-fund luminaries, from Alfred Winslow Jones to Ken Griffin.
No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos (Wiley). A first-person account of the struggle to convince the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard Madoff's returns were mathematically impossible.
On the Brink by Henry Paulson Jr. (Business Plus). The former US Treasury secretary describes his fight to prop up the financial system.
Priceless by William Poundstone (Hill and Wang). Companies, restaurants and even artists exploit psychology to extract more cash from the rest of us, as Poundstone shows.
The Quants by Scott Patterson (Crown Business). A behind-the-scenes look at the turbulent lives of four quants, including Ken Griffin.
The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns by Alan Greenberg (Simon & Schuster). The former chairman, a self-described "bald guy wearing a bowtie," tells his side of the story.
The Sugar King of Havana by John Paul Rathbone (Penguin Press). An evocative mixture of history and memoir that traces the rise and fall of Cuban sugar magnate Julio Lobo.
13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak (Pantheon). Unless too-big-to-fail banks are broken up, they will trigger another meltdown, the authors say.
War at the Wall Street Journal by Sarah Ellison (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). An inside look at Rupert Murdoch's takeover.
The Zeroes by Randall Lane (Portfolio). A farcical memoir of the financial bubble as seen by the creator of Trader Monthly and Dealmaker.