5 Best Financial Books to Read During a Recession

The impact of a recession on workers’ pockets can be significant. Job loss and reduced income can lead to financial difficulties, and businesses may also cut benefits or freeze wages, which reduces the amount of money available to workers.

During a recession, it’s not uncommon for people to feel financial pressure. However, it’s important to see this time as an opportunity for growth. Through learning about finance and economics, you can gain a better understanding of the current economic climate and make smart financial decisions.

Here are five books that can help you enhance your knowledge of the economic issues we are facing and be more equipped to handle the future.

1. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

The Big Short by Michael Lewis is a #1 New York Times bestseller that tells the story of the 2008 financial crisis, specifically focusing on the individuals and firms who were able to profit from the housing market’s collapse.

The book provides a firsthand account of the events leading up to the crisis and offers insight into the workings of Wall Street and the financial industry.

It’s written in a character-driven narrative and brimming with indignation and dark humor. This book is a fitting sequel to his #1 best-selling Liar’s Poker and provides an intriguing and compelling story of the unlikely individuals and firms who recognized the potential collapse of the real estate market and profited greatly from it.

2. The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure? by Robert L. Hetzel

The author draws on his extensive knowledge of the Federal Reserve System and monetary history to argue that the main cause of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 was the Federal Reserve’s failure to ease monetary policy aggressively in the summer of 2008.

He explains how contractionary monetary policy turned a moderate recession caused by energy prices and housing sector shocks into a serious economic contraction.

This book is an immensely rewarding read for serious students of central banking, monetary economics, and macroeconomic performance. It will come as a surprise to many readers and challenge the conventional view that a massive financial market failure caused the recession of 2008-2009.

3. The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse

Steven Greenhouse takes a fresh, probing, and often shocking look at the stresses and strains faced by American workers as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has shriveled.

The book tells the stories of software engineers, hotel housekeepers, call center workers, and janitors as it explores the reasons why many corporations are intent on squeezing their workers dry.

The book delves into the economic, business, political, and social trends, such as globalization and the influx of immigrants that have fueled the squeeze. The author also examines companies that are generous to their workers, providing models for all of corporate America and presents a series of pragmatic, ready-to-be-implemented suggestions on what government, business, and labor should do to alleviate the squeeze.

4. The money illusion by Scott Sumner

“The Money Illusion” by Scott Sumner is a book-length work on market monetarism written by its leading scholar. The book argues that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong.

Instead, the author claims that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet.

The book is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, and its leading voice in economics writes it. It is based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, making it highly accessible and easy to understand. It lays the groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.

5. Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze

This book by Adam Tooze is a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything. The book deftly weaves finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative.

The author provides a panoramic and synthetic overview of the current crisis by focusing on finance and business and sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are.

Tooze’s special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from local hospitals to the World Bank.

He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics, what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic.