10 Books That’ll Teach You Everything (Or at Least a Lot) About Money

Each week in TLDR, we offer up bite-size news and analysis to help you better understand money and markets. But with the holidays coming up, we thought we’d take a step back from the news cycle and suggest a few books that are a full meal of economic and business insight in case you need to round out your Christmas list. These books — a mix of newish releases and modern classics that each reveal something compelling about money — will make you smarter, no doubt, and they’re not total snoozefests, either.

The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire by Stephen R. Bown (2020) In 1665, two French fur traders met with the king of England to pitch him a deal: if the king agreed to finance their operation, they’d handle the difficult business of building relationships with Indigenous trappers and establishing a port on the remote Hudson Bay. The king obliged, and for the next 200 years, the Hudson’s Bay Company would be the most dominant economic and political force in the 3.9-million-square-kilometre tract known as Rupert’s Land, which stretched from present-day Alberta to Nunavut to North Dakota. This quick-reading history details how HBC controlled trade first by creating a complex network of outposts and then by using its pseudo-militaristic muscle to extract as much wealth as possible from the new world. Throughout, Bown brings to life incredible figures from Canadian history, including Thanadelthur, a trilingual teen interpreter who deftly negotiated a trade deal between the Cree and the Chipewyan, leading to decades of profits for European traders.

Key takeaway: HBC created the blueprint for how to be a politically influential corporate behemoth in Canada: it amassed power and wealth not through the free market but through eliminating competition. But without competition, HBC eventually became sluggish and ineffective, as have so many other companies that have followed its example.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman (2019) Jim Simons has been called the “greatest moneymaker in modern financial history,” and for good reason. For three-odd decades, his hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, made 66% in annualized returns, handily outperforming its competitors. This dynamic biography recounts how Simons, a chain-smoking former U.S. government codebreaker, notched such legendary returns by developing what we now call quantitative trading. In the early 1980s, when other firms were mostly relying on their own judgments, Simons hired physicists and other non-finance types to build algorithms that looked for patterns in markets to identify trading opportunities. These powerful algorithms picked up on changes in everything from the weather to tiny shifts in commodity consumption, and they’ve since influenced biology, quantum physics, and beyond. Simons died earlier this year at age 86, making this a timely read.

• Key takeaway: Markets are absurdly complex, so much so that even with powerful algorithms, Simons’s firm only made money on a little more than half its trades. That illustrates how difficult it is to beat the market and why most folks are better off sticking to index funds.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (2014) Each year, workers worldwide generate something like $105 trillion in output. The hitch is that more than 20% of this haul ends up in the hands of the richest 1% of people. The distribution of wealth, or “capital,” across the globe is the central concern of Piketty’s much-talked-about masterwork. In it, Piketty, a French economist, uses data to show that, for myriad reasons, assets and investments have long grown faster than worker wages, exacerbating the divide between rich and poor. He observes that the 20th century was an anomaly in terms of inequality, since union efforts, steep marginal tax rates on top earners, and the destruction wrought by two world wars helped to narrow the wealth divide dramatically. But now inequality is getting worse: in the U.S., that 1% has seen a three-fold increase in wealth over the past 50 years while the average worker has gained essentially nothing.

• Key takeaway: Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system. The trouble is when too much wealth ends up in too few hands. Piketty argues that economies would be far healthier if vast fortunes weren’t sitting idly in barons’ bank accounts and instead put to more productive uses in the hands of the many.

China Unbound: A New World Disorder by Joanna Chiu (2021) Joanna Chiu, a former Toronto Star reporter, spent more than a decade in China reporting on the country’s economic growth — and on the growing authoritarian tendencies of its leaders. Shortly after Chiu returned home to Canada in 2018, Meng Wanzhou, a Huawei exec, was arrested in Vancouver over accusations of evading U.S. sanctions. China swiftly retaliated by detaining two Canadians. These events crystallized for Chiu that China was now a global story. Her book is a riveting primer on the threat China’s government poses to other nations, and she dutifully catalogues its vast espionage efforts and human-rights abuses. But she also faults Western nations for failing to live up to their lofty democratic ideals — such as when the U.S. unlawfully invaded Iraq and used drone strikes against civilians. In doing so, Chiu argues, the U.S. modelled for China that international rules can be flouted, and the world is now suffering the consequences.

• Key takeaway: The world is in flux, and it remains unclear whether China is an ascendant power or already in the early stages of decline. In either case, Chiu’s view is that hawkishness by the West, rather than savvy geopolitical maneuverings, only risks further heightening tensions between China and the West, to the benefit of no one.

Other exceptional reads:

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller (2022): An absorbing account about the arms race to control the semiconductor supply chain — and the geopolitical consequences for the nations vying for supremacy.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (2009): A Pulitzer Prize-winning book about how four central bankers brought the global economy to its knees and kick-started the Great Depression.

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss (2020): An acclaimed essay collection that describes how strange it is to both own things and feel owned by things. If you’ve ever coveted items in a Crate & Barrel catalogue while simultaneously feeling guilty about your spending habits, read this.

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar (1990): One of the all-time great business books about how a Canadian CEO with a taste for excess struggled to retain control of his cookie-and-cigarette empire amid a leveraged buyout.

The Financial Activist’s Playbook by Jasmine Rashid (2024): A funny, practical financial guidebook that teaches readers how to become “everyday philanthropists” and how to responsibly manage their money in a way that benefits their community.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel (2020): Housel, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, explains how financial success has much to do with emotional behaviour and ingrained biases.

Written By

Sarah Rieger

Sarah Rieger is a news writer for Wealthsimple Magazine. She was previously a staff writer and editor at CBC News and HuffPost Canada. You can reach her at srieger@wealthsimple.com, or on Twitter at @sarahcrgr.