US Economic Events Calendar

EconoDay Calendar of Economic Events

Recommended Reading/Books

RISK
- Benoit Mandelbrot : The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb : The Black Swan
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb : Fooled by Randomness
- Peter L Bernstein : Against the Odds - The Remarkable Story of Risk

INVESTMENT STRATEGY
- Benjamin Graham : The Intelligent Investor

GENERAL HISTORY
- Al Alletzhauser : The House of Nomura
- Niall Ferguson : The Ascent of Money - A Financial History of the World

2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS
- Michael Lewis : The Big Short

OIL & COMMODITIES
- Leah McGrath Goodman : The Asylum - The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
- Daniel Amman : The King of Oil - The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

BIOGRAPHIES
- John Perkins : Confessions of an Economic Hitman
- Jordan Belfort : The Wolf of Wall Street - How Money Destroyed a Wall Street Superman
- Daniel Amman : The King of Oil - The Secret Lives of Marc Rich
- Victor Niederhoffer : The Education of a Speculator

ORGANISED CRIME
- Misha Glenny : McMafia - Seriously Organised Crime
- James S Henry : The Blood Bankers - Tales from the Underground Economy

DERIVATIVES
- Satyajit Das : Traders, Guns & Money

Keynes on Inflation - The Economic Consequences of the Peace

A must-read, 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace' by John Maynard Keynes:

Available free online from Project Gutenberg.

Wikipedia Entry.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers,", who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.