Becoming a Wall Street banker is like pledging the world's most lucrative and soul-crushing fraternity. Every year, thousands of eager college graduates are hired by the world's financial giants, where they're taught the secrets of making obscene amounts of money--as well as how to dress, talk, date, drink, and schmooze like real financiers. This is the inside story of this well-guarded world. Kevin Roose, New York magazine business writer, spent...

Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, shares the epic inside story of how a working-class kid from the Nebraska prairie took on Wall Street's clubby brokerage business, busted it open, and walked away a billionaire. Joe Ricketts always had the gift of seeing what others missed. The son of a house builder, he started life as a part-time janitor, but by the age of thirty-three he saw the chance to challenge the big brokerage firms by offering Americans...

The financial establishment-banks and investment bankers, such as Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley-were the cowboys, recklessly assuming risks, leveraging up to astronomical levels, and driving the economy to the brink of disaster. In King of Capital, David Carey and John E. Morris show how Blackstone (and other private equity firms) transformed themselves from gamblers, hostile-takeover artists,...

"The United States has two separate banking systems today -- one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. How the Other Half Banks contributes to the growing conversation on American inequality by highlighting one of its prime causes: unequal credit. Mehrsa Baradaran examines how a significant portion of the population, deserted by banks, is forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services to cover...

"In this deeply personal memoir, Schwab describes his passion to have Main Street participate in the growing economy as investors and owners, not only earners. Schwab opens up about his dyslexia and how he worked around and ultimately embraced it, and about the challenges he faced while starting his fledgling company in the 1970s. A year into his grand experiment in discounted stock trading, living in a small apartment in Sausalito with his wife,...

"Will help you: understand key drivers of financial crises and principles for managing them; recognize warning signs of speculative manias that lead to asset bubbles; understand why few investors beat market indices and why index funds are preferable formost individuals and institutions; identify the major threats to U.S. economic prosperity in the twenty-first century...reveals that there is almost no financial event that is unprecedented. By understanding...