Michael Lewis is one of the great non-fiction authors of our time. He brilliantly tells tales involving highly technical details in ways that are entertaining and engaging, and–like any great artist–he makes the feat look easy. Lewis uses the colorful character and language of his subjects and weaves their personal stories into the greater picture.
The topic of Flash Boys is high-frequency trading (HFT). High-frequency traders utilize the fastest hardware, software, and internet connections–all carefully located–to engage in arbitrage schemes that suck billions of dollars from investors by beating their trades to the exchanges and raising the prices. What is most disturbing is how so many of the exchanges, banks, and brokers enable it, profit from it, or are complicit in it.
Flash Boys follows the men who exposed this dark underworld of Wall Street and set out to create their own alternative stock exchange that would play by its own rules, rules that are fair to investors. It also follows two other stories connected the HFT movement. This is a great story told by a great storyteller, and it is essential reading for anyone who desires a better understanding of how the world works.
This is a neat book of magazine-style business stories. There are 12 stories about 25-100 pages each. They don’t relate to each other at all, other than all being related to business, finance, and economics.
Timothy Geithner was President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2003 to 2009 and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under from 2009 to 2013. Many people would have loved to be a fly on the wall in some of the meetings that Geithner was in during the financial crisis, the Great Recession, and the recovery. Geithner provides some insights, but he is also overly concerned with addressing his critics, especially those he calls “moral hazard fundamentalists.” 
The Austrian School approach to the study economics is practical, logical, and accessible. Understanding it gives one an excellent perspective on history, philosophy, politics, business, current events, and daily life. However, there are so many thinkers one needs to explore, starting with Frédérick Bastiat, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Friederich A. Hayek. While incredibly enlightening, their works can be overwhelming in their size, depth, and dryness. They can each take quite a while to get through, and there are so many of them. Gene Callahan shrinks the central concepts from the works of Bastiat, Menger, Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek into one reasonably sized volume that is succinct and more colorfully written. 
Econ4All 