A hot topic

TRENDS: Are you ready to start your Christmas shopping? Current trends show that books on finance and economics are this year’s holiday hit.

One example of an increasingly popular business book is The Great Crash: 1929 by Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006). A year ago, the book was selling just a few copies a month, says Myles Hunt, managing director of the financial publisher Harriman House in Petersfield, England.

Now Galbraith's book is in the top 100 on his list of best-selling titles. People want to understand what happened in earlier downturns in the hopes of learning what might come next: “When JK Galbraith is selling well, you know the economy is doing badly,” Hunt told The Daily Telegraph.

"When JK Galbraith is selling well, you know the economy is doing badly."

Another book that is on Christmas lists is The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb (see Business Spotlight 1/2008). In the book, Taleb explains that some events are simply unpredictable. He claims that the current banking crisis is not a black swan, but was caused by incompetent financial management.

Taleb says he saw the crash coming. In The Black Swan, published in early 2007, he wrote: “The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard.”

Taleb on the financial crisis