Five books on the high finance culture of the last 40 years

Andrew Lipstein is the author of Last Resort (2022), a novel “you’ll think about ... for weeks after you read the last pages” (Los Angeles Times). He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and son.

Lipstein's new novel is The Vegan.

At Lit Hub he tagged five books that "give us a window into not only the financial preoccupations of different eras, but the larger moral issues their unique cultures wrestled with.... Together they trace the history of high finance culture over the past 40 years, from the barbarous heyday of the eighties to the tech-obsessed venture capitalists of today." One title on the list:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Yes, Elizabeth Holmes is a grifter nonpareil. Yes, along with Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, she made a fool of investors and the government, showing a company valued at $9 billion to be more or less a house of cards. But the most amazing part of this story isn’t Holmes’ duplicity—it’s the complicity of everyone around her. Bad Blood is a vivid document, capturing the tech bubble in all of its frothy, fraudulent glory, with valuations based on shaky projections and all parties involved incentivized to intensify the hype. Carreyrou deftly shows how money can mold morals in the modern age, and how easily a company can wield “virtue” for its own profitable means. (Lest we forget, Theranos’ mission statement included the goal to “empower people everywhere to live their best possible lives.”)

Read about the other entries on the list.

Bad Blood is among Kathy Wang's six non-fiction titles about crime & general bad behavior in Silicon Valley.

--Marshal Zeringue