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The Economist Guide to Financial Markets: Why They Exist and How They Work (Economist Books) Paperback – January 28, 2014

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher The Economist
• Publication date January 28, 2014
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.88 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 1610393899
• ISBN-13 978-1610393898
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Economist; 6th edition (January 28, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1610393899
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1610393898
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.88 x 8.5 inches
• #39 in Bonds Investing (Books)
• #83 in Commodities Trading (Books)
• #919 in Finance (Books)

About the author

Marc levinson.

Marc Levinson is an independent historian, economist, and author. He spent many years as a journalist, including a stint as finance and economics editor of The Economist. He later worked as an economist at JP Morgan Chase, managed a staff advising Congress on transportation and industry issues at the Congressional Research Service, and served as senior fellow for international business at the Council on Foreign Relations. For more information, check out his website at www.marclevinson.net.

Customer reviews

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• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 59% 23% 11% 5% 2% 2%

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Customers say

Customers find the content excellent, factual, and well thought out. They also say the book is easy to understand and read.

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Customers find the book's content excellent, giving some basic information about financial markets. They also say it has clear examples and plenty of statistics to back up its points. Readers also say the book is factual and well thought out.

"...It covers nearly all the different financial markets and gives a good amount of detail to how they work, what common used words mean and important..." Read more

"A very well-written, informative , and affordable (appropriately) introduction to financial markets. Covers stocks, bonds, options, derivatives...." Read more

"This book is the probably the best introductory resource to a complex topic...." Read more

"This is an excellent way to gain familiarity with financial markets -- the terms, financial structures, how certain structures might be used...." Read more

Customers find the book easy to understand and read, with an easy vocabulary. They also say it's a great detailed general basic guide to the world's financial markets.

"This book gives some basic information about financial market. It is very basic and uses easy vocabulary so that it's quite easy to understand and..." Read more

"I knew nothing about financial markets before this book. It is a very simple and easy book for you to start understanding the financial market..." Read more

" Easy to read book that describes in detail how financial markets work." Read more

" Great detailed general basic guide to the world's financial markets..." Read more

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A selection of novels to read this spring

We review six recent works of fiction.

T HOUSANDS OF new books land on the desk of the Culture editor at The Economist each year, but only a select few are reviewed. Among the novels chosen for our reviewers’ attention so far this year are six works of fiction that make up an eclectic library. The first is a crime story about sex, race and the abuse of power on campus. In the next the ghosts of Trinidad’s past haunt the island. Our third is a story of middle age, femininity and desire. Another is a Hindu epic made more poignant by its author’s recent ordeal. Our fifth pick is a lavish tableau of slaughter and adventure that stretches from the trenches of the first world war to occupied Shanghai. The final book on our list is a weird yet wonderful novel set in a freezing and abandoned research station. Dive in.

I Have Some Questions for You. By Rebecca Makkai. Viking; 448 pages; $28. Fleet; £16.99

In 2018 Bodie Kane, a film professor and podcaster, returns to the Granby School, her alma mater, to teach. She sets her podcasting students a project related to the school. One of them, Britt, chooses the killing in 1995 of Thalia Keith, a pretty, rich, popular white pupil—and Bodie’s former room-mate. The school’s black athletics coach was convicted of her murder. Britt thinks he is innocent. Bodie becomes obsessed with the crime, making inquiries into Thalia’s death by tracing her last movements, evaluating suspects and sifting alibis. Meanwhile, she wrestles with demons of her own, from losing both her father and brother in childhood to her unhappy years at Granby. The book is particularly compelling when she interrupts her narrative at routine intervals to address the “you” of the novel’s title. “I Have Some Questions for You” raises lots of them. Read our full review .

Hungry Ghosts. By Kevin Jared Hosein. Ecco; 336 pages; $30. Bloomsbury; £16.99

Kevin Jared Hosein’s latest novel deftly merges the living and the dead. Its “Hungry Ghosts” are spectres of the Indian labourers, shipped to Trinidad to toil on sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery in 1833, which haunt the island’s defunct estates. Mr Hosein joins a line of Indian-Trinidadian writers, including V.S. Naipaul , who have grappled with the history of indentured labour. “Passage”, his short story of 2018, told of a Trinidadian family who illegally cremated a child in the early 2000s. This book darts back to the 1940s to explore the Indian mythology that underpins such rituals. The narrative unfolds in a sugar-cane barrack, beside a river “black with the ashes of babies”. The ghost of a dead infant cremated by her mother is “a preta —a hungry ghost”, her spirit cursed with an insatiable appetite. Through the gloom, the author’s bravura style illuminates the story. Read our full review .

My Nemesis. By Charmaine Craig. Grove Atlantic; 208 pages; $26 and £12.99

Charmaine Craig’s taut, bristling and psychologically profound third novel is the story of a seductive friendship that threatens to upend two homes. But “My Nemesis” is really about the unwieldy needs and desires of middle age, “with death looming on one side, disappointment on the other, and nothing but a Sisyphean wheel of activities supporting the structure of one’s present”. A successful memoirist who writes books about Albert Camus , Tessa has a crush on a new friend, a philosophy professor named Charlie. Both are married but there is a charge to their long, wine-soaked, moonlit chats. Tessa is a solipsist who misunderstands herself and a feminist who holds other women, especially Charlie’s wife, in contempt. Through him she experiences the invigoration of desire, which can seem unbearably enticing when life feels short. Read our full review .

Victory City. By Salman Rushdie. Random House; 352 pages; $30. Jonathan Cape; £22

In Salman Rushdie’s 15th novel , a storyteller survives a sadistic assault. In its aftermath she reflects that “terrible things happened” yet “life on earth was still bountiful, still plenteous, still good.” Sir Salman had completed “Victory City” before he was stabbed by a jihadist. But the book’s defiance is poignant since the author narrowly avoided the fate decreed for him by an Iranian fatwa of 1989 . Pampa Kampana, the Indian storyteller-queen at the heart of the book, conjures the empire of Bisnaga into being by words alone. Cursed with longevity she directs its course over two centuries as queen consort, regent, minister and sorceress. Pampa also battles sectarians and fundamentalists. Bisnaga’s fate tracks the real-life 15th-century Hindu empire of Vijayanagar, which means “victory city”. With history on one flank and fantasy on the other, Sir Salman gallops down the generations. Intrigue, exile, love and murder propel fast-flowing, wittily written chapters. Read our full review .

The World and All That It Holds. By Aleksandar Hemon. MCD ; 352 pages; $28. Picador; £18.99

“You go to sleep in one world, wake up in another,” muses the narrator of Aleksandar Hemon’s fourth novel. Something similar happened to the Sarajevo-born author. In 1992 the implosion of Yugoslavia shattered his Bosnian homeland and left him stranded in America. He weathered hard knocks to emerge as an English-language writer of verbal agility. Migration, dispossession and their legacies run through his work . “The World and All That It Holds” is a story of love, hope and survival that traverses Eurasia and the 20th century. In June 1914 an assassin’s bullets slay the Habsburg heirs in Sarajevo. Soon after, a Jewish pharmacist falls in love with a Muslim fellow Sarajevan. Their secret passion spans decades of mayhem as the story leaps across wars and years in a splintered, lyrical chronicle. Read our full review .

The Thing in the Snow. By Sean Adams. William Morrow; 288 pages; $27.99 and £22.95

​​Sean Adams’s second book, “The Thing in the Snow”, has a small cast, a bare-bones backdrop and a threadbare plot. Yet it is by no means insubstantial. Beneath the minimalism is a fiendish mystery and a sharp satire shot through with offbeat charm. Hart is one of three caretakers at the Northern Institute, an abandoned research facility in the frozen back of beyond . Every week he receives fresh provisions along with a new set of mundane assignments. But the caretakers’ routine is interrupted when they spot a small black object in the snowscape outside. Meanwhile, the team encounter other disturbances (flickering lights, “autobiographical confessions” scrawled under tables). Hart, increasingly unmoored from reality, takes matters into his own hands by venturing outdoors, and off-limits, to investigate. Readers who prefer conventional narratives should look elsewhere. Others will find this deliberately opaque novel baffling and beguiling in equal measure. Read our full review .  ■

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