The 2013 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Shortlist: Finance & Economics

Over the course of this week, we will be posting the shortlist selections for our 8 business book categories: General Business, Leadership, Management, Entrepreneurship & Small Business, Marketing & Sales, Personal Development, Innovation & Creativity, Finance & Economics. On Monday, December 16th, we'll announce the 8 category winners! In early January, the overall winner of the 2013 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards will be awarded, so stay tuned to The Daily Blog for all the good news.

The selections for the Finance & Economics category are:

• The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin, The Penguin Press
• The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil, Princeton University Press
• The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan, Business Plus
• Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate by Rose George, Metropolitan Book
• The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This year's Finance & Economics books are a diverse group, but they all speak of the creation of new worlds. The Alchemists by Neil Irwin is the story of the American, British, and European Union central bankers unprecedented institutional response to the most recent global economic crisis, and how they essentially created money from thin air (as the alchemists of old hoped to do) to save us from another world-wide collapse. Benn Steil's The Battle of Bretton Woods documents their World War II era predecessors' creation of the old Bretton Woods system and stabilization of the world economy under American leadership after the upheaval of those crises. In The Billionaire's Apprentice, Anita Raghavan introduces us to creation of a much more insular world—the ascent of a fabulously wealthy Indian-American elite on Wall Street—and the scandal that brought down Galleon Hedge Fund and some of that elite's most famous members. Ninety Percent of Everything by Rose George chronicles another machination of modern economics—the massive container ships that make our iteration of the globalized world possible, and the life aboard those ships. Finally, we have The Physics of Wall Street, James Owen Weatherall's exploration of the history of complex financial modeling, how its flawed implementation in Markets has failed us, and how to improve the way it is done to revolutionize finance and create a new world with less risk and more accurate valuations.