Ask HN: Book recommendations for understanding financial systems?

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Two-Lessons-Markets-Badly-e...

"Since 1946, Henry Hazlitt’s bestselling Economics in One Lesson has popularized the belief that economics can be boiled down to one simple lesson: market prices represent the true cost of everything. But one-lesson economics tells only half the story. It can explain why markets often work so well, but it can’t explain why they often fail so badly—or what we should do when they stumble. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Samuelson quipped, “When someone preaches ‘Economics in one lesson,’ I advise: Go back for the second lesson.” In Economics in Two Lessons, John Quiggin teaches both lessons, offering a masterful introduction to the key ideas behind the successes—and failures—of free markets."

2.- Most independents money managers I know, love this book;

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - by Charles Mackay http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518

https://marianamazzucato.com/publications/books/value-of-eve...

Blurb:

"Modern economies reward activities that extract value rather than create it. This must change to insure a capitalism that works for us all.

In this scathing indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Everything rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been determined and reveals how the difference between value creation and value extraction has become increasingly blurry. Mariana Mazzucato argues that this blurriness allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they were just moving existing value around or, even worse, destroying it.

The book uses case studies–from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma–to show how the foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, a difference that distorts the measurements of growth and GDP. "

Something like The Economist's Guide to Financial Markets will give you a good general overview.

Some of the recommendations on here are truly awful.

Yes, undergrad textbooks are tedious and the content varies between the misleading and wrong (and I definitely agree about learning accounting and how the plumbing works).

But it is also true that past the level of undergrad, it does get more useful. There is still a lot of dubious stuff going on, and you have zealots engaging in the holy war over which useless model is least useless. But there is also some pretty good research that helps you understand the economy.