Books That Shaped Finance Tutorials
This series explores the most influential books that shaped modern finance, showing how ideas, authors, and historical context transformed our understanding of money, markets, and economic power. Each tutorial explains what the book teaches, what worked, what failed, and why it remains relevant today, using clear explanations, historical examples, and real-world insights. Rather than summaries, the series emphasizes reasoning over memorization, helping readers understand finance as a system shaped by human behavior, institutions, and ideas.
Showing 1 to 2 of 2 tutorials
Das Kapital Explained: Why Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism Still Shapes Global Finance
Das Kapital is one of the most influential and controversial books ever written about money, labor, and capitalism. Written during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx set out to explain how profits are created, why inequality emerges, and why economic systems carry internal tensions. This tutorial explores the historical conditions that shaped the book, the core ideas Marx introduced, and the parts of his analysis that proved remarkably durable. It also examines where Marx was wrong, what changed in modern economies, and why Das Kapital remains essential reading for anyone trying to understand finance, labor, and power in the modern world.
The Wealth of Nations Explained: Adam Smith's Blueprint for Modern Finance
f the first book in this series, Marx's Das Kapital, provided a critical X-ray of capitalism's stresses, then Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is its foundational anatomy textbook. Published in 1776, it was the first systematic attempt to explain how commercial societies function, grow, and create wealth. This tutorial explores the world that shaped Smith, deciphers his core concepts—from the division of labor to the invisible hand—and reveals why his framework remains the essential operating system for understanding global finance, from hedge fund strategies to international trade policy.