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Timothy Geithner was U.S. President Barack Obama's first, and much-reviled Treasury Secretary, and prior to that president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under president George W. Bush, during the darkest days of the 2008-09 financial crisis. But after reading his account of what happened, he emerges as more of a hero, and certainly not a villain.

Jean Pisani-Ferry cogently explains the origins of the euro, the build-up of imbalances and oversights that led to the crisis, the choices European policymakers have both addressed and ignored since 2010, the evolution of the policy agenda, and...

The eurozone crisis started in Greece in 2009–10, spread into Ireland and Portugal, and, from there, quickly spread to the larger economies of Spain and Italy. By the autumn of 2011, it threatened the entire global financial system. In Europe’s Crisis, Europe’s Future, an international group of economic analysts provides an insightful view of the crisis.How did mismanagement of a crisis in a marginal economy spark such a wildfire? After all, Greece is responsible for only 2% of the eurozone’s total GDP, yet the crisis in Athens threatened to grow into a worldwide contagion.

These two books are the best on the euro crisis to have appeared in recent years.

The Beatles sang about it, Drake raps about it, major world religions warn about the danger of blindly chasing it, and according to a recent study, the average American thinks about it more often than about sex.

Last spring, people were getting all excited about Bitcoin because its value surged from a movie ticket to a fancy dinner for two in response primarily to Cypriots freaking out that their money was going to be seized by banks with the permission of their government. All of a sudden the fringe Bitcoin gold bug movement became mainstream and many journalists began writing about what Bitcoin was and why people were so excited about it. My editor challenged me to do this in a more visceral way. Rather than just writing about it, or how to get it, I would live on it for a week.

The 2010 English-language edition of Christian Marazzi’s The Violence of Financial Capitalism made a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to an expanded readership. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent events, up to and including the G20 summit in July 2010 and the broad consensus to reduce government spending that emerged from it. Marazzi, a leading figure in the European postfordist movement, argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth.