The Wisdom of Finance

Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return

De: Mihir Desai

Narrado por: Mihir Desai

Finance is shrouded in mystery for outsiders, while many insiders are uneasy with the disrepute of their profession. How can finance become more accessible and also recover its nobility?

Harvard Business School professor Mihir Desai takes up the cause of restoring humanity to finance. With deft wit, he draws upon a rich knowledge of literature, film, history, and philosophy to explain finance's inner workings.

Through this creative approach, he shows that outsiders can easily access the underlying ideas and insiders can reacquaint themselves with the core values of their profession. This combination of finance and the humanities creates unusual and illuminating pairings: Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope are guides to risk management; Jeff Koons becomes an advocate of leverage; and Mel Brooks' The Producers teaches us about fiduciary responsibility.

In Desai's vision, the principles of finance also provide answers to critical questions in our lives: bankruptcy teaches us how to react to failure, the lessons of mergers apply to marriages, and the Capital Asset Pricing Model demonstrates the true value of relationships. The Wisdom of Finance is a wholly unique book, offering an enlivening new perspective on one of the world's most complex and misunderstood professions.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2017 Mihir Desai (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc

An enjoyable read

This isn’t a detailed technical read and so if you’re searching for ‘meat’, this is not the book for you. However if you’re looking for an overview of how concepts central to Finance today have evolved from human experience, and therefore Finance has clear parallels and connections with the real world of human endeavour, this is a good read.

The rest of my audible library is filled with more technical, ‘hard’ books but I’m very glad I have this book in my library to weave it all together and to put Finance in a relevant, real context.

Insightful and inspirational

I had been waiting for this book to be available in my country. Approcing and explaining finance intuitively is art that Mihir Desai masters. As is shown in the book the phenomenons of finance are intertwined in life in so many ways. If more professors could teach by shedding light on their subjects linkage to other fields, enlightenment would be easier to achieve.