Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis (author), Dylan Baker (narrator)

Simon & Schuster Audio, ISBN 9781442341265, October 2011

Published in 2011, when the financial crisis was still fairly fresh in everyone's mind and we had not yet reached as much recovery as we eventually achieved, this is in some respects a look into the past. Yet none of Lewis's observations from his travels through a developed world still reeling from that crisis seem to have been proven truly false. Each country got into trouble in the world of essentially free money in the madness of 2003-2008 by following its own weaknesses and temptations.

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice, by Bill Browder (author), Adam Grupper (narrator)

Recorded Books, February 2015

Bill Browder, grandson of the former head of the American Communist Party, and son of a prominent mathematician, as a teenager cast around for ways to rebel against his family. It took him a while to conclude that the obvious way was to become a capitalist, and a little bit longer to realize he had to put his considerable brains to work learning what he needed to know to do that. Once he did that, though, he overcame the obstacles he'd created for himself, and, in due course, wound up, by now a British citizen, the most successful foreign investor in Russia.

Then he started asking awkward questions about seemingly undervalued Russian companies, and what was really going on with them.