Ask HN: Book recommendations for understanding financial systems?
Somewhat meta comment, when I read all the conflicting recommendations here (seriously, for almost all recommendations there’s an anti-recommendation somewhere in this thread), it makes me question the value to me in really trying to understand the financial system.<p>I mean, I’m not completely financially illiterate. I understand compound interest. I stick with sinking most of my money into passive investing, saving x months of expenses in checking for surprises, and not accumulating any debt.<p>Every now and then I think about getting back into value investing (it was fun in high school) which is a little more active, but the effort required to understand this system seems enormous&#x2F;impossible. There are simplified expositions of how to read a balance sheet, but then I run into weird edge cases of financial trickery that I’d never be aware of. So I figure I can’t compete with pros and passive investing seems like a reasonable enough approximation in the long run.<p>When I compare it to all of the other stuff I could learn or skills I could acquire in the same time, so far “learning about the financial system” is so <i>messy</i> and uncertain to me that I never really pursue it.<p>Has anybody run into this issue? What did you decide?