You want to understand a recession in the time it takes to read a 300-page book, or a 300-word review? Journalists, economists and traders have all taken on that challenge over the years, aiming to condense the most devastating market shocks into pithy summaries you can absorb from a sun lounger. But why are the best ones so good? What can you learn about avoiding market crashes without taking a degree in economics and can any of them help you understand the storm clouds brewing over today's global economy?
Sometimes it feels as though major market events come out of nowhere, bursting on to your TV screen (or the front page of the Financial Times) all at once. But recessions are made up of thousands of tiny triggers, which might take place in boardrooms, oilfields or at rampant parties.
In Gillian Tett's account, the key to the 2008 recession lay, in part, with the creation of complex financial products that enabled risk to mushroom throughout the financial system. Ms Tett pinpoints the moment of fevered innovation at JPMorgan when the monster was born. In the 1990s, the tight-knit derivatives team at the American bank began working on the audacious aim of removing one of the bank's major risks - that its borrowers would not repay their loans - using derivatives. Derivatives are swap contracts in which a buyer compensates a seller if an underlying loan goes into default. They were typically used in the bond market, but the steely Blythe Masters, a rare woman in the testosterone-fuelled world of investment banking, was the first to use the instruments to take major corporate loans off bank balance sheets. "For the first time in history, banks would be able to make loans without carrying all, or perhaps even any, of the risk involved themselves," says Ms Tett.