It's not that the inner workings of financial systems are obscure, but rather that there is so much misinformation around. Ask a simple question like "how does

It's not that the inner workings of financial systems are obscure, but rather that there is so much misinformation around. Ask a simple question like "how does money work" and you will hear responses, in very loud and belligerent voices, from the gold-standard crowd, the full-reserve banking crowd, the anti-Fed crowd, the Rolling Stone-influenced true believers, the hyperinflation fearmongers, the deflation fearmongers, Austrian economics true believers, Randists, socialists, And most of them are wrong. I don't really feel like addressing them all, or at all, but you should see most of them are wrong because most of them are mutually contradictory. About the only thing the have in common is an irrational fear of banks, as if banks are breaking into homes and stealing money from single mothers. The signal to noise ratio is very high. I'm not aware of any book that describes all the major parts of finance in one go, but Warren Buffet's shareholder letters (which have been collected in book form) are a good place to start. He explains so clearly what business is and is not that I think it will arm one with a good signal-to-noise filter. I think the hacker feels that highs, lows, Jim Cramer's screaming, stock charts, naked shorts, uptrends/downtrends, and all that other stuff is a basket of canards, but is unable to articulate this; armed with the knowledge of how and why exactly public corporations work and what their stock is for, he should be ready to use the same patterns of knowledge to tackle the rest of finance.