Even though Enron as a company no longer exists, there are certain lessons and anecdotes in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room that everyone should see. The epitome of greed, the courage to stand against it, and the cheesy-yet-true revelation that you can never judge a book, or a major corporation, by its cover.

Economic theories can’t explain economic events in history, say George Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller in their 2009 book, because they don’t take into account that humans are involved. Or, more specifically, humans and their “animal spirits.”

Brendan Moynihan, editor-at-large for Bloomberg News, simplifies the financial crisis and pieces together an elaborate history leading up to the event.

There are plenty of how-to-invest books but it’s hard to find valuable guides that explain the fundamentals of our economic system—capitalism. How has capitalism, which caused disasters like the Great Depression and the financial crisis of 2007-2009, survived until now?

The U.S. unemployment rate dropped for a fifth straight month in March, but economists caution there are still too many discouraged workers.

“Pension Roulette,” an investigation by Medill Reports’ Alexandra Harris, uncovers risky investments made by the Illinois TRS

I never intended to uncover a public pension fund’s risky use of OTC derivatives.

At the beginning of the last decade, I was on the verge of graduating from an engineering program and pretty much clueless about what I would do next. I was without a job and with strictly average college grades.

That was until I got caught up in the dot-com bubble.

Liaquat Ahamed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lords of Finance” weaves international exchange rates, foreign reserves and the inter-war period’s “barbarous relic” – gold – together from the vantage point of four men who directed the fates of millions toward the granddaddy of all economic crises: The Great Depression.

William Cohan’s House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street chronicles, play-by-play, the demise of the firm that had survived the Great Depression, 1987 stock market crash and dot-com bubble burst.

Alan Greenspan's "The Age of Turbulence" provides an in-depth expose on many economic issues of our time. (David Noell/MEDILL)

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