CEO Mr. Gerrit Zalm from the new Dutch ABN Bank recommends on his weblog the book
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This book is an entertaining and enlightening book, and fairly easy to read. It has an important message regarding how the world works; that the world is governed not by the predictable and the average, but by the random, the unknownable, the unpredictable -- big events or discoveries or unusual people that have big consequences. Change comes not uniformly but in unpredictable spurts. These are the Black Swans of the title: completedly unexpected and rare events or novel ideas or technologies that have a huge impact on the world. Indeed, Taleb argues that history itself is primarly driven by these Black Swans.

Another book which I personal recommend for reading is Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System (Wiley Finance)

Restoring Financial Stability is the single most comprehensive book published to date on the great credit meltdown that began in 2007 and is now nearing two years in length. The book is organized as a series of parts covering different aspects of the crisis, each of which is in turn divided into 2-3 chapters that are essentially "white papers" written by different contributing authors. The book begins with a well-written overview chapter describing the key events of the crisis up to the time of publication. The book then moves into the causes and sub-causes of the crisis, with the general thrust moving over time from descibing what happened to prescriptions for preventing future occurrences.

While the individual chapters are written by different contributors, the book reads smoothly and does not feel disjointed as is sometimes the case with books that have multiple authors. The book's organization and editing makes it seem as if it was written by a single author. While it offers much more sophisticated insight than what has generally been written in the business and financial press (let alone the general news media), I think that most readers with a decent working knowledge of financial markets will find it to be quite accessible.

On my vacation in Turkey, begin september 2009 I readed this book under a palm tree....