● Balanced Asset Allocation: How to Profit in Any Economic Climate 
By Alex Shahidi
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
The conventional portfolio is prone to frequent and potentially devastating losses because it is NOT balanced to different economic outcomes. In contrast, a truly balanced portfolio can help investors reduce risk and more reliably achieve their objectives. This simple fact would surprise most investors, from beginners to professionals. Investment consultant Alex Shahidi puts his 15 years of experience advising the most sophisticated investors in the world and managing multi-billion dollar portfolios to work in this important resource for investors.

● Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History
By Barry Eichengreen
Summary via publisher (Oxford University Press)
The Great Depression and the Great Recession are the two great economic crises of the past hundred years. While there are accounts of both episodes, no one has yet attempted a sustained comparative analysis. In Hall of Mirrors, Barry Eichengreen draws on his unparalleled expertise for a brilliantly conceived dual-track account of the two crises and their consequences. Rather than telling the stories of the two crises in sequence, instead he weaves them together. He describes the two bubble-fueled buildups, then the onset of crisis, the subsequent financial and economic and collapse, the policy response, and finally the recovery. A theme of Eichengreen's narrative is that while the policy response to the Great Recession was importantly shaped by perceptions of the Great Depression – contemporary policymakers did in fact learn lessons from the Depression that enabled them, this time, to prevent the worst – they could have done better. Their failure to do so reflected a tendency to take the lessons of the Depression too literally, leading to an inability to recognize important respects in which circumstances, and specifically the structure of financial markets, had changed – precisely in response to the policies put in place due to the Depression.