Lessons From 'The Panic of 1907'

They don't lard clause upon clause and write a decent, if slightly stiff, yarn.

Moreover, the book -- released 100 years after the liquidity crisis, which encompassed everything from high-profile earthquakes to suicide -- makes the implicit case that we may be headed for the same. (Not the earthquake and suicide, but the crisis of coming from good times into a lack of liquidity.)

The book also lays out the benchmarks for what causes such liquidity panics. And whether you agree with their assessments or not, they provoke thought in investors, which is a whole lot more than you can say about most business books.

Bruner and Carr show that to reach back in history to make a compelling case for a parallel, you need a historian's nose. For doing that, the book becomes an important read, despite its flaws -- which show themselves most glaringly in those benchmarks, essential from an investor's standpoint as they are the most directly useful portion of the book moving forward.

Now, about those benchmarks. The authors make the case at the start of the introduction that market crashes and banking panics happen for a grab-bag of reasons and work back toward this theme in the book's all-important final chapter called "Lessons." Bruner and Carr dress this up as a tilt against conventional wisdom, claiming that too many believe crashes happen for one big reason or a bunch of them, all specific to that point in time.