Book of the week: The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman

(Morrow, $28)

This inside look at the New York Merc might overinflate the exchange’s importance, said Kirkus Reviews. Author Leah McGrath Goodman focuses on energy markets—a business NYMEX got into only in the late 1970s—and repeatedly asserts that the rowdy traders who worked the floor during its heyday influenced oil prices more than major oil-producing nations did. She had “remarkable access to key players,” though, so it’s hard to dismiss her accounts of deals made by traders loaded up on drugs or alcohol. In fact, she “nails the culture,” said Bryant Urstadt in Bloomberg Businessweek. And worse than this gang’s taste for the wild life was their tendency to bend laws at the expense of their customers and, arguably, the broader public. Eventually, they “traded themselves into oblivion” by refusing to adapt their crude world to computerized markets. Today, the NYMEX oil pit is largely symbolic. Its traders quietly—and presumably soberly—execute orders on laptops.

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