Gillian Tett's "Fools Gold" is more narrowly focused on the world of credit derivatives, the alphabet soup of CDOs and SIVs that were at the heart of the crisis. The action is seen through the prism of the derivatives team at JPMorgan, which helped create the toxic products. While Ms Tett's explanation of the technicalities is first class, the fact that JPMorgan survived the crisis better than most robs the book of some drama. One longs instead to have a similar inside view from Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, the investment banks laid low by their exposure to dodgy American housing loans.

The alternative to the structure adopted by Mr Augar and Ms Tett is to take a thematic approach. Pablo Triana's "Lecturing Birds on Flying" laments the way that mathematicians and financial economists have appeared to take over the markets. Economics is not a science like physics because humans are forever adapting their behaviour in the light of others' actions. The models devised by the maths gurus were not just unlikely to work, he argues, they also gave bankers a false sense of security, leading them to take more risks.

Mr Triana compares one widely used system, the value at risk (VAR) measure, to a passenger airbag that works 95 per cent of the time; unfortunately the other 5 per cent includes the time when the driver has an accident. Rather than rely on models which can never capture the complexity of human interaction, banks and investors should instead trust the judgment of experienced traders and managers.

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