Last week's financial-market gyrations sent me back to one of my favorite books about the crash. Its wisdom seems freshly relevant. "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism" by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller (both Nobel laureates) was published in 2009. (I reviewed it for the Financial Times.) It was mostly written before the recession, but events didn't make it seem out of date -- rather the opposite. The book, I find, only improves with age. Last Wednesday saw U.S. government bond prices spike and the steepest intraday fall in the Standard & Poor's 500 ... (full story)