Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson
The Long and Short of It - John Kay
A great place to look is the second hand study books for professional qualifications like the CFA, Chartered Banker and so on
The Long and Short of It - John Kay
A great place to look is the second hand study books for professional qualifications like the CFA, Chartered Banker and so on
Anything technical (mathematical finance) is really not going to provide a foundation without the historical why of the instruments creation and use. One you have that, the most efficient way to understand it after would be with Quantlib (https://www.quantlib.org/docs.shtml)
There is a lot of middle brow commentary (krugman, piketty, reinhard/rogoff, dalio, taleb, etc) that will be entertaining and philosophical, but only that. The guts of economics (Keynes, Galbraith, Mises/Hayek) are very dense, and provide a very narrow, depth first plunge into something you won't be able to apply well without a more complete education.
Functional grasp of (re)insurance, securitization, liquidity, and the bond/debt markets is the best royal road, I"d say.