Roula Khalaf

Editor

The shortlisted titles for the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award are, by definition, some of the most compelling reads of 2024. For readers who missed the announcement of the shortlist, I recommend every one of the six books. Since I chair the judging panel, I can’t reveal my personal favourite and we have yet to decide on the winner. Stay tuned. I do most of the reading of the longlist over the summer. My rule, however, is to read one novel before I start. My pick this year was Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, an epic tale of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family. It has everything I love about a novel — sensitive character studies and the sweep of history.

Janine Gibson

FT WEEKEND EDITOR

If you are alive in 2024 you will know that X (né Twitter) is either haemorrhaging users or was the most important and influential spreader of misinformation during the US election campaign. Elon Musk, who bought the world’s 12th most popular social media platform for $44bn just two years ago, is either a delusional posting-addict in thrall to RTs or the man who won it for Donald Trump. And as one of X’s most enduring memes says, why not both? In 2024, where major newspapers do not bother to endorse their preferred candidates in public, a platform that does not officially at least consider itself media dominated another election campaign and its owner claimed victory. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The ballad of Elon and Donald doubtless has a few more verses to go, but in Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac have produced a deeply reported, revealing and slightly terrifying book that is considerably subtler than its subtitle. 

Frederick Studemann

Literary Editor

Much has been written about the chilling realities of Putin’s Russia. Yet, in a very crowded field, Patriot by Alexei Navalny is in a class of its own. This haunting autobiography ranges from vivid, often funny accounts of growing up in the lie-infested Soviet Union through the hopes of the post-communist years and on to Navalny’s emergence as the opposition leader prepared to stand up to state power for which he was hounded, imprisoned and poisoned. Unflinching, defiant and even hopeful, the book was published after Navalny’s death in unexplained circumstances earlier this year in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. It is — to borrow the author’s own description — a shocking and extraordinary “memorial”.

On a very different note, I enjoyed Long Island by Colm Tóibín. Sequels are often best avoided. But in this follow-up to his celebrated novel Brooklyn, Tóibín elegantly brings the story back to Ireland where he unfurls a poignant tale of paths not taken and opportunities lost.

Janan Ganesh

International politics commentator

Of the great 20th-century politicians, Zhou Enlai is probably the least documented, at least in the form of English-language biographies. In Zhou Enlai, author Chen Jian plugs the hole, perhaps too exhaustively at times. Whether the long-serving Chinese premier was Mao’s accomplice, or a bridge to modern China, is teased out over more than 700 scrupulous pages.

Nilanjana Roy

FT Weekend columnist

“Friend. What a word. Most use it about those they hardly know. When it is a wondrous thing.” Hisham Matar’s profoundly moving and unsettling novel My Friends haunted my year. He writes of exile, of friendships woven from “great affection and loyalty” but also “absence and suspicion”, and you walk with him through a London filled with the whispers of writers’ ghosts, memories and betrayal. Unforgettable.

Rana Foroohar

Global Business Columnist

I’ve long thought that most of the world’s biggest problems — from climate change to rising inequality to the challenges of autocracy and oligarchy in a post-Washington Consensus world — will require more systems thinking. This is an area that is generally the wonky purview of engineers and the military, but in his very readable book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies looks at how discrete problems, from bad business management to disastrous political decisions, are often a failure of faulty systems. A great way to think about our current moment.

Camilla Cavendish

Contributing editor and columnist

Not the End of the World is the most uplifting book I’ve read this year. Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World in Data, charts the progress being made on reducing global per capita carbon emissions and tells us what to stop stressing about and what to focus on. A call for action which is also an antidote to gloom.

Tim Harford

Undercover Economist

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman contains 28 concise essays on how to live our brief lives with less anxiety and more joy. Do you rarely see friends because the prospect of a dinner party is intimidating and exhausting? Read his note on “scruffy hospitality”, cook some pasta, and enjoy your imperfect existence with some company.

Robert Shrimsley

UK chief political commentator

Clever, funny and tragic, James is the superb retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway slave, Jim. Percival Everett wittily but devastatingly employs the literary device of elevating a secondary character from a famous novel into the lead to flesh out both Jim and the truer horrors of American slavery. Jim is not only given a full name but a rounded personality, revealed to be an intelligent, well-read man hamming up a slave patois to comfort white owners. You do not need to have read Huck Finn to enjoy this but it is a good excuse to do so.

Alice Fishburn

OPINION EDITOR

While devouring The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing’s beautifully told tale of literature, politics and horticulture, I started three lists: people to give it to immediately; writers to read immediately; plants to purchase immediately. Her account of the rigours of restoring a Suffolk walled garden is really a glorious meditation on what humanity’s Eden obsession tells us about ourselves.

Robin Harding

Asia Editor

An exemplar of the LitRPG (or Literary Role-Playing Game), a strange new literary sub-genre spawned by the internet, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman includes an AI with a foot fetish and sentient cat called Princess Donut who sends text messages in ALL CAPS. It’s very funny and was published in print for the first time this year.

Brooke Masters

US Financial Editor

If you are a big fan of books that tie together narratives across time, Elif Shafak has written a great one. There Are Rivers in the Sky uses rainfall to link the stories of the last great Assyrian king, a 19th-century Dickensian waif turned pillaging archeologist, a Yazidi refugee from the 2014 Iraqi purge and a modern-day London hydrologist.

Henry Mance

Chief features writer

The best royal memoir of recent years is Prince Harry’s Spare (seriously). Yet I was also moved by A Very Private School, an account by Charles Spencer, Harry’s uncle, of an English boarding school in the 1970s. The education was excellent, but the teachers were abusive and the separation from his parents amounted to “an amputation”. The book made me reflect on the damage done to generations of posh kids, including today many from overseas.

John Burn-Murdoch

Chief Data Reporter

With rightwing populism on the march on both sides of the Atlantic, Vicente Valentim’s The Normalization of the Radical Right presents a striking argument: that what has changed in the past decade is not the rise of reactionary views, but the breakdown of norms that kept these always-dormant views suppressed. This book more than any other has changed how I think about the seismic political and social shifts of recent years, and what might reverse them.

Enuma Okoro

Life & Arts columnist

All Fours, is a funny, quirky and fantastically mischievous and necessary novel by Miranda July. I was not always sympathetic to the main character, “a semi-famous artist” but I loved the provocative questions about how women in mid-life might consider and boldly renegotiate what they want, what they desire and what they allow themselves to create.

Anne-Sylvaine Chassany

Companies Editor

With Houris, a brutal and poignant account of the Algerian civil war, Kamel Daoud has this year become the first author from the former French colony to win the Prix Goncourt. But France’s top literary prize has come at a high personal cost: Daoud has had to flee the country, where he risks criminal charges for daring to tackle the subject.

Madhumita Murgia

Artificial Intelligence Editor

Samantha Harvey’s diminutive and dreamy Orbital, which won this year’s Booker Prize for fiction, couldn’t have felt more otherworldly when I read it in a rustic Tuscan farmhouse this past summer. This luminous novel about the lives of six astronauts as they orbit the Earth in a spacecraft is a series of snapshots of the bonds that form in strange circumstances, the joys and sorrows of being human, and a love letter to our unique planet.

Gillian Tett

Columnist and member of the editorial board

Little unites the right and left today — except, perhaps, a sense of despair about the quality of information. The right rails against the allegedly liberal bias of the “mainstream media”; the left accuses the right of deliberately unleashing mass disinformation. So, is the answer to seek more information? Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari’s thoughtful book, suggests not. He argues that more knowledge alone will not solve our problems, since so much rests on the social and political channels that it passes through. Not everyone will like Harari’s grandiose approach, and his conclusions about AI are unnerving. But it is an important perspective at a time when the info-wars seem likely to only get worse.

Books of the Year 2024

All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:

Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: FT Critics’ choice

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Donald Trump has picked Scott Bessent to be his US Treasury secretary, nominating one of his biggest financial backers as the top economic official of his second administration.

Bessent will be responsible for overseeing the president-elect’s most prominent economic pledges, including sweeping tax cuts, while maintaining the stability of the world’s largest economy, its most important bond market as well as the dollar.

The hedge fund manager’s economic philosophy seeks to bridge traditional free-market conservatism with Trump’s populism. He has defended the president-elect’s repeated threat of raising tariffs against accusations that they would upend relations with US allies and raise consumer prices, saying they are a trade negotiating tool and a way to raise government revenue.

In a statement on Friday, Trump described Bessent as “one of the world’s foremost international investors and geopolitical and economic strategists”, who was “widely respected”.

“He will help me usher in a new golden age for the United States, as we fortify our position as the world’s leading economy, centre of innovation and entrepreneurialism, destination for capital, while always, and without question, maintaining the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world.”

Trump added that with Bessent at the helm, his administration “will reinvigorate the private sector, and help curb the unsustainable path of federal debt”.

Bessent will also be responsible for steering the administration’s sanctions policy, including on Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as the rules that govern Wall Street. His appointment will need to be confirmed by the US Senate, which will be controlled 53-47 by Republicans next year.

Trump on Friday evening also selected Russell Vought to once again lead the Office of Management and Budget. “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,” Trump wrote. The president-elect also picked Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican Congresswoman from Oregon, to be his labour secretary.

Wall Street bankers across the political spectrum were digesting the news of Bessent’s appointment. They pointed out that a lot would depend on how much independence he would have to manage the economy. 

A dealmaker at a large bank said Bessent had a strong pedigree managing complex financial situations but was concerned that he would be a “puppet” of Trump.

“Bessent is a very skilled investor, he has a great track record over decades but I fear he won’t have much autonomy,” the dealmaker said.

The 62-year-old Bessent is a Wall Street veteran who has been among Trump’s most vocal advocates and closest economic advisers in recent months.

It will be his first government position. He currently runs the hedge fund Key Square Capital Management. Bessent previously worked closely with billionaires George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller.

Trump also went with a Treasury secretary who had Wall Street experience during his first term, when former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin held the post.

“There’s nobody with a better understanding of markets [than Bessent] to manage $36tn in debt, who’s a vocal advocate of the president-elect’s economic agenda, and has the stature around the world to navigate the global economic challenges we need to confront,” said Michael Faulkender, a finance professor at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business and chief economist at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.

A top corporate lawyer and longtime Democratic donor said that Trump’s decision was encouraging. “[It is a] sensible choice that will reassure the financial community. The Treasury functioned well under Mnuchin and I would expect Bessent to provide similar stability,” the lawyer said.

Apollo Global Management chief executive Marc Rowan and former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh were candidates for the Treasury role, travelling to Mar-a-Lago this week for interviews with Trump. So was Howard Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald’s chief executive, who is also co-chair of the Trump transition team. John Paulson, another billionaire hedge fund manager, had also been in the running before dropping out.

In a statement on Friday, Paulson called Bessent an “outstanding pick”.

“He has the market experience and financial acumen to successfully implement President Trump’s economic agenda.”

The nomination of Bessent, who is seen as a pragmatic pick, is among the most important of Trump’s cabinet picks and follows a number of controversial appointments, including Fox News host Pete Hegseth for defence and vaccine-sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary. The president-elect had also nominated former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to run the justice department, but he withdrew his name from consideration for the role.

Bessent, a Yale University graduate who grew up in South Carolina, will take the helm of a US economy that is on solid footing. After the worst cost of living crisis in decades, inflation has steadily declined following a period of high interest rates. Unemployment remains historically low at 4.1 per cent, keeping consumer spending strong.

Many economists have warned that Trump’s protectionist economic plans, and his pledge to deport millions of immigrants and slash taxes, could reignite inflation and dent growth — criticism that Bessent has strongly rejected.

In an interview with the Financial Times in October, Bessent framed tariffs as a “maximalist” threat that could be pared back during talks with trading partners. He also denied that the Trump administration would devalue the dollar.

“My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” Bessent told the FT, referring to Trump. “It’s escalate to de-escalate.”

But Bessent has floated more unorthodox ideas, including taking steps that would infringe on the long-standing independence of the Fed.

Speaking to rightwing ideologue and Trump ally Steve Bannon recently, he also floated cutting government spending by $1tn over the next decade.