Acumen Presents: Mihir Desai on Demystifying Finance

We see finance everywhere, from our retirement assets to our investments in housing and education. Yet, many smart people still find finance intimidating. Key ideas like insurance, leverage, risk, value creation, mergers and bankruptcies remain shrouded in mystery for the majority of people who spend their days on Main Street instead of Wall Street.

The 2008 financial crisis revealed that we could all benefit from a clearer understanding of how markets work. Yet, too often finance is taught in ways that are dry, technical, or jargon-filled.

Enter Mihir Desai. A professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, he is on a mission to restore the connection between the humanities and finance. In his book The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the world of Risk and Return, Professor Desai explores the ideas of finance from a humanities perspective. In this course, he’ll teach you the most important financial concepts using stories from books like Pride and Prejudice, the Maltese Falcon and the Bible.

This is not a personal finance course.

Instead, it will be a vivid, story-based tour of the key ideas in finance. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to converse fluently about key financial concepts, unpack financial stories in the news, and recognize financial ideas as they show up in everyday life. You’ll start to realize that, rather than being intimidating, the core practices of finance are all around us and have been ingrained in our stories for centuries.