Review by James Pressley

BRUSSELS (Bloomberg) - As Wall Street played hide-and-seek with toxic assets during the panic of 2007, HSBC Holdings plc. opted for a more straightforward accounting.

It was November, and HSBC decided to bail out two structured investment vehicles (SIV) by taking $45 billion of their assets onto its own books. Other banks followed, and plans for a "SuperSIV" - remember that lead balloon? - were withdrawn.

HSBC chairman Stephen Green skates past this turning point in his book "Good Value". Yet I kept thinking about it while reading his reflections on how to rebuild trust in global capitalism. Though one can question why HSBC joined the SIV game to begin with, the bank set the right precedent that day.

The depth and breadth of books on the Great Credit Crackup continue to surprise me. The pile on my desk today ranges from Green's meditation on money and morality to Jim Collins's "How the Mighty Fall", a brisk look at why great companies stumble. Both explore the dark side of markets.

Green's book presents a somewhat amorphous melange of chapters on the history and ontology of capitalism and trade. His broad message is nonetheless clear: Human nature - our inherent desire to explore and exchange - is what propelled us into a globalised, urban world.

What is globalisation, after all, except an extension of the impulse that led Homo sapiens to spread across the planet from our early home in East Africa, as documented on the digital map "Journey of Mankind"?

As for capitalism, Green shows why it remains our best bet for improving mankind's material wealth.

"Capitalism is not just another 'ism' in the sense of communism, socialism or fascism," he says. "The propensity to venture and trade is the default mode of human economic interaction."

Green isn't naive about capitalism. With the good comes the bad. Like Faust, we're tempted to strike a bargain, seeking "immediate and undiluted pleasure/power/sex/money", he writes. Yet psychology tells us that humans also yearn for the kind of recognition that flows from "an integrity based on honesty, trust and a real desire to exchange value for value", he says.

Green is familiar with both God and mammon. An ordained priest in the Church of England, he can afford more than communion wine. HSBC paid him 1.3 million pounds ($2.1 million at current rates) in salary and benefits last year, according to the bank's annual report.

Though his dual role draws the usual gibe about a rich man trying to get into heaven, Green comes across here as a deep thinker wrestling with contradictions that beset us all.

"Good Value" is from Allen Lane in the UK and (207 pages, £25). It will be released by Atlantic Monthly Press in the US in February (224 pages, $25).

Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great" and "Built to Last", specialises in studying why outstanding companies are, well, outstanding. In "How the Mighty Fall", he turns to what he calls "the dark side" - why great companies crash.

This may seem morbid, "like studying train wrecks", he says. Yet even stalwarts like International Business Machines Corp. "can stumble, badly, and recover", he writes. His aim in studying the blunders is to help those that are sliding downhill to reserve course.

Combing through documents and financial data stretching back more than 70 years, he and his researchers identified 11 great companies that came to grief at some point. The fallen stars included Bank of America (before it was acquired by NationsBank Corp.), Motorola Inc. and Rubbermaid Inc.

The selection was made in 2005, placing the meltdown of one "good-to-great" company, Fannie Mae, beyond the scope of this study (except in an appendix). Even so, the theme is timely.

Collins and his colleagues identified five stages of decline: hubris born of success; undisciplined pursuit of more; denial of risk and peril; grasping for quick salvation; and capitulation to irrelevance or death.

Institutional decline, he says, is "like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages". So he begins by describing how Motorola slipped into the hubris trap with its pride and joy, the sleek StarTac cell phone, in the mid-1990s. The snag: It used analog technology just as wireless carriers began demanding digital, Collins writes.

As for the undisciplined pursuit of more, recall how Rubbermaid set itself a goal of introducing "at least one new product per day, seven days a week", as Collins puts it. It wound up choking on new products, he says.

What should executives do when things get grim? Stick with your core purpose, Collins says, and heed what Winston Churchill said: "Never give in".

"How the Mighty Fall" is from HarperCollins in the US and from Random House in the UK (222 pages, $23.99, £15.99).