Effective fiscal policy must incorporate basic financial concepts, such as opportunity costs and economic return.

FORBES: The Policy Value Gap, Part 1: A Fiscal Perspective

Carl Richards, a financial planner in Park City, Utah, has a knack for taking complex financial concepts down to their simplest form.

FORBES: A Couple of Interesting Short Books

My theory is many people understand financial basics and even more sophisticated financial concepts, but they just have a hard time applying them to their own financial lives.

FORBES: Three Key Investment Concepts Everyone Needs to Know

Consequently, it is not surprising that investors do not understand advanced financial concepts such as differences between stocks and bonds, the role of the stock market, and the value of portfolio diversification.

FORBES: Educating a Nation of Financial Illiterates

Ideas such as financial planning and insurance coverage can be foreign concepts to those from families or home countries where it was not common.

FORBES: Big Data Shows The Growing Influence of Hispanics Will Change Business Models

The banker's philosophy about making credit decisions was to use the concepts of asset enhancement and liabilities reduction as a framework for looking at financial structure and power.

FORBES: Should You Enhance Your Assets Or Reduce Your Liabilities?

But Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder expands on the concepts in Fooled and its follow-up The Black Swan and goes far beyond financial markets into a more general theory of randomness and volatility and their importance in life and nature.

FORBES: Nassim Taleb's 'Antifragile' Celebrates Randomness In People, Markets

The Shariah explains in detail the Islamic concepts of money and capital, the relationship between risk and profit and the social responsibilities of financial institutions and individuals.

FORBES: South Dakota's Ill-Considered Attack On Islamic Financing