Appropriately for a US election year, the longlist for the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award inc-l-udes an array of titles charting the strengths and weaknesses of the American corporate, economic and financial system.

William Silber’s forthcoming biography of form-er Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker sits alongside Walter Isaacson’s life of the late Apple chief executive Steve Jobs. The stories of ExxonMobil under Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson, and Ford under Alan Mulally, are tackled by, respectively, Steve Coll (Private Empire) and Bryce Hoffman (American Icon).

But tales of towering US personalities and companies were outnumbered among the 262 entries by books warning of threats to the world’s biggest economy. In this vein, the longlist includes Luigi Zingales’s warnings about US cronyism (A Capitalism for the People), and Michael Sandel’s dissection of a world where everything is for sale (What Money Can’t Buy). Philip Coggan’s Paper Promises and Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, each take different long views of the flaws in global fin-ance and the roots of power and prosperity. Guy Lawson’s Octopus focuses on the Bayou hedge fund fraud, a signature scandal of the past decade, while Charles Duhigg (The Pow-er of Habit) and John Coates (The Hour Between Dog and Wolf) explore the scientific secrets of success and failure in financial markets and beyond.