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From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a credit crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool's Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown.
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This is the best I've read on the origins of our financial crisis. Young investment bankers Peter Hancock and Blythe Masters tries to find a way to reduce the capital requirements of their bank JP Morgan back in 1994. They find a solution: sell the riskiest parts of the loans (now known as CDOs), just keeping the safest part. JPMorgan even insured the safest of the safest - so called super senior - at well known AIG.
JPM however, only employed the credit derivatives on corporate debt. ...
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This book is pretty good, but the best business book of the decade is Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle (John Rolfe, Peter Troob). It's an awesome, quick read and given that it was written almost a decade ago, but is amazingly prescient about just what a useless, self-serving job investment banking is, and how bankers add very little value to the world. The authors just released a new edition, with an afterword focused on the financial crisis. You can read it in one or two ...
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An undoubtedly interesting account of the unwritten ties among financial institutions shaped by the enormous growth of credit derivatives market combined with mortgage securitization.
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I think Fool's Gold is a MUST-READ for anyone wanting to know why the economy tanked in 2008 and is STILL today at risk. Before I read the book, I had heard about derivatives many times on the news on tv and the radio as other people had, but I only remembered them being explained as "hedges" and were complex financial instruments that were too complex for the common person to understand but were considered "reliable" risk instruments. I never dreamed they played such a huge role in the economy. ...
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Good account of the development of credit/mortgage derivatives and the role they played in the global financial crisis. Gillian Tett tells the story from the creation of derivatives as a way to spread risk and ends with the rampant abuse of concentrating it. Without the historical data to support the amount of risk that was taken, financial disaster ensues. Regulators are exposed as turning a blind eye to everything that was going on. I could do without all the financial jargon, but I thought the book ...
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