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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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The author's unusual background in anthropology makes her an objective observer of financial markets. Much as I enjoyed the body of the text, I found her Epilogue to be the most enlightening. In this section, she outlines the intellectual power structure that elites employ to maintain their status and dominate the rest of humanity. This information is a powerful tool for navigating and surviving "the system."
Deborah Weir, CFA
Author,
Timing the Market (John S. Wiley & Sons, ...
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Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
To see it play out helps one see how banks indiscrimately misused and gambled in the use of CDOs by using them with mortgages which J.P. Morgan would not have done. There is no history in many cases, and it wasn't like the trust built up by J.P. Morgan with its clients. The book opens wide the fact that the banks did the vast majority of this activity "off the ...
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I've now read no fewer than seven excellent books detailing the financial atrocities of 2007-9. Each takes a different spin.
British broker Philip Augar covers the historical perspective; hedge fund manager and amateur philosopher George Soros looks to epistemology; former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan provides a wide-ranging survey aimed more or less at self-exculpation; former Goldman Sachs chief and US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson breathlessly covers the regulator's perspective; ...
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Fascinating to know that Derivatives were almost regulated in the early 90s. Greenspan, Rubin and lobbyists managed to block any efforts for getting them under control. Though the book is mainly about how CDOs were mishandled by the banks, the thing I get most out of the book is that blind faith in economic dogma is really frightening, be it communism or, as in this case, self-regulation.
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Although this is too admiring an account of the JP Morgan creators of CDOs and what then became of their "innovation," it is, as others have pointed out, an excellent blow-by-blow chronology of how those particular instruments became weapons of mass financial destruction. Tett, with a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge, puts her training to good use as the FT's international finance columnist. Here, based mostly on her own reporting, she tells an important, thickly descriptive story that many others are ...
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