Long Term Capital Management

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pages: 206 words: 70,924

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton by Colin Read

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of penicillin, discrete time, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, martingale, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Works Progress Administration, yield curve

But everybody understood that this company was the most theoretically sophisticated investment house ever created. That was their calling card, and investors clamored to have Long Term Capital Management invest their wealth. These financial theorists understood one thing. Their models typically assume that there are zero transaction costs. We might consider a 180-person firm to be expensive to operate, but the initial funding of the firm represented more than $5 million invested per employee. 168 The Rise of the Quants Long Term Capital Management used the facilities of others, such as Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, and the company was registered in the Cayman Islands to reduce regulatory overhead and minimize tax consequences.

We might consider a 180-person firm to be expensive to operate, but the initial funding of the firm represented more than $5 million invested per employee. 168 The Rise of the Quants Long Term Capital Management used the facilities of others, such as Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, and the company was registered in the Cayman Islands to reduce regulatory overhead and minimize tax consequences. So that they could avoid the regulation imposed on mutual funds, Long Term Capital Management was organized as a hedge fund, under the Investment Company Act of 1940, which imposes little oversight but allows the admission of only very well-heeled millionaires who understood the risks of a highly leveraged strategy and could afford to lose some money on occasion. The organization was also brand new, so it did not suffer from organizational creep as had other older companies in the business. Long Term Capital Management was designed to operate lean, which was going to be an essential element for its strategy – to be able to trade quickly and at very low cost, so that it could make arbitrage profits based on perceived price discrepancies measured in cents rather than nickels or dimes.

These differences in liquidity may be slightly more pronounced even between two trading centers located in different time zones and thousands of miles apart. Long Term Capital Management developed a strategy to capitalize on these differences. It could even do so with almost no invested capital, by buying the thinly traded slightly aged bonds and at the same time short selling the new issue bonds to raise the funds. This way, it could afford to trade very The Nobel Prize, Life, and Legacy 169 large volumes of each, and make perhaps only pennies per bond, but over millions of bond contracts. These strategies were wildly successful at first. Because Long Term Capital Management had to front little money on these covered transactions, its equity grew to almost $5 billion within four years and it had borrowed to purchase contracts worth almost $130 billion.


pages: 198 words: 53,264

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

Michael Mauboussin has written about this idea many times, and he calls it the paradox of skill. The takeaway is that there is a lot of skilled market participants; so, intelligence alone is not enough. Other skills are required. Genius and its limitations are exemplified in no better way than by studying John Meriwether and his band of Einsteins at Long‐Term Capital Management. John Meriwether founded Long‐Term Capital Management in 1994 and before that he enjoyed a legendary two‐decade career as head of the fixed‐income arbitrage group and vice chairman at Salomon Brothers. At Salomon, he surrounded himself with some of the brightest minds in the industry. Michael Lewis, who began his career at Salomon Brothers, wrote in the New York Times, “Meriwether was like a gifted editor or a brilliant director: he had a nose for unusual people and the ability to persuade them to run with their talents…Meriwether had taken it upon himself to set up a sort of underground railroad that ran from the finest graduate finance and math programs directly onto the Salomon trading floor.

Lowenstein, When Genius Failed. 10. Loomis, “A House Built on Sand.” 11. Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, 94. 12. Ibid., 127. 13. Roger Lowenstein, “Long‐Term Capital Management: It's a Short‐Term Memory,” New York Times, September 7, 2008. 14. Lewis, “How the Eggheads Cracked.” 15. Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, 339. 16. Peter Truell, “Fallen Star Manager,” New York Times, September 9, 1998. 17. Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, 120. 18. Ibid., 126. 19. Lowenstein, “Long‐Term Capital Management.” 20. Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, 180. 21. Ibid., 192. 22. Ibid., 80. 23. Quoted in Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, 64. 24.

His band of wizards would became the most powerful, profitable group inside of Salomon Brothers. In a year in which John Gutfreund, CEO, earned $3.5 million, Meriwether was reportedly paid $89 million.4 But after a scandal at the Treasury rocked the bank, Meriwether was forced to resign. Shortly thereafter, his loyal protégés would follow. Meriwether launched Long‐Term Capital Management with two giants of financial academia at his side, who would both later become Nobel Laureates. One was Robert Merton, who earned a bachelor of science in engineering mathematics from Columbia University, a master of science from the California Institute of Technology, and his doctorate in economics from MIT.


pages: 584 words: 187,436

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deal flow, do well by doing good, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, High speed trading, index fund, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine translation, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, operational security, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule

Thus, a position with a standard deviation of six basis points would not fall by more than about fifteen basis points in 99 percent of cases, or on ninety-nine days out of a hundred. 19. Rosenfeld, Harvard Business School presentation. See also Perold, “Long-Term Capital Management.” 20. For example, at the time of the Bank of China party, LTCM’s leverage was about nineteen to one—extraordinarily high relative to most other hedge funds. But, according to the firm’s calculations, LTCM’s value at risk was $720 million, and its $6.7 billion in capital was more than enough to absorb that. See Perold, “Long-Term Capital Management.” 21. Many hedge funds borrowed cheaply by financing positions in the repo market with overnight money. Long-Term was willing to pay more in order to lock the money up for six to twelve months.

But by 1988, when Asness arrived in Chicago, Fama was leading the revisionist charge: Along with a younger colleague, Kenneth French, Fama discovered non-random patterns in markets that could be lucrative for traders. After contributing to this literature, Asness headed off to Wall Street and soon opened his hedge fund. In similar fashion, the Nobel laureates Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, whose formula for pricing options grew out of the efficient-markets school, signed up with the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Andrei Shleifer, the Harvard economist who had compared the efficient-market theory to a crashing stock, helped to create an investment company called LSV with two fellow finance professors. His coauthor, Lawrence Summers, made the most of a gap between stints as president of Harvard and economic adviser to President Obama to sign on with D.

Foreshadowing future financial panics, the turmoil spread from the United States to Japan, Europe, and the emerging world; several hedge funds sank, and for a few hours it even looked as though the storied firm of Bankers Trust might be dragged down with them. As if this were not warning enough, the world was treated to another hedge-fund failure four years later, when Long-Term Capital Management and its crew of Nobel laureates went bust; terrified that a chaotic bankruptcy would topple Lehman Brothers and other dominoes besides, panicked regulators rushed in to oversee LTCM’s burial. Meanwhile, hedge funds wreaked havoc with exchange-rate policies in Europe and Asia. After the East Asian crisis, Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, lamented that “all these countries have spent 40 years trying to build up their economies and a moron like Soros comes along with a lot of money to speculate and ruins things.”10 And so, by the start of the twenty-first century, there were two competing views of hedge funds.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Their decisions to be in or out of the market were set in motion long before the unexpected event of September 11 happened. Although Enron, the California energy crisis, and September 11 are vivid illustrations of the zero-sum game with trend followers as the winners, the story of Long-Term Capital Management in the summer of 1998 may be the best trend following case study. Event #3: Long-Term Capital Management Collapse Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund that went bust in 1998. The story of who lost has been told repeatedly over the years; however, because trading is a zero-sum game, 151 152 Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets exploring the winners was the real story.

., Jr, 62 Kerkorian, Kirk, 111 Killian, Mike, 125 Kingman, Dave, 143, 183-184 Klingler, James, 107 Klopenstein, Ralph, 39 Knapp, Volker, 393 Knoepffler, Alejandro, 273 Koppel, Ted, 117 Kovner, Bruce, 62, 282, 285, 289 Kozloff, Burt, 16 Kroc, Ray, 377 Kurczek, Dion, 393 kurtosis (statistics), 228 Lange, Harry, 111 Lao Tsu, 195 “law of small numbers,” 195 Le Bon, Gustave, 201 leadership traits, 201 “Learning to Love Non-Correlation” (research paper), 112 Lector, Hannibal, 221 Lee Kuan Yew, 205 Lee, Sang, 125 Leeson, Nick, 124-125, 168-172 Lefevre, Edwin, 91 Legg Mason, 285-286 Leggett, Robert, 241 Lehman Brothers, 153 Leonardo da Vinci, 242 leverage, decreasing returns and, 281-282 Levine, Karen, 203 Lewis, Michael, 184, 188 Liechtenstein Global Trust, 156 limitations of day trading, 272 linear versus nonlinear world, 224-229 Litner, John, 86 Little, Grady, 188-189 Little, Jim, 69, 71, 151, 253, 261 Litvinenko, Alexander, 199 Livermore, Jesse, 22, 90-93, 131, 236 Lo, Andrew, 271 Lombardi, Vince, 65, 176 Long Island Business News, 375 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), xix, 118, 151-164, 272, 280, 293 long volatility, defined, 422 losers averaging, 235, 237-238 winners versus, 123-125 losing investment philosophies, 4-6 losing positions, when to exit, 262-263 losses. See also drawdowns handling, 22-23, 195-196 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) collapse, 156 zero-sum trading, 114-120 lottery example (risk and reward), 250-251 Lowenstein, Roger, 259 Lueck, Martin, 29 lumber trading, 134 Lynch, Peter, 110 Madoff, Bernard, 22, 223 The Man Group, 15, 29, 148, 157-158, 287 Managed Account Reports, 376 Mandelbrot, Benoit B., 228 manias, prospect theory, 194-199 Marcus, Michael, 19, 60, 62, 285 Marino, Dan, 261 market defined, 3-4 inefficiency of, 288-290 role of speculation in, 6 market price.

Part II 74 78 85 90 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 3 Performance Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Absolute Returns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Fear of Volatility and Confusion with Risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Drawdowns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Correlation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Zero Sum Nature of the Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 George Soros and Zero Sum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 4 Big Events, Crashes, and Panics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Event #1: 2008 Stock Market Bubble and Crash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Day-by-Day Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Event #2: 2000–2002 Stock Market Bubble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Event #3: Long-Term Capital Management Collapse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Event #4: Asian Contagion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Event #5: Barings Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Event #6: Metallgesellschaft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Final Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 The Always “New” Coming Storm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 5 Baseball: Thinking Outside the Batter’s Box . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 The Home Run . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Moneyball and Billy Beane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 John W.


pages: 257 words: 64,763

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, California energy crisis, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, do well by doing good, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mega-rich, mortgage debt, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics

Bush administration as private, profit-driven pursue subprime, Alt-A, mortgages Gramm, Phil as antiregulatory, free-market ideologue background blames economic collapse on victims responsible for CFMA with ties to Enron as UBS executive weakens CRA standards for poor consumers Gramm, Wendy Lee background as deregulation activist exempts Enron from regulatory restraints as head of CFTC under Reagan, targets regulatory system tries to unseat Bush’s CFTC commissioner Gramm-Latta budget of 1981 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act Grayson, Alan Great Depression Greenberger, Michael Greenspan, Alan on bailout of Long-Term Capital Management -Clinton agreement defines economic policy declares free markets as self-regulating on growth of OTC derivatives insists derivatives will self-regulate on irrational exuberance of economy opposes Born’s derivatives study, stance profiled, praised, in media in territorial rivalry with Rubin GSEs. See Government sponsored enterprises Hedge funds and AIG Geithner’s reliance on managers Long-Term Capital Management Paulson’s description to G. W. Bush receiving banks’ toxic holdings regulations prevented by Summers Hendrickson, Jill M.

Born, who a decade later would begin to be seen as a modern-day Cassandra, recognized the problem immediately, as she would recall in a 2003 interview for Washington Lawyer magazine: “I became concerned about it once I got to the commission and began to learn about the OTC market. The more I learned, the more I realized we didn’t know.” She understood clearly that U.S. and international markets were facing great danger. She referred to Alan Greenspan himself, who said one of the reasons the Federal Reserve Board had supported the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management (a large hedge fund) was that they were “afraid it would have profound worldwide economic repercussions.” A Wall Street Journal article by Michael Schroeder and Greg Ip published December 13, 2001, five years after Born’s appointment, explained the escalating tension: “[Born’s] comments in speeches and in a discussion paper about the need for more oversight and regulation of OTC derivatives triggered an uproar among derivatives dealers—from J.

In dramatic fashion, according to the Wall Street Journal, she was summoned in June 1998 from the hospital bed of her daughter, who had undergone knee surgery, by Representative James Leach, chair of the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, to an emergency meeting in which “regulatory staff and lawmakers berated Ms. Born for more than two hours in a fruitless effort to persuade her to stop her campaign.” Three months later, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management led Leach to offer a grudging acknowledgment that Born wasn’t crazy. “You are welcome to claim some vindication,” he said at a congressional hearing. Born was still alive and kicking. Yet she had already aroused the extreme hostility of an army of corporate advocates—especially the formidable DC lobbying machine of Enron, which was “fanatical about preventing any hint of derivatives regulation” according to the Wall Street Journal reporters’ sources.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Livingston, Jessica. Founders at Work. Stories of Startups’ Early Days. Apress, 2007. Lockhart, James B. “FHFA’s First Anniversary and Challenges Ahead.” FHFA Speech, July 30, 2009. Long-Term Capital Management. “Long-Term Capital, Ltd. Private Placement of Ordinary Shares.” Confidential Private Placement Memorandum #225, October 1, 1993. Lowenstein, Roger. When Genius Failed. The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. Random House, 2000. Luce, Edward. “Bank of Italy Governor Defends LTCM Position.” Financial Times, October 5, 1998. Lux, Thomas. “Herd Behavior, Bubbles, and Crashes.” The Economic Journal, July 1995.

The Ballooning Debt The Banks Small Business Borrowing The Markets Appendix L: The Policy Reaction I: If You're Dodd, I'll be Frank Systemic Risk The Banking Industry Derivatives Hedge Funds and Private Equity Securitization Credit Rating Agencies Insurance Industry Consumer and Investment Protection Corporate Governance and Executive Compensation Last Thoughts Appendix M: The Policy Reaction II: Basel's Back: Three Strikes and You're Out Increased Capital Requirements for Banks New Liquidity Requirements Other Changes Some Thoughts on Basel III Appendix N: The Policy Reaction III: The Federal Reserve The Fed’s Business Unconventional Policies Quantitative Easing The Federal Hedge Fund Appendix O: The Policy Reaction IV: Fiscal Stimulus and Housing Capital Injections into the Banking System Supporting the Housing Market Stimulating the Economy Appendix P: A Simple Model of Banks A Simple Bank Credit Risk Management A Bank and Mark-to-Market Accounting Simple Answer to Puzzles Glossary Bibliography About the Author Index Additional Praise for The Crisis of Crowding “What causes systemic risk in economic markets? What are the signals that there could be problems? How do you prevent systemic risk? And how should we change our risk management practices to take this risk into account? Chincarini looks at the financial crises of the past 15 years—starting with a comprehensive analysis of the Long-Term Capital Management crisis in 1998 and ending with the Euro-debt crisis of 2012—and argues convincingly that the central risk in these crises was accentuated from within the financial system rather than from external economic forces (it includes the best analysis I have read on the LTCM crisis). This bold new theory has important implications for both industry practices as well as for new regulations.

This bold new theory has important implications for both industry practices as well as for new regulations. It is essential that we learn the lessons from the past (or else we will repeat the same mistakes). Chincarini’s book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand and help prevent financial crises.” —Eric Rosenfeld, Co-Founder of Long-Term Capital Management and JWM Partners “Chincarini connects the dots between LTCM, mispriced risk, the 2008 financial crisis, the flash crash, and the Greek debt crisis. The instability created by crowded trades, interconnected financial institutions, and too much debt is the recurring theme. For those interested in understanding the quantitative approach to investment, the section of the book focused on LTCM is a very useful reference.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

HG4530.B66 2007 332.64'524—dc22 2006034368 Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ffirs.qxd 3/1/07 3:33 PM Page v In memory of my son, Joseph Israel Bookstaber ffirs.qxd 3/1/07 3:33 PM Page vi ftoc.qxd 3/1/07 3:34 PM Page vii CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix About the Author xi CHAPTER 1 ~ Introduction: The Paradox of Market Risk 1 CHAPTER 2 ~ The Demons of ’87 7 CHAPTER 3 ~ A New Sheriff in Town 33 CHAPTER 4 ~ How Salomon Rolled the Dice and Lost 51 CHAPTER 5 ~ They Bought Salomon, Then They Killed It 77 CHAPTER 6 ~ Long-Term Capital Management Rides the Leverage Cycle to Hell 97 CHAPTER 7 ~ Colossus 125 CHAPTER 8 ~ Complexity, Tight Coupling, and Normal Accidents 143 CHAPTER 9 ~ The Brave New World of Hedge Funds 165 CHAPTER 10 ~ Cockroaches and Hedge Funds 207 CHAPTER 11 ~ Hedge Fund Existential Conclusion: Built to Crash?

He received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. xii ccc_demon_001-006_ch01.qxd 2/13/07 1:44 PM Page 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PARADOX OF MARKET RISK W hile it is not strictly true that I caused the two great financial crises of the late twentieth century—the 1987 stock market crash and the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund debacle 11 years later—let’s just say I was in the vicinity. If Wall Street is the economy’s powerhouse, I was definitely one of the guys fiddling with the controls. My actions seemed insignificant at the time, and certainly the consequences were unintended. You don’t deliberately obliterate hundreds of billions of dollars of investor money.

The Salomon gang bet that once the market cooled the normal physics would reemerge, pick up on this mispricing, and reestablish the relationship, which indeed occurred. Between this and several similar trades they picked up more than $100 million. (Ironically, 11 years later this same team, having left Salomon and riding high at Long-Term Capital Management, would trigger a market crisis that would lead to a far more egregious mispricing between various 30-year bonds. By then I would be sitting at Salomon arguing at a risk management committee meeting for the firm to take on a similar position. But with its trading spirit dulled by the Citigroup merger, Salomon would pass on the opportunity.)


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

., p. 16. 83 For a history of the efficient markets school of finance theory, see Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (New York, 1993). 84 Dunbar, Inventing Money, p. 178. 85 Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York, 2000), p. 126. 86 Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (A)’, pp. 11f., 17. 87 Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, p. 127. 88 André F. Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (B)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-08 (27 October 1999), p. 1. 89 Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, pp. 133-8. 90 Ibid., p. 144. 91 I owe this point to André Stern, who was an investor in LTCM. 92 Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, p. 147. 93 André F. Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (C)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-09 (5 November 1999), pp. 1, 3. 94 Idem, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P.

‘Not Even a Cat to Rescue’, The Economist, 20 April 2006. 68 See the classic study by Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire (Harmondsworth, 1987). 69 George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market (New York, 1987), pp. 27-30. 70 Robert Slater, Soros: The Life, Times and Trading Secrets of the World’s Greatest Investor (New York, 1996), pp. 48f. 71 George Soros, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means (New York, 2008), p. x. 72 Slater, Soros, p. 78. 73 Ibid., pp. 105, 107ff. 74 Ibid., p. 172. 75 Ibid., pp. 177, 182, 188. 76 Ibid., p. 10. 77 Ibid., p. 159. 78 Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It (New York, 2000), p. 92. 79 Dunbar, Inventing Money, pp. 168-73. 80 André F. Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (A)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-007 (5 November 1999), p. 2. 81 Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (A)’, p. 13. 82 Ibid., p. 16. 83 For a history of the efficient markets school of finance theory, see Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (New York, 1993). 84 Dunbar, Inventing Money, p. 178. 85 Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York, 2000), p. 126. 86 Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P.

(C)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-09 (5 November 1999), pp. 1, 3. 94 Idem, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (D)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-10 (4 October 2004), p. 1. Perold’s cases are by far the best account. 95 Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, p. 149. 96 ‘All Bets Are Off: How the Salesmanship and Brainpower Failed at Long-Term Capital’, Wall Street Journal, 16 November 1998. 97 See on this point Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving (New York, 2007). 98 Donald MacKenzie, ‘Long-Term Capital Management and the Sociology of Arbitrage’, Economy and Society, 32, 3 (August 2003), p. 374. 99 Ibid., passim. 100 Ibid., p. 365. 101 Franklin R.


pages: 318 words: 99,524

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis by Kevin Rodgers

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, diversification, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, latency arbitrage, law of one price, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Minsky moment, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, Y2K, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

n=PET&s=RWTC&f=D 20 Central Bank of Russia statistics website, http://www.cbr.ru/eng/statistics/print.aspx?file=b_sector/interest_rates_98_e.htm&pid=procstavnew&sid=svodProcStav 21‘An Historical Document: Long-Term Capital Management CEO John Meriwether Asks for Money’, Grasping Reality with the Invisible Hand, http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/an_historical_d.html 22 ‘Long-Term Capital Management, Report to Congressional Requesters’, United States General Accounting Office, October 1999, http://www.gao.gov/assets/230/228446.pdf Chapter 6 1 ‘Weather risk market remains buoyant, claims Clemmons’, Paul Lyon, Risk.net, 24 October 2002, http://m.risk.net/risk-magazine/news/1503229/weather-risk-market-remains-buoyant-claims-clemmons 2 Presentation to Merrill Lynch European Banking & Insurance Conference London, Anshu Jain, 8 October 2002, https://www.db.com/ir/en/download/1382.pdf 3 Stern Business School, NYU, datasets, http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html 4 US Treasury data, http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/Historic-LongTerm-Rate-Data-Visualization.aspx 5 2015 Investor Company Handbook, Investment Company Institute, May 2015, Chapter 2, http://www.icifactbook.org/fb_ch2.html#popularity 6 ‘Studies on Stock and Bond Picking Performance’, Mark Hebner, Index Fund Advisors, May 2013, https://www.ifa.com/articles/studies_on_stock_picking_performance/ 7 ‘Speculators Have Discovered Palladium and Sugar’, William Baldwin, Forbes, March 2011, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/investing-william-baldwin-investment-strategies-palladium-sugar.html 8 Presentation to Merrill Lynch European Banking & Insurance Conference London, Anshu Jain, 8 October 2002, Slide 17, https://www.db.com/ir/en/download/1382.pdf 9 Ibid., Slide 14. 10 Market Surveys Data, 1987–2010, ISDA, 2010, http://www.isda.org/statistics/pdf/ISDA-Market-Survey-annual-data.pdf 11 ‘Introducing CCOs’, Credit magazine, February 2005, http://www.risk.net/credit/feature/1510254/introducing-ccos 12 ‘CDO Evaluator Applies Correlation and Monte Carlo Simulation to the Art of Determining Portfolio Quality’, Sten Bergman, Standard and Poor’s, 12 November 2001, http://www.globalriskguard.com/resources/crderiv/sp_portf_qual.pdf 13 ‘“The Formula That Killed Wall Street”?

I worked in my speciality of FX until 1997, then I moved over to the newly created Emerging Markets department. With my angel-of-death-like ability to be close to the centre of any trouble, I was soon caught up in one of the market’s greatest ever crises as first Asia, then Russia, then a huge hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management dragged the banking industry to the brink of disaster in 1998. The market was saved by intervention by the Federal Reserve and, in the chaos, Bankers Trust was purchased by German giant Deutsche Bank. It was here, at Deutsche, from 1999 onwards, that I was to spend the rest of my career.

With that, he turned the corner and drove out of sight. CHAPTER 2 Whales Don’t Eat Elephants Triangle Man and the Clackatron It was spring 1999 and I was bored. The takeover of my employer Bankers Trust by Deutsche Bank had been agreed late the previous year after the Russia crisis and the collapse of a major hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) but had not yet been consummated. Like every other trader in Bankers, I had been given strict instructions by management on how I could help the process, namely do as little as possible and don’t screw up. My boss Ron, a crop-haired and intense Israeli ex-paratrooper, packed around 20 of us emerging markets traders and salespeople into a cramped, anonymous, overheated meeting room to explain.


Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns by Michael W. Covel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, disinformation, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, full employment, global macro, Jim Simons, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Sharpe ratio, systematic trading, the scientific method, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, Y2K, zero-sum game

When Kernen asked about trend followers purportedly pushing markets further than they should be fundamentally, did that mean he had a way to determine the correct price level of all markets at all times? 3. When Kernen brought up Long Term Capital Management in attempt to compare Harding to its demise, did he not understand that Harding did not believe in efficient markets? Had he ever looked at a monthly up and down track record of Harding or any trend follower? 4. Why ask a trend following trader for “picks”? 5. When Kernen asked Harding if he would come back with the same moniker and title, was he implying that he believed Harding would blow up soon and be back on CNBC under some reformulated firm name—like what the proprietors of Long Term Capital Management did after their blowup? Has he ever asked Warren Buffett that question?

., 228 Jones, Paul Tudor, 15, 143-144 judgment, 30 Kahneman, Daniel, 118 history of trend following, 221-231 Kernen, Joe, 215-218 Hite, Larry, 15 King of the Hill (television program), 147 “home runs,” 81-82 Index Kovner, Bruce, 5, 15 Krakower, Susan, 162 LTCM (Long Term Capital Management), 101-102, 216 Krispy Kreme, 34 luck versus skill in trend following, 189-190 L Lynyrd Skynyrd, 211 “law of small numbers,” 118 M learning from others, 143-144 Lebeau, Charles, 60 Leeson, Nick, 4, 91 Lefèvre, Edwin, 223 Livermore, Jesse, 79, 223, 227-228, 239 long, defined, 12 long only, defined, 12 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 101-102, 216 Madoff, Bernard, 81 Magee, John, 226 Man Group, 15 Man Investments, 5 managed futures, defined, 11.

And there will inevitably be more surprise events with headline-generating losers taking the perp walk in the press, with the winners going unknown. That is a prediction worth betting on. This page intentionally left blank “Could you be on a desert island and make money trading?” That is the question to answer.1 Inefficient Markets The hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) went bust in 1998, and that event is more relevant today than ever. It laid the foundation for government induced bubble/bailout schemes still employed daily. LTCM promised to use complex mathematical models to make investors wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. It attracted elite Wall Street investors and initially reaped fantastic profits with secret money-making strategies.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

One day in the early 1980s: Nearly all of the details of Boaz Weinstein’s life and career come from interviews with Weinstein and people who knew and worked with him. In 1994, John Meriwether: A number of details of LTCM’s demise were taken from When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, by Roger Lowenstein (Random House, 2000), and Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It, by Nicholas Dunbar (John Wiley & Sons, 2000). 6 THE WOLF On a spring afternoon in 1985: The Liar’s Poker account is taken from The Poker Face of Wall Street, by Aaron Brown (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), as well as interviews and email exchanges with Brown.

But they always loomed like a bad memory in the back of their minds, and were from time to time thrust to the forefront during wild periods of volatility such as Black Monday, only to be forgotten again when the markets eventually calmed down, as they always seemed to do. Inevitably, though, the deadly volatility returns. About a decade after Black Monday, the math geniuses behind a massive quant hedge fund known as Long-Term Capital Management came face-to-face with Mandelbrot’s wild markets. In a matter of weeks in the summer of 1998, LTCM lost billions, threatening to destabilize global markets and prompting a massive bailout organized by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. LTCM’s trades, based on sophisticated computer models and risk management strategies, employed unfathomable amounts of leverage.

The quants were steadily growing, moving ever higher into the upper echelons of the financial universe. What could go wrong? As it turned out, a great deal—a four-letter word: LTCM. In 1994, John Meriwether, a former star bond trader at Salomon Brothers, launched a massive hedge fund known as Long-Term Capital Management. LTCM was manned by an all-star staff of quants from Salomon as well as future Nobel Prize winners Myron Scholes and Robert Merton. On February 24 of that year, the fund started trading with $1 billion in investor capital. LTCM, at bottom, was a thought experiment, a laboratory test conducted by academics trained in mathematics and economics—quants.


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I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

The complexity of the mathematics involved in derivatives can’t be exaggerated. This was the reason John Meriwether, a famous bond trader, employed Myron Scholes—he of the Black-Scholes equation—and Robert Merton, the man with whom he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, to be directors and cofounders of his new hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management.* The idea was to use these big brains to create a highly leveraged, arbitraged, no-risk investment portfolio designed to profit no matter what happened, whether the market went up, down, or sideways or popped out for a cheese sandwich. LTCM quadrupled in value in its first four years, then imploded in the chaos that followed Russia’s default on its foreign-debt obligations in 1998.

By June 2008, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA—the association of companies dealing in this stuff—was estimating the total size of the market as $54 trillion, close to the total GDP of the planet and many times more valuable than the total number of all the stocks and shares traded in the world. The underlying value of the risks being insured was much lower than the notional value, of course—but the lesson of Long-Term Capital Management was that when such deals blow up, they leave huge holes in the markets because of the sheer number of counterparties holding contracts with notional exposure to the risk. It’s like a game of pass-the-parcel, in which nobody knows who’s actually holding the parcel, much less what’s going to be found inside it when it’s unwrapped.

., about once every three thousand times something is measured. Quants use these measures of probability all the time. According to the models in use by the quants, the Black Monday crash of 1987 was a ten-sigma event. Translated into English, that meant that, in the words of Roger Lowenstein’s book When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management: Economists later figured that, on the basis of the market’s historical volatility, had the market been open every day since the creation of the Universe, the odds would still have been against its falling that much in a single day. In fact, had the life of the Universe been repeated one billion times, such a crash would still have been theoretically “unlikely.”


pages: 419 words: 130,627

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The unwinding of the fixed income unit’s positions contributed to the market’s instability that summer, especially at Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which, having been founded by Salomon veterans, had on its books many of the same positions that Salomon was now vigorously selling. In fact, Dimon recalls, the Salomon arbitrage unit had only 10 material trading strategies it played around with. “With all the bullshit around it, there were just 10 trades,” he recalls. “And they were the same 10 trades that LTCM had.” (LTCM, in fact, was jokingly referred to by the Travelers crowd as “Salomon North.”) Long-Term Capital Management wasn’t just any old hedge fund. Through the magic of leverage, it had turned $5 billion of capital into a $100 billion giant, and its sudden shakiness posed a threat to the entire market.

(A put option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to sell an asset at a predetermined “strike” price. If prices rise, you don’t sell. If they fall, you sell at the strike price and minimize your losses.) With aggressive interest rate cuts in the event of any kind of crisis—the Mexican crisis, the Asian currency crisis, the Long-Term Capital Management crisis, the bursting of the Internet bubble, or 9/11—his Federal Reserve created the impression that investors essentially had a “put option” on asset prices, and in the process arguably encouraged excessive risk-taking. His successor Ben Bernanke continued the tradition, resulting in the notion of the “Bernanke put.”

A scathing 1995 piece by Suzanna Andrews in New York magazine made the case that Maughan had been in over his head at Salomon yet had a tendency to say things like, “I am the hardest-working man at Salomon Brothers.” Most top executives also thought he put politics ahead of the interests of the firm, a conclusion arrived at after he seemingly forced the star trader John Meriwether out of Salomon—Meriwether had gone on to found Wall Street’s hottest hedge fund at the time, Long-Term Capital Management. A stream of talented partners had also left during Maughan’s tenure. Then there was the issue of Maughan’s wife, Va. A onetime Pan Am reservation agent who had changed her name from Lorraine Hannemann, Va Maughan was a gossipmonger’s dream. Stories floated around that it was she, and not Maughan, who had negotiated his pay packages at Salomon.


pages: 385 words: 128,358

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market by Steven Drobny

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital controls, central bank independence, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Greenspan put, high batting average, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, inventory management, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, land bank, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Maui Hawaii, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, panic early, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vision Fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

As a result, spreads between the benchmark U.S. government bonds and all other risk assets widened dramatically, leading the world to its next financial crisis: Long Term Capital Management. 150 145 Yen per Dollar 140 135 130 125 Yen Carry Trade Goes Bad 120 115 FIGURE 2.12 The Dollar/Yen Carry Trade, 1997–1998 Source: Bloomberg. -9 8 -9 8 De c No v 8 Au g98 Se p98 Oc t-9 8 98 l-9 Ju -9 8 nJu M ay 8 -9 r-9 8 ar Ap b98 Fe M 7 98 nJa 97 -9 v- De c No 97 7 t-9 7 Oc pSe 7 l-9 g9 Au Ju Ju n- 97 110 24 INSIDE THE HOUSE OF MONEY Long Term Capital Management 1998 Although Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was not a global macro fund, it is worth mentioning for several reasons.

No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk. Source: Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, on PrivateSector Refinancing of the Large Hedge Fund, Long Term Capital Management, October 1, 1998. that they were in LTCM’s portfolio. In other words, their models didn’t provide for the LTCM liquidity premium. LTCM was a reminder of the notion that there is no such thing as a risk-free arbitrage. Because the arbitrage positions they were exploiting were small, the fund had to be leveraged many times to produce meaningful returns.This put them at risk to their lenders’ financing fees as well as general market liquidity.The problem with liquidity is that it is never there when really needed.

Markets are going to go where they’re going to go.Yes, sure, on one or two days when I was liquidating, it pushed it down, but the moment I stopped selling, it went where it was going to go. 80 INSIDE THE HOUSE OF MONEY 250 Yen per Pound 225 200 Siva-Jothy Liquidating Sterling/Yen Position 175 150 No v9 Ja 3 n94 M ar -9 M 4 ay -9 Au 4 g9 Oc 4 t-9 De 4 c9 M 4 ar -9 M 5 ay -9 Ju 5 l-9 Oc 5 t-9 De 5 c9 Fe 5 b9 Ap 6 r-9 Ju 6 l-9 Se 6 p9 No 6 v96 Fe b9 Ap 7 r-9 Ju 7 n9 Se 7 p9 No 7 v97 Ja n9 M 8 ar -9 Ju 8 n9 Au 8 g98 125 FIGURE 5.2 Sterling/Yen, 1993–1998 Source: Bloomberg. Markets are immense but if people know there’s a big position out there that is being liquidated, they’ll go for it. Nick Leeson at Barings Singapore and Long Term Capital Management are the classic cases. The market sniffed their unwinding and traded against them. Did the sterling/yen experience prove useful later on? Yes, definitely. The 1998 LTCM/Russia episode for me was the reverse. The firm didn’t have a great 1998, but the prop group did and I attribute it to the lessons learned in 1994.


pages: 349 words: 134,041

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Chapter 5 The perfect storm – risk mismanagement by the numbers 1 Tanya Styblo Beder ‘The Great Risk Hunt’ (May 1999) The Journal of Portfolio Management, p. 29. 2 Peter Bernstein (1998) Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk; John Wiley, New York. 3 See ‘The Jorion-Taleb Debate’ (April 1997) Derivatives Strategy, 25. 4 Roger Lowenstein (2002) When Genius Fails: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management; Fourth Estate, London, p. 15. 5 For details of Salomon’s Treasury Bond trading scandal, see Nicholas Dunbar (2000) Inventing Money; John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, pp. 110–112; and Roger Lowenstein (2002) When Genius Fails: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management; Fourth Estate, London, pp. 19–22; Frank Partnoy (2004) Infectious Greed; Owl Books, New York, pp. 97–109. 6 Quoted by Merton Miller in ‘Trillion Dollar Bet’ (8 February 2000) Nova PBS. 12_NOTES.QXD 17/2/06 4:43 pm Page 323 Notes 323 7 LTCM’s 1997 return is somewhat in dispute.

Different sources give different returns for the fund – 17% (see Phillipe Jorion ‘How Long Term Lost Its Capital’ (September 1999) Risk, 31–36, p. 32) or 27% (see Nicholas Dunbar ‘Meriwether’s Meltdown’ (October 1998) Risk 32–36, p. 33). 8 Roger Lowenstein (2002) When Genius Fails: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management; Fourth Estate, London, p. 147. 9 Roger Lowenstein (2002) When Genius Fails: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management; Fourth Estate, London, pp. 161, 162. Chapter 6 Super models – derivative algorithms 1 The phrase ‘best and brightest’ is attributed to David Halberstam (1993) The Best and the Brightest; Ballantine Books, New York. 2 Emmanuel Derman (2004) My Life as a Quant; John Wiley, New Jersey. 3 Douglas Adams (1979) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Pan Books, p. 75. 4 Fischer Black and Myron Scholes ‘The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities (1973) Journal of Political Economy 81, 399–417. 5 Robert Merton ‘The Theory of Rational Option Pricing’ (1973) Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 28, 141–183. 6 John Maynard Keynes (1937) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; MacMillan, London, p. 298. 7 Emmanuel Derman (Winter 2000) The Journal of Derivatives, p. 62. 8 See Robert Merton, Nobel Lecture (9 December 1997).

Chapter 8 Share and share alike – derivative inequity 1 Roger Lowenstein (2002) When Genius Fails: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management; Fourth Estate, London, p. 35. 2 The description of the LTCM – UBS option transaction is based on: David Shireff ‘Another Fine Mess at UBS’ (November 1998) Euromoney, 41–43; Nicholas Dunbar ‘Meriwether’s Meltdown’ (October 1998) Risk, 32–36, p. 34; Nicholas Dunbar (2000) Inventing Money; John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, pp. 168–175; Roger Lowenstein (2002) When Genius Fails: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management; Fourth Estate, London, pp. 92–94. 12_NOTES.QXD 20/2/06 324 4:11 pm Page 324 Tr a d e r s , G u n s & M o n e y Chapter 9 – Credit where credit is due – fun with CDS and CDO 1 CDO litigation (including the Barclays – HSH and Bank of America – Banca Popolare di Intra litigation) is described in: Nicholas Dunbar ‘Barclays Fights CDO Lawsuits’ (October 2004) Risk, 10, 12; Nicholas Dunbar ‘BoA in Litigation Firing Line’ (March 2005) Risk, 13; Nicholas Dunbar ‘The Curious Incident of the Disputed CDO’ (July 2005) Risk, 22–24; Rachel Woolcott ‘NatWest Rattles Sabre in Law Firm Claim’ (August 2005) Risk, 11.


pages: 350 words: 103,270

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again by Nicholas Dunbar

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delayed gratification, diversification, Edmond Halley, facts on the ground, fear index, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

First eBook Edition: July 2011 ISBN: 978-1-4221-7781-5 For T Contents Copyright Foreword Introduction: The Siren Song of the Men Who Love to Win ONE The Bets That Made Banking Sexy Introduction to derivatives. Long-term actuarial approach versus the market approach to credit. Goldman Sachs sees opportunity in default swaps. The market approach vindicated by Enron’s bankruptcy. TWO Going to the Mattresses The advent of VAR and OTC derivatives. The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). A fatal flaw is exposed. The wrong lesson is learned. THREE A Free Lunch . . . with Processed Food A new market for collaterized debt obligations (CDOs). Risky investments, diversification, and the role of the ratings agencies. Barclays finds investors for its CDOs, only to fall out with them.

After we’d talked, I was taken to meet the bank’s chief credit officer, Robert Strong, who talked about his memories of the 1970s recession and how cautious he was about lending. I knew why Chase was selling me this line so hard. A few months earlier, it had lent about $500 million to the massive hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which was on the brink of bankruptcy and threatened to bring much of Wall Street down with it until a consortium of banks (including Chase) bailed it out. At the time, Chase was mocked for being so careless with its money, and Shapiro was keen to signal that this had been a one-off.

And if markets were efficient—in other words, if people like Meriwether did their job—then the prices of futures contracts should be mathematically related to the underlying asset using “no-arbitrage” principles. Bending Reality to Match the Textbook The next leg of my U.S. trip took me to Boston and Connecticut. There I met two more Nobel-winning finance professors—Robert Merton and Myron Scholes—who took Miller’s idea to its logical conclusion at a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Scholes had benefited directly from Miller’s mentorship as a University of Chicago PhD candidate, while Merton had studied under Paul Samuelson at MIT. What made Merton and Scholes famous (with the late Fischer Black) was their contemporaneous discovery of a formula for pricing options on stocks and other securities.


pages: 290 words: 83,248

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, ‘Freddie Mac’, had been in business for three decades and had earned a second nickname, ‘Steady Freddie’, until in 2003 it announced it would have to restate earnings by $4.5 billion because of incorrect accounting in its derivatives portfolio.38 Another government-sponsored mortgage finance company, ‘Fannie Mae’, said it would have to restate previous years’ earnings – by $9 billion according to some estimates – because of incorrect accounting on its derivatives book.39 Its regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, said this raised ‘serious doubts’ about ‘the overall safety and soundness of the business’; the company contested this view but made management changes.40 Even the experts can get it wrong, as we saw when Long-Term Capital Management’s sophisticated investment bankers, Nobel Prize-winning economists and rocket-scientist traders, lost nearly all their clients’ money in 1998. The losses came from several sources. Complex derivatives are hard to understand and hard to value. Frequently there is no external market in which to test valuations and holders can be surprised when they try.

Throughout the firm small businesses developed where specialized trading and investment skills and the ability to risk a certain amount of partnership capital gave the firm an edge.’14 It’s there again – that word ‘edge’ – although in the post-Spitzer era not many firms would have been quite so ‘refreshingly candid’ in their hours of interviews with Lisa Endlich.15 Proprietary trading went underground in 1998 at many firms: ‘By the late 1990s, almost every investment bank on Wall Street had, to some degree, gotten into the game. Most had separate arbitrage desks, with traders specifically assigned to look for opportunities in every nook and cranny of the business.’16 However, the Long-Term Capital Management crisis of that year persuaded many of the banks that specialist proprietary trading units were dangerous and they wound them down. Most dramatically, Citigroup’s Sandy Weil, having just bought Salomon Brothers, kings of the trading jungle, ordered the closure of proprietary trading at the firm.

Around it they were able to put in place a structure of committees and teams of risk experts to monitor and manage risk. For the first time since 1987 the investment banks appeared to be in control of the risks that they were running. This sense of security was shaken in September 1998, the month ‘when genius failed’ and Long-Term Capital Management, a high profile hedge fund, collapsed. The firm had about $5 billion of its own capital and borrowed getting on for $100 billion to leverage its trades. Under the leadership of John Meriwether, still then a legend for his time at Salomon Brothers, and with the expertise of a group of highly qualified arbitrageurs, professors and two Nobel Prize winners, the fund had a four-year winning streak of 40 per cent per annum and its models seemed infallible.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

… Are some hedge funds too big to fail?” After last-minute attempts to save the firm were unsuccessful, the Fed decided it had to organize a rescue: it would extend credit to a group of big banks that would enable them in turn to buy low-priced ownership stakes in Long-Term Capital Management. This worked in the sense that, although it didn’t save Long-Term Capital Management, it did save the banks that were its major lenders. Hedge funds were unregulated because they were supposed to represent private investment arrangements between wealthy, sophisticated parties who were prepared to absorb whatever losses they suffered; what this episode showed was that government and taxpayers may have had no power to monitor hedge funds, but they could wind up with the responsibility for covering their losses.

But in the spring of 1999, when the Working Group on Financial Markets issued its report on the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, it called only for what Rubin, in a memo to Clinton describing the report, described as “indirect regulation”—mostly requirements that hedge funds disclose more information to their lenders. The report did not, Rubin went on, recommend “direct regulation” of hedge funds and derivatives dealers, or government supervision of the general financial condition of investment banks. By contrast, the GAO’s report on Long-Term Capital Management, published a few months later, took a harder line. It said that the Working Group had not proposed enough regulation, especially of investment banks, and that more was needed to ensure the safety of the financial system.

“on balance, more regulation”: Doug Elmendorf, memorandum to Janet Yellen, December 21, 1998, 1. Clinton Library, 2010-0673-F, Box 1, File 2. “indirect regulation”: Robert Rubin, memorandum to the president, April 22, 1999. Clinton Library, 2010-0673-F—President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. GAO’s report on Long-Term Capital Management: General Accounting Office, “Long-Term Capital Management: Regulators Need to Focus Greater Attention on Systemic Risk,” October 1999. “Larry thought I was overly concerned”: Robert Rubin with Jacob Weisberg, In an Uncertain World: Choices from Wall Street to Washington, Random House, 2004, 288. Another marcher in the skimpy parade: See Edward Gramlich, Subprime Mortgages: America’s Latest Boom and Bust, Urban Institute Press, 2007. 5.


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The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

“Roundtable: The Limits of VAR,” Derivatives Strategy (April 1998): www.derivativesstrategy.com/magazine/archive/1998/0498fea1.asp. 21. The subsequent account of Long-Term Capital Management’s fall is, except where otherwise attributed, taken from the two books: Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000); Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000). 22. Joe Kolman, “LTCM Speaks,” Derivatives Strategy (April 1999): www.derivativesstrategy.com/magazine/archive/1998/0499fea1.asp. 23.

Rosenfeld lured Merton on board in 1988 as a “special consultant to the Office of Chairman.” Scholes joined up two years later as a consultant to and later cohead of Salomon’s derivatives business. When Meriwether and Rosenfeld launched the most famous (and soon most infamous) hedge fund of the 1990s, Long-Term Capital Management, Merton and Scholes signed on as partners. Merton usually justified his presence in terms of the advice he could give about tradeoffs between risk and return. Scholes was less circumspect. During a road show to pitch the fund in 1993, a young trader at an insurance company scoffed, “No way you can make that kind of money in Treasury markets.”

Just as selling by portfolio insurers trying to protect their clients from price declines had driven down prices yet further in 1987, VaR had the potential to exacerbate a downturn. “Our activities may invalidate our measurements,” Taleb said early in 1998. “All…markets go down together.”20 THE SAGA OF LONG-TERM CAPITAL Management, or LTCM, offers so many cautionary tales that it’s hard to keep track of all of them. Listen to one of the former partners, or read the two fascinating books that chronicle the fund’s downfall, Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed and Nicholas Dunbar’s Inventing Money, and one comes away shaking one’s head at the many hazards of hubris, of wealth, of leverage, of trusting one’s bankers, of trying to make decisions in a partnership.21 The hedge fund’s fall might be evidence that markets are efficient: Its market-beating returns were the result of taking excessive risks.


pages: 543 words: 157,991

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, break the buck, buy and hold, call centre, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, the long tail, too big to fail, value at risk, zero-sum game

Washington-speak for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. HOEPA: The Homeownership and Equity Protection Act. A 1994 law giving the Federal Reserve the authority to prohibit abusive lending practices. HUD: Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sets “affordable housing goals” for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. LTCM: Long-Term Capital Management. Large hedge fund that collapsed in 1998. MBS: Mortgage-backed securities. NRSROs: Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organizations. The three major credit rating agencies, Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch, were granted this status by the government. OCC: Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

That was followed, in short order, by full-blown crises in Russia (which did default), Asia, and Latin America, as well as near crises in Egypt, South Africa, the Ukraine, and elsewhere. Each time, the three men helped contain the crisis while keeping it walled off from the U.S. economy. They did the same in the fall of 1998, when a giant hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, collapsed. An LTCM bankruptcy could have been devastating for Wall Street, since the big firms were all on the hook for tens of billions of dollars of LTCM’s losses, both as lenders and as counterparties. “In late-night phone calls, in marathon meetings and over bagels, orange juice, and quiche, these three men . . . are working to stop what has become a plague of economic panic,” Time wrote breathlessly.

They didn’t act enough like, well, us, with our supremely efficient market-driven economy. “A Thai banker who breaks the rules by passing $100,000 to his brother-in-law puts the whole system at risk,” is how the author of the article, Joshua Cooper Ramo, characterized their thinking. Even the Long-Term Capital Management disaster didn’t dent their enthusiasm for the way our own markets had evolved. LTCM was a firm that relied entirely on the tools of modern finance, chief among them derivatives, risk models, and debt. Its leverage ratio was a staggering 250 to 1, meaning that it had borrowed $250 for every $1 of equity on its balance sheet.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

An alternative starting date for the onset of the bubble is the summer of 1998, following the Asian Financial Crisis, the financial debacle in Moscow and the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. The sharp depreciation of the Asian currencies led to an increase in the US trade deficit of more than $150 billion. Moreover, the Federal Reserve again eased policy, partly because of concern with the fragility of the monetary arrangements following the crisis in Long-Term Capital Management, until then the most professional and sophisticated of the many US hedge funds. In the twelve months after the end of June 1998 the market value of the stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange increased by 40 percent, from $9005 billion to $12,671 billion.

The crisis spread to Russia, there was a debacle in the ruble, and the country’s banking system collapsed in the summer of 1998. Investors then became more cautious and they sold risky securities and bought safer US government securities, and the changes in the relationship between the interest rates on these two groups of securities led to the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, then the largest US hedge fund. The 1990s bubble in NASDAQ stocks Stocks in the United States are traded on either the over-the-counter market or on one of the organized stock exchanges, primarily the New York Stock Exchange. The typical pattern was that shares of young firms would initially be traded on the over-the-counter market and then most of these firms would incur the costs associated with obtaining a listing on the New York Stock Exchange because they believed that a listing would broaden the market and lead to higher prices for their stocks.

The ‘phrenzy of speculation’ during this period strongly influenced the Currency School.32 In 1857 John Ball, a London accountant, reported knowing firms with capital under £10,000 and obligations of £900,000 and claimed it was a fair illustration.33 In Hamburg during the same boom, Schäffle reported a man with capital of £100 and £400,000 worth of acceptances outstanding.34 Long-Term Capital Management borrowed more than $125 billion; its capital was $5 billion. Its leverage ratio of 25 to 1 was much higher than the ratios of most other hedge funds, which generally were less than 10 to 1. In the eighteenth century, however, many firms, according to Wirth, speculated for ten to twenty times their capital during the boom of 1763.35 Lehman Brothers had capital of three percent in the several years prior to its collapse – and it tended to transfer some of its assets to affiliates at the end of each month to reduce its leverage ratios.


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Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

He had more influence than any other figure over the direction the nation took over the next two decades, not merely in fighting inflation, but also in government’s role in the economy, effectively diminishing it. He repeated time and again that unfettered markets were best. A few weeks before the fall of the nation’s largest hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, in 1998, which collapsed from borrowing extreme amounts, Greenspan argued that such hedge funds were already effectively regulated—by their lenders. Lenders wouldn’t provide dangerous levels of debt to the clients because it was irrational to do so. But LTCM’s lenders were mostly caught unaware because the hedge funds were not required to make their loan positions known.

The acquiescence to ideology occurred even when markets lurched from financial crisis to crisis under Greenspan’s tenure—a stock market crash in 1987, a thrifts crisis in 1989, the collapse of junk bonds by 1990, a derivatives crisis in 1994, the Mexican peso collapse of 1994, the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the failure of Long-Term Capital Management and the Russian default on debt in 1998, and the severe stock market crash of 2000. Speculative binges enabled by both stimulative monetary policy and regulatory neglect preceded all these collapses. Levels of speculation rose to ever more dangerous heights each time. In the 1980s, the takeover movement built on soaring levels of debt, much of it ultimately bad, rose to unmanageable levels.

The Greenspan Fed—formally, to repeat, decisions were made by the Open Market Committee, which Greenspan now effectively controlled—had again been ready to raise rates before this new crisis, but Greenspan now cut rates instead. Rubin again strongly urged the world’s central bankers to loosen policies. In October, the highly indebted hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management failed, in part due to the Russian default. Hedge funds, too, were mostly free of regulation or even disclosure requirements about their levels of debt. Only weeks before the LTCM collapse, as noted earlier, Greenspan said that the banks themselves “regulated those who lend money” and would provide the surveillance necessary.


Global Governance and Financial Crises by Meghnad Desai, Yahia Said

Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency peg, deglobalization, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, German hyperinflation, information asymmetry, Japanese asset price bubble, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent-seeking, short selling, special drawing rights, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, transaction costs, Washington Consensus

It seemed that the knowledge economy did not obey the old laws of economics. There would be no longer boom and bust as a new generation of central bankers and prudent Finance Ministers had fashioned the perfect combination of monetary and fiscal policies for us. There was a warning in 1997 with the Asian crisis and the triple bypass for Long-Term Capital Management. The 1997 crisis was the first crisis of the new phase of globalisation. But while it sloshed about in Russia and Brazil, it failed to reach the shores of the New York or London financial markets. Smugness returned until in early 2001, the Dow Jones and Footsie began their journey southwards.

At the end of the twentieth century, the Asian crisis of the summer of 1997 brought us back to that world. That crisis originated in Thailand and after spreading across Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, leapt across to Russia, threatened to hit Brazil and caused the spectacular troubles1 at Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in the summer of 1998. That was the first crisis of the recent phase of globalisation. It led in its turn to demands for ‘new financial architecture’ and much activity by the IMF/World Bank and G7 leaders in the summer of 1998 was directed towards coping with the global crisis.2 As it happened (and this is my reading of the events of October 1998), a small number of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve (Fed) calmed the markets and resolved the crisis.

The need is to invest resources into building models based on the best available theory, calibrate them and then test which of the alternative provides a plausible explanation. It is not an easy task. It will require combining finance theory, econometrics and political economy. But it needs to be done. Notes 1 For the affairs at LTCM see Lowenstein, R. (2000) ‘When genius failed’, The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management, Random House, New York. The Mexican peso crisis, which happened in December 1994, was regional and did not grow into a global crisis as the Asian one did. I am excluding it therefore. There were other national crises in Russia, Turkey, Argentina and Brazil. 2 For the 1998 debate on financial architecture see Eatwell and Taylor (1998).


pages: 258 words: 71,880

Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street by Kate Kelly

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, fixed income, housing crisis, index arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, moral hazard, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, technology bubble, too big to fail, traveling salesman

Roger Lowenstein. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House, 2000. INDEX AAA ratings Ackermann, Josef acquisition, of Bear announcement of deal price and deal protection and J.C. Flowers and J. P. Morgan and, see J.P. Morgan, Bear acquisition and AIG (American International Group) Alix, Mike Alt-A mortgage loans American Express Angelo, John A.R. Baron & Co. Asia see also China; Japan asset management Atkins, Peter bailouts Bush and of Long-Term Capital Management see also Federal Reserve, Bear loan from Bainlardi, Peter “bake-offs” Bank America Corp.

During the 1990s, it proudly hired castoffs from competing firms who had been fired after political battles or regulatory skirmishes. A trader’s outside reputation, Bear recruiters felt, had little bearing on his or her talent with a telephone, a computer terminal, and a pile of cash. In 1998, when the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management nearly collapsed, Bear refused to participate in a bailout effort that included every other Wall Street firm. Ten years later, employees wondered if the lenders and competitors who pushed Bear to the brink were exacting revenge for the firm’s selfish behavior at that time. Bear’s executives could be curt.

Now, after a few bruising days in the stock market, his net worth had fallen by nearly half. “Yeah, I saw the same procession walk in,” Greenberger said, referring to the Cadwalader bankruptcy lawyers. “Yeah,” said Marano. “They looked like the undertakers.” 11:30 P.M. Matt Zames had been down this road before. He had started his career at Long-Term Capital Management in the winter of 1994, shortly after college. There he witnessed firsthand what could happen when a bunch of shortsighted executives didn’t manage their risk properly. In September 1998, when Long-Term’s massive losses had prompted an emergency meeting at the New York Fed, Wall Street’s top players had cobbled together an eleventh-hour bailout of the fund, hoping to stave off collateral damage to the financial system.


Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Then they are forced to go into the market and buy it back at what is likely to be a higher price than the price at which they sold. Many hedge funds own illiquid assets or assets trading only in thin markets, where the probability of large losses is much greater than in conventional investing—as the disastrous experience of Long-Term Capital Management so dramatically demonstrated.* All these activities become even riskier when the fund uses borrowed money, which is frequently the case.9 By definition, most investors cannot outperform the market because they are the market. On the other hand, the available evidence suggests that fewer investors are able to win out over the others than would be the case if the markets were not so competitive.

If they agree right away that he is on to something, he figures the price of the stock already ref lects this idea, and he goes on to something else. But when his friends just don’t get it, he is inspired to study the matter further and, in all likelihood, invest in it.† * † For a more extended discussion of Long-Term Capital Management, see Chapter 6. See Mehrling (2005), pp. 253–254. bern_c02.qxd 3/23/07 8:53 AM Page 25 The Strange Paradox of Behavioral Finance 25 Treynor is a kind of lone wolf operator and prefers what he calls “slow ideas”—ideas that will take time to bear fruit and therefore have no attraction for most investors.

These widely separated but memorable demonstrations of market inefficiency are seared into memory: the 50 percent rise in stock prices from the middle of 1928 to October 1929; the subsequent plummet of 85 percent to the low of June 1932; Black Monday of October 19, 1987, when stocks lost over 20 percent of their value in one day; the Long-Term Capital Management crisis of the summer of 1998 when the imminent failure of this hedge fund nearly pulled down the whole bern_c02.qxd 3/23/07 8:53 AM Page 29 The Strange Paradox of Behavioral Finance 29 financial system; the 140 percent boom from the end of 1995 to October 2000, and the subsequent 44 percent bust in February 2003.


pages: 526 words: 158,913

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America by Greg Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbus A320, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Long Term Capital Management, mass affluent, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, yield curve

The fact that all trading in the market for these funds had stopped meant there was no longer a market. The BNP announcement caused the normal flow of overnight interbank funding to seize up on the Continent, spurring the European Central Bank to put 95 billion euros into the market as an emergency measure. For the first time in nine years, when Long Term Capital Management imploded in 1998 and threatened to take down several investment banks, including Merrill Lynch, O’Neal felt fear in the pit of his stomach. Back then, he was Merrill’s chief financial officer and the firm’s exposure to Long Term Capital, a hedge fund that bet the wrong way on interest rates, threatened Merrill’s access to overnight funding.

There was O’Neal slouched back in his chair, looking disheveled, unshaven, wearing a gray cardigan, his hands at his temples to prop up his slumping head. Tosi had never seen the CEO like this, and it was unnerving. “That fucking Semerci,” O’Neal muttered. “I should have known I could never trust him.” He then started talking about the Long Term Capital Management crisis almost a decade earlier, when he was CFO and Merrill Lynch nearly ran out of money. “Those fixed-income guys got me in 1998, and I swore I’d never let them do it to me again.” When Tosi left the office, he looked at Marian Brooks, O’Neal’s longtime secretary. There were tears in her eyes.

Chris Hayward, Eric Heaton, Kelly, and Moriarty realized they had been given a cue to leave, and awkwardly departed. O’Neal now made his case to the directors. The problems on Merrill’s balance sheet could get far worse, and there was no way to quantify the potential losses at the moment, he said. He had lived through the Long Term Capital Management crisis in 1998, and once liquidity dries up, Merrill Lynch could get into deep trouble in almost no time. Given this situation, it was only prudent for the firm to look at potential partners, O’Neal explained. That’s why he had reached out to Wachovia. “Stan, this is a great franchise, an iconic brand,” said Cribiore.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

It also raises the rates that they must pay for the funds they are able to borrow. They may have been fully solvent before the flight to liquidity began, but in a liquidity crisis they may not be able to afford the higher rates required for continued borrowing.12 Bear Stearns and Long Term Capital Management The interactions between the Fed and Bear Stearns in 2008, and between the Fed and Long Term Capital Management in 1998, are illustrative of the Fed’s concern about the shadow banking system and the possibility that failures there would lead to a financial panic. On a Monday morning in March 2008 the public was stunned to discover that over the weekend Bear Stearns, a leading investment bank, had been merged with JPMorgan Chase at the bargain-basement price of $2 per share.

., 197n24 Liebow, Elliot, 161, 196n13 limited liability corporations, 27–29 Limits to Growth, The (study report), 141–42 Lincoln, Abraham, 175 Lindbeck, Assar, 189n17 linked verse, 139 liquidity problems, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85 Littlefield, Henry, 185n14 Liutuan, China, 126–27 Lo, Andrew W., 182n22, 198n9 loanable funds theory, 78–79 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 81 Lohr, Steve, 180n5 London School of Economics, 43 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 38, 82, 83–85 López Portillo, José, 53–54 Los Angeles, California, 36, 169, 198n8 Los Angeles Times, 142 Loury, Glenn, 162, 197n18 Love Is a Story (Sternberg), 52 Lowenstein, Roger, 186n16 LTCM. See Long Term Capital Management Ludvigson, Sydney C., 180n12 Lundborg, Per, 183n14 Lusardi, Annamaria, 122, 191n7,8 Luxembourg, 125, 192n17 Macaulay, Frederic, 184n6 McCabe, Kevin A., 189n15 McCloskey, Michael, 151, 195n5 McCloud, James F., 138 McCulloch, Robert, 185n20, 196n10 McDonald, Forrest, 185n22 McDonald, Ian, 188n2 McGrattan, Ellen R., 178n6 McKinley, William, 62 macroeconomics, 174; with and without animal spirits, 4–5; in classical economics, xxiv; confidence and, 13, 14; credit crunch and, 88–89, 90; full employment and, 3; inflation-unemployment trade-off and, 45, 46; Keynesian, xxii; minorities and, 158; money illusion and, 41, 42, 45, 46; new insight into, 171; response required by, 168 Madrian, Brigitte C., 191n6 Maharashtra, India, 34 Malaysia, 126 Mao Zedong, 26, 126 marginal propensity to consume (MPC), 14–15 Mark, Rebecca, 34 mark-to-market accounting, 33–34 marriage, stories in, 52 Marsh, Terry A., 193n6 Martin Luther King Day, 163 Mason, Joseph R., 181n18 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 113, 141 Matsusaka, John G., 179n9 Meadows, Dennis L., 194n29 Meadows, Donella H., 194n29 Melino, Angelo, 191n9 mental accounts, 120–21, 192n25 Merrill Lynch, 133 Merton, Robert C., 84, 193n6 Meston, Lord, 71 Mexico, 53–54, 109 Miami, Florida, 36, 169, 198n8 Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, 16–17, 179n2,9 Milken, Michael, 31–32 Mincer, Jacob, 19 minorities, 6, 157–66, 174, 196–97n1–24; anger in, 161–62; characteristics of those left behind, 161–63; education and, 165–66; importance of trying to assist, 166; real estate market and, 154–55; remedy for economic problems of, 163–66; why they are left behind, 158–60 Minsky, Hyman, xxiv, 177n2,7,8, 186n3 Mishkin, Frederic S., 180n9, 187n9, 191n9, 193n15 MIT.

On this basis hedge fund owners have a huge incentive to leverage their holdings as much as possible and to make investments that are extremely risky. Curiously it appears that the hedge funds did not, for the most part, invest heavily in sub-prime packages.23 Calomiris claims that, as sophisticated investors, they knew better.24 But the case of Long Term Capital Management (whose failure we shall discuss in considerably more detail in Chapter 7) tells us that hedge funds, leveraged as they are, can fail in unusual times that fall outside the scope of their hedging models. Right now we do not know whether failure of large hedge funds is the next shoe to drop in the current crisis, or whether they really are what they claim to be.


pages: 162 words: 50,108

The Little Book of Hedge Funds by Anthony Scaramucci

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business process, carried interest, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, follow your passion, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, managed futures, margin call, mass immigration, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

This leverage enables the manager to buy $140,000 worth of good stocks while shorting $60,000 worth of bad stocks, thus giving him more money to play with so he can better diversify his portfolio. As a result, the hedge fund manager incurs less stock-selection risk and less market risk. But, leverage can be a fickle bitch . . . just ask Long-Term Capital Management. As Warren Buffett says, “When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.” Leverage can be tricky as it bears various levels of risk—counter party risk and market risk. I compare this alternative investment tool to a very sharp knife coming out of the steering wheel of your sports car; it can point at your heart as you are traveling downhill on an icy mountain road.

Consequently, a flood of money has poured into these funds, increasing the impact hedge funds have on the market and global economy, and affecting the everyman’s pocketbook. And Now for the Not-Quite-as-Successful By the mid-90s, it appeared that hedge funds had found the Shangri-La of investments. But just as they were about to meet the leprechaun and his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it happened—Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) collapsed in 1998 and was later rescued by the federal government. Founded in 1994 by a proprietary trading legend, John Meriwether from Solomon Brothers; two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Robert C. Merton and Myron Scholes; and a slew of finance wizards, LTCM used an arbitrage strategy that exploited temporary changes in market behavior.

Each of the major broker dealers (with the exception of Bear Stearns) put up capital, took over the defunct fund, and worked patiently to unravel the trades once the market calmed down. According to the Fed’s William McDonough, “An abrupt and disorderly liquidation would have posed unacceptable risks to the American economy.” Sound familiar? Although Long Term Capital Management took the crown for the most-documented hedge fund failure, the runner-up is more than likely Amaranth Advisors. Founded in 2000, Amaranth Advisors successfully bet on the natural gas market and came up big, showering its clients with sparkling performance. And then came the summer of 2006.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

Not a single one of the works of these economists will ultimately survive: Strategies that allow you to survive are not the same thing as the ability to impress colleagues. So the world today is divided into two groups using distinct methods. The first method is that of the economists who tend to blow up routinely or get rich collecting fees for managing money, not from direct speculation. Consider that Long-Term Capital Management, which had the crème de la crème of financial economists, blew up spectacularly in 1998, losing a multiple of what they thought their worst-case scenario was. The second method, that of the information theorists as pioneered by Ed, is practiced by traders and scientist-traders. Every surviving speculator uses explicitly or implicitly this second method (evidence: Ray Dalio, Paul Tudor Jones, Renaissance Technologies, even Goldman Sachs!).

Both can be analyzed using mathematics, statistics, and computers. Each requires money management, choosing the proper balance between risk and return. Betting too much, even though each individual bet is in your favor, can be ruinous. When the Nobel Prize winners running the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management made this mistake, its collapse in 1998 almost destabilized the US financial system. On the other hand, playing safe and betting too little means you leave money on the table. The psychological makeup to succeed at investing also has similarities to that for gambling. Great investors are often good at both.

Another tool used today is to “stress-test” a portfolio by simulating the impact of major calamitous events of the past on the portfolio. In 2008, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund managed by a leading quant used ten-day windows from the crash of 1987, the First Gulf War, Hurricane Katrina, the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management crisis, the tech-induced market drop in 2000–02, the Iraq War, and so forth. All this data was applied to the fund’s 2008 portfolio and showed that these events would have led to losses of at most $500 million on a $13 billion portfolio, a risk of loss of no more than 4 percent. But they actually lost over 50 percent at their low in 2009, brought to the brink of ruin before finally recovering their losses in 2012.


pages: 256 words: 60,620

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

If you ask people to offer adjectives they associate with good decision makers, words like “intelligent” and “smart” are generally at the top of the list. But history contains plenty of examples of intelligent people who made poor decisions, with horrific consequences, as the result of cognitive mistakes. Consider the following: • In the summer of 1998, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a U.S. hedge fund, lost over $4 billion and had to be bailed out by a consortium of banks. The senior professionals at LTCM, who included two recipients of the Nobel Prize in economics, were highly successful up to that point. As a group, the professionals were among the most intellectually impressive of any organization in the world and were large investors in their own fund.

If you have ever heard a financial expert refer to the stock market using terms like alpha, beta, or standard deviation, you have witnessed reductive bias in action. Most economists characterize markets using simpler, but wrong, price-change distributions. A number of high-profile financial blowups, including Long-Term Capital Management, show the danger of this bias.15 Benoit Mandelbrot, a French mathematician and the father of fractal geometry, was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of using normal distributions to explain how asset prices move.16 His chapter in The Random Character of Stock Market Prices, published in 1964, created a stir because it demonstrated that asset price changes were much more extreme than previous models had assumed.

While market participants described the formula as “beautiful, simple, and tractable,” it had a fatal flaw because correlations change. Consistent with reductive bias, the equation was based on an uncomplicated, stable world but was applied in a complex, dynamic world. As is often the case, default correlations rise when the economy turns south. The failure of Long-Term Capital Management illustrates how changing correlations can wreak havoc. LTCM observed that the correlation between its diverse investments was less than 10 percent over the prior five years. To stress test its portfolio, LTCM assumed that correlations could rise to 30 percent, well in excess of anything the historical data showed.


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The model, despite its elegance, has a problem: it doesn’t describe real world results very well. In particular, the model is remiss in capturing “fat tails”: infrequent but very large price changes. The failure of risk-management models to fully account for fat tails has led to some high-profile debacles, including the 1998 demise of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. Fat tails are closely associated with power laws, a mathematical link between two variables characterized by frequent small events and infrequent large events. Power laws are fascinating, and they empirically represent relationships as diverse as city sizes, earthquakes, and income distribution.

Exposure, on the other hand, considers the likelihood—and potential risk—of an event that history (especially recent history) may not reveal. Buffett argues that in 2001 the insurance industry assumed huge terrorism risk without commensurate premiums because it was focused on experience, not exposure. Investors, too, must discern between experience and exposure. The high-profile failures of Long Term Capital Management and Victor Niederhoffer give witness to this point. Remarkably, however, standard finance theory does not easily accommodate extreme events. Financial economists generally assume that stock price changes are random, akin to the motion of pollen in water as molecules bombard it.1 In a triumph of modeling convenience over empirical results, finance theory treats price changes as independent, identically distributed variables and generally assumes that the distribution of returns is normal, or lognormal.

Phillips, “Calibration of Probabilities,” in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 306-34. 8 Peter Schwartz, Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence (New York: Gotham Books, 2003). 9 Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000); Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007). 10 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” Econometrica 47 (1979): 263-91. 11 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Markets and in Life (New York: Texere, 2001), 89-90.


pages: 304 words: 80,965

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

Just as hurricanes do sometimes happen and insurance companies have to pay up, so, too, those otherwise stable relationships sometimes evaporate. When they do, they can take your life savings with them. It was just that sort of low-probability set of events that caused hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management to blow up in 1998, forcing the Federal Reserve to organize a $3.6 billion bailout of the fund, which at its height had controlled derivatives with a notional value of $1.25 trillion.24 Long-Term Capital Management used far more complex mathematical calculations than a manager who just writes put options. But fundamentally, it was exposed to the same risk.25 Weisman calls these strategies “informationless” because you don’t have to know much to create a great performance record—until disaster strikes.

International Monetary Fund, “IMF Performance in the Run-up to the Financial and Economic Crisis: IMF Surveillance in 2004–07” (International Monetary Fund, Independent Evaluation Office, January 10, 2011), http://www.ieo-imf.org/ieo/pages/NewsLinks107.aspx. 20. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton were both directors of Long-Term Capital Management. Wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Term_Capital_Management. 21. John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (Snowball Publishing, 2012), bk. 5, chap. 21. 22. Friedrich von Hayek, “The Pretense of Knowledge,” Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1974, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html. 23.

The compass that bankers and regulators were using worked well according to its own logic, but it was pointing in the wrong direction, and they steered the ship onto the rocks. History does not record whether the Queen was satisfied with the academics’ response. She might, however, have noted that this economic-statistical model had been found wanting before—in 1998, when the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management nearly took the financial system down with it. Ironically, its directors included the two people who had shared the Nobel Prize in Economics the previous year.20 The Queen might also have noted the glittering lineup of senior economists who, over the last century, have warned against excessive confidence in predictions made using models.


pages: 460 words: 122,556

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, break the buck, Brownian motion, Carmen Reinhart, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, geopolitical risk, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Y2K

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction Chapter 1 - TO THE CROSSROADS Chapter 2 - SUBPRIME Chapter 3 - LENDERS Chapter 4 - NIAGARA Chapter 5 - LEHMAN Chapter 6 - DESPERATE SURGE Chapter 7 - ABSENCE OF FEAR Chapter 8 - CITI’S TURN Chapter 9 - RUBICON Chapter 10 - TOTTERING Chapter 11 - FANNIE’S TURN Chapter 12 - SLEEPLESS Chapter 13 - THE FORCES OF EVIL Chapter 14 - AFTERSHOCKS Chapter 15 - THE HEDGE FUND WAR Chapter 16 - THE TARP Chapter 17 - STEEL’S TURN Chapter 18 - RELUCTANT SOCIALIST Chapter 19 - GREAT RECESSION Chapter 20 - THE END OF WALL STREET Acknowledgements NOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY ROGER LOWENSTEIN While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist THE PENGUIN PRESS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St.

Lean and sinewy, he resembled the actor Al Pacino, whose character in The Godfather (a movie Fuld watched repeatedly) he vaguely emulated, most famously in the brutal stares with which he responded to subordinates’ entreaties. His darting eyes seemed ever on the alert, as if for predators. Perhaps he had cause, for Lehman suffered a near-death experience almost every market cycle. In 1998, when the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management imploded, seeming to imperil Wall Street, Fuld valiantly went on the road to keep Lehman’s creditors from withdrawing their lines of credit; his efforts saved the firm. He had the daring of a gambler who believes, deep down, that he will always be able to play the last card—that if down markets or a credit crunch ever swamped his firm, he would find a way to steer it home.

AIG was based in Manhattan, its Art Deco skyscraper sprouting defiantly from behind the squat fortress of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. However, it sold CDO protection out of its derivatives unit in London, AIG Financial Products, a corporate satellite that employed a squadron of highly trained quants. Not unlike Long-Term Capital Management, the ill-fated hedge fund, Financial Products was an obscure, little-known trading outfit whose tentacles wrapped around the world of high finance. It didn’t offer “insurance” in the traditional sense of writing policies; rather, it entered into derivative contracts known as credit default swaps, under which a counterparty—Goldman, say, or Merrill Lynch—paid an upfront fee for AIG to guarantee the value of a CDO, or some other security.


pages: 351 words: 102,379

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

He liked to tell the story about how he once sat at a blackjack table and watched a “whale” of a gambler in Vegas lose $4.5 million, doubling every lost bet in hopes his luck would change. Fuld took notes on a cocktail napkin, recording the lesson he learned: “I don’t care who you are. You don’t have enough capital.” You can never have enough. It was a lesson he had learned again in 1998 after the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management blew up. In the immediate aftermath, Lehman was thought to be vulnerable because of its exposure to the mammoth fund. But it survived, barely, because the firm had a cushion of extra cash—and also because Fuld aggressively fought back. That was another takeaway from the Long-Term Capital fiasco: You had to kill rumors.

Resistance to the idea of an IPO was strong, as the bankers worried it would upend the firm’s partnership and culture. But with a big assist from Paulson, who became co-chief executive in June 1998, Corzine ultimately won the day: Goldman’s initial public offering was announced for September of that year. But that summer the Russian ruble crisis erupted and Long-Term Capital Management was teetering on the brink of collapse. Goldman suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in trading losses and had to contribute $300 million as part of a Wall Street bailout of Long-Term Capital that was orchestrated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A rattled Goldman withdrew its offering at the last minute.

Peterson had been leading the search for a replacement for William McDonough, who was retiring after a decade at the helm of the New York Fed. McDonough, a prepossessing former banker with First National Bank of Chicago, had become best known for summoning the chief executives of fourteen investment and commercial banks in September 1998 to arrange a $3.65 billion private-sector bailout of the imploding hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Peterson had been having trouble with the search; none of his top choices was interested. Making his way down the candidates list, he came upon the unfamiliar name of Timothy Geithner and arranged to see him. At the interview, however, he was put off by Geithner’s soft-spokenness, which can border on mumbling, as well as by his slight, youthful appearance.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

When panic strikes, even central banks willing to act as lenders of last resort cannot easily untangle the web of transactions in time to avoid a domino-style crash of one bank after another. All of this was amply demonstrated in the Panic of 2008, and even earlier in the collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. BlackRock had none of these problems. It was an asset manager, pure and simple. Clients entrusted it with assets to invest. There was no liability on the other side of the balance sheet. BlackRock did not need depositors or money market funds to finance its operations. BlackRock did not act as principal in exotic off-balance-sheet derivatives to leverage its client assets.

The crisis abated in the winter and spring of 1998, then burst into flames in late summer. Russia defaulted on its debt and devalued the ruble on August 17, 1998. The IMF prepared a financial firewall around Brazil, then seen as the next domino to fall. The world was shocked to learn the next domino was not a country, but a hedge fund—Long-Term Capital Management. The IMF had no authority to bail out a hedge fund. The task was left to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which supervised the banks that stood to fail if LTCM defaulted. In an intense six-day period, September 23–28, 1998, Wall Street, under the watchful eye of the Fed, cobbled together a $4 billion bailout to stabilize the fund.

It was four times greater than the largest nuclear explosion ever, the fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba test by the USSR in 1961. After the 1883 Krakatoa explosion, there was nothing left of Krakatoa. The cause for investor concern is that certain systemic collapses are so large the system does not bounce back. The system ceases to exist. CHAPTER 4 Foreshock: 1998 I have reflected a long time on the Long-Term Capital Management crisis. The thing that struck me most was the story of LTCM … is a very modern crisis, but the way it was resolved was almost identical to the way that crises always used to be resolved. The central bank was brought in and banged a few heads together. There was an argument about whether they should have done it, but in the end, that was how it was resolved.


pages: 430 words: 109,064

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

Mexico had a major meltdown in 1994–1995 and former communist countries such as Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine struggled with severe financial shocks. Then in 1997–1998, what seemed like the mother of all international financial crises swept from Thailand through Southeast Asia to Korea, Brazil, and Russia. The contagion even spread to the United States via Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), an enormous and terribly named hedge fund, which came to the brink of collapse. In the United States, economists and policymakers took two main lessons from these crises. The first was that crises could be managed—by pushing other countries to become more like the United States.

Our society cherishes few things more than the idea that all Americans have an equal opportunity to make money or participate in government. There is no construct more important in American political discourse than the “middle class.” The United States was not untouched by the emerging markets crisis of 1997–1998. In 1998, the most prestigious hedge fund in the world was arguably Long-Term Capital Management, founded only four years before in Greenwich, Connecticut, by a legendary trader, two Nobel Prize–winning economists, and a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve, among others.49 When the crisis broke out, LTCM had about $4 billion in capital (money contributed by investors), which it had leveraged up with over $130 billion in borrowed money.50 It bet that money not on ordinary stocks or bonds, but on complex arbitrage trades (betting that the difference between the prices of two similar assets would vanish) and directional trades (for example, betting that volatility in a given market would decrease).

In 1994, Orange County lost almost $2 billion on complicated interest rate derivatives sold by Merrill Lynch and other dealers; county treasurer Robert Citron pleaded guilty to securities fraud, although no one on the “sell side” of those transactions was convicted of anything. In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management collapsed in the wake of the Russian financial crisis and had to be rescued by a consortium of banks organized by the Federal Reserve. Scandals are a constant refrain throughout the history of the financial services industry. Particularly severe episodes of wrongdoing often lead to the implementation of new rules that at least close the particular barn door that had been left open in the past; the most important example was the new regulatory scheme created during the Great Depression.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

But the US Federal Reserve acted quickly and decisively, much as the Bank of England used to, by cutting interest rates and injecting a lot of liquidity into the global banking system. There was a fascinating episode which should have been instructive for economists and active traders. During the brief interval when Russian bonds were falling in price, an American investment company – Long-Term Capital Management – whose directors included Nobel Prize winning economists, went bust.3 The basic strategy of the company was based on the assumption that if the interest rate differential widened between a US bond and a foreign bond, one should invest in the foreign bond as sooner or later the rates would converge.

Much of this was the consequence of the pioneering work of Black and Scholes on options. Hedge funds and many other institutions of what became known as the shadow banking structure also proliferated. Transactions on the forex markets reached a level of trillions of dollars. (The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, which invested in foreign bonds, was one example of the collateral damage caused by the implosion in global financial markets.) The so-called emerging economies were able to benefit from the increased flow of foreign capital and used it to further their manufacturing industry. The WTO allowed greater exports from the EEs to the developed countries’ markets.

Metzler, eds, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 1.1 (1976): 19–46. 8.See, for instance, Frank Smets and Raf Wouters, An Estimated Stochastic Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of the Euro Area, ECB Working Paper 171 (European Central Bank, Frankfurt, 2002). 9.Fisher Black and Myron Scholes, “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities,” Journal of Political Economy, 81.3 (May–June 1973): 637–54. 6 The New Globalization 1.For some historical background, see Meghnad Desai, Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, London, 2002). 2.For background on the Asian crisis see Julia Leung, The Tides of Capital: How Asia Surmounted the Crisis and Is Now Guiding World Recovery (Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, London, 2015). 3.See Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management (Fourth Estate, New York, 2002). 4.J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 7 (Macmillan, London, 1978), pp. 158–9. 5.Many books describe and analyze the crisis in detail. See Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail (Viking, New York, 2009); Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2010). 6.Alan Greenspan’s testimony to the Senate Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, US House of Representatives, October 23, 2008.


pages: 620 words: 214,639

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, book value, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, Irwin Jacobs, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Northern Rock, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, too big to fail, traveling salesman, uptick rule, vertical integration, Y2K, yield curve

“That's why that night became such a crazy night— with JPMorgan there, the discussions with the Fed and the SEC—because we were going to have real problems in the morning,” said one senior executive. Finally, around midnight, Matt Zames, the co-head of global rates and currency trading at JPMorgan, arrived in the conference room. The brusque Zames had been a trader at Long-Term Capital Management when it blew up ten years earlier. The Bear Stearns executives started to run through the situation for Zames. “About ten minutes into it he goes, ‘Where's the Fed?’” Friedman said. “We said, ‘They're in one of the other conference rooms.' He goes, ‘Well, we can't talk about anything until we talk to the Fed.

We're worrying about people rolling in the overnight repo.' Because this wasn't term repo, it was overnight. This was good collateral, and all of a sudden, poof! You're vulnerable to it being over at any time when you're leveraged. You didn't have a chance. So, that same lesson that we learned today, Long-Term Capital Management had back then [in 1998] and the tulip people had it back in the 1400s.” Although he had watched Schwartz on Wednesday morning on CNBC, until Thursday night Cayne, who had spent his last forty years at the company and built it into the fifth-largest securities firm on Wall Street, had no idea what had been transpiring.

The New York Times led with the story and highlighted both its rarity and its potentially devastating effects on the firm: “The Fed's intervention highlights the problems regulators face as they contemplate the prospect that investment banks, saddled with toxic securities tied to subprime mortgages, are losing the trust of their lenders and clients—the kiss of death on Wall Street, where confidence has always been the most precious asset of all.” The paper then quoted Samuel Hayes, a professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School. “The public has never fully understood how leveraged these institutions are,” he said. “But the market makers understand the inherent risk. This is a run on the bank, just like Long-Term Capital Management, Kidder and Drexel Burnham.” On Friday morning, Bear Stearns put out its own announcement that followed the JPMorgan script precisely, though Schwartz added his own clarifications. “Bear Stearns has been the subject of a multitude of market rumors regarding our liquidity,” Schwartz explained.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Progress is reported and new goals are set, all without the normal accoutrements of established bureaucracies or rigid governance. This process was something Geithner learned in the depths of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. He saw it again when it was deployed successfully in the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. In that crisis, the heads of the “fourteen families,” the major banks at the time, came together with no template, except possibly the Panic of 1907, and in seventy-two hours put together a $3.6 billion all-cash bailout to save capital markets from collapse. In 2008, Geithner, then president of the New York Fed, revived the use of convening power as the U.S. government employed ad hoc remedies to resolve the failures of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from March to July of that year.

To explain why, it is illuminating to take 1947, the year of publication of Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis, as an arbitrary dividing line between the age of economics as social science and the new age of economics as natural science. That dividing line reveals similarities in market behavior before and after. The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 bears comparison to the collapse of the Knickerbocker Trust and the Panic of 1907 in its contagion dynamics and private resolution by bank counterparts with the most to lose. The stock market crash of October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 22.61 percent in a single day, is reminiscent of the two-day drop of 23.05 percent on October 28–29, 1929.

The theory of efficient markets and its corollaries of random price movements and a bell curve distribution of risk had escaped from the lab and infected the entire trading apparatus of Wall Street and the modern banking system. The application of these flawed theories to actual capital markets activity contributed to the 1987 stock market crash, the 1998 implosion of Long-Term Capital Management and the greatest catastrophe of all—the Panic of 2008. One contagious virus that spread the financial economics disease was known as value at risk, or VaR. Value at risk is the method Wall Street used to manage risk in the decade leading up to the Panic of 2008 and it is still in widespread use today.


pages: 313 words: 101,403

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, fixed income, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, hiring and firing, implied volatility, interest rate derivative, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, law of one price, linked data, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stochastic volatility, technology bubble, the new new thing, transaction costs, volatility smile, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The overheated tech-stock market of the late 1990s cast a warm, reflected glow on geeks of all types, as did the droves of hedge funds trying to use mathematical models to squeeze dollars out of subtleties. The guts to lose a lot of money carries its own aura. D.E. Shaw & Co., a NewYork trading house that was rumored to be making substantial profits doing "black box" computerized statistical arbitrage before their billion-dollar losses in 1998, and Long Term Capital Management, the quant-driven Connecticut hedge fund that ultimately needed a multibillion-dollar bailout, have both contributed to this more glamorous view of quantization. And indeed, many of the Long Term Capital protagonists are back in business again at new firms. The capacity to wreak destruction with your models provides the ultimate respectability.

There are not that many riskless profits to be harvested in the world. Eventually the struggle to make the same return on larger amounts of capital makes everriskier strategies tempting. In 1998 D. E. Shaw & Co., in partnership with the Bank ofAmerica, reportedly lost close to a billion dollars on the same sorts of strategies that decapitated Long Term Capital Management and took appreciable pounds of flesh out of many other hedge funds and investment banks. Meanwhile, in 1981, I attended the computer science courses offered by the Labs and learned the practical art of programming. I was especially entranced by language design and compiler writing, and spent most of my time creating specific little languages that allowed users to solve specialized problems.

One day, as I mindlessly whistled a Beatles song to myself while I programmed my bond option model, I heard the 23-year old kid in the next cube turn around and exclaim astonishedly, "How do you know that?" In fact, though, age didn't matter that much if you had ability, and the turbulence in financial markets since then-the crashes of 1987 and 1989, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management and Russia's default in 1998-has made the appearance of maturity an advantage. Among the new people I met was Roscoe, the amiable, cheerily disillusioned leader of a group of good-humored programmer malcontents who occupied the cubicles on what he called Dissident Row Everyone on Dissident Row ate lunch early and then took a constitutional up to the Brooklyn Bridge and back again.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

He’d made a killing on Black Monday in October 1987, when the Dow fell 22.6 percent in a single day. Like Spitznagel, he’d witnessed all the blowups of the nineties—the 1994 bankruptcy of Orange County, California; the Asian Contagion of 1997 triggered by currency devaluations; the 1998 collapse of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management after it made wildly misguided bets on Russian debt (among other things). Taleb had begun calling such crises Black Swans—extreme events no one could have predicted (like a sudden market crash). Once upon a time Europeans thought all swans were white… until they discovered black swans in Australia.

It wasn’t enough to save the firm—Eastbridge shut down a year later—but it was enough to satisfy Spitznagel that his strategy had worked. His “trial and error” experiments, as he liked to call them, were proving themselves with the certainty provided by cold hard cash. His next experiment, the following year, made even more money when the giant quant-packed hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management blew up, triggering more panic. That gave him the financial cushion to quit trading for a while and—hoping to add some scientific rigor to his pit-trader experiments—take what he called a “learning sabbatical.” He enrolled in New York University’s elite Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, one of the world’s top applied mathematics schools and home to some of the brightest quantitative minds on Wall Street—including a freshly minted professor of finance, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The more you expand your model by adding parameters, the more you become trapped in an inextricable apparatus of relationships. It is called overfitting.” Taleb earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1998 from the University of Paris–Dauphine. Then he hit the jackpot again when Russia defaulted on its debt (a move that devastated Long-Term Capital Management). Prior to the default, Taleb had purchased a bunch of put options on Russian banks, positions that would pay off if the banks plunged. They did, handsomely. * * * In a small classroom in Greenwich Village ripe with the scent of car exhaust and Chinese takeout, Taleb stood before a whiteboard scribbling equations.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

The key components of academic financial theory, however, are the ‘efficient market hypothesis’ (EMH), for which Eugene Fama won the Nobel Prize in 2013, and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), for which William Sharpe won the Nobel Prize in 1990. Sharpe shared that prize with Markowitz, and Myron Scholes received a Nobel Prize in 1997, just before the famous blow-up of Long-Term Capital Management, in which Scholes was a partner; Black had died in 1995. All of these financial economists have affiliations to the University of Chicago. EMH asserts that all available information about securities is ‘in the price’. Interest rates are expected to rise, Procter and Gamble owns many powerful brands, the Chinese economy is growing rapidly: these factors are fully reflected in the current level of long-term interest rates, the Procter & Gamble stock price and the exchange rate between the dollar and the renminbi.

The central bank might provide funds itself as ‘lender of last resort’ and/or help orchestrate a rescue operation by other financial institutions. But as the sector became more aggressive and competitive such co-operation diminished. Perhaps the last great co-ordinated rescue operation – which involved much official twisting of private-sector arms – was the support package for the racy and absurdly named hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. (The foul-mouthed Jimmy Cayne, of Bear Stearns, who refused to participate, would receive his comeuppance a decade later when the Federal Reserve took pleasure in forcing a fire-sale of his failing business to J.P. Morgan.) But the concerns about banks that paralysed the USA in 1933, or which brought the global financial system close to collapse in 2008, were not like that.

From the 1990s private equity – which invested in a diversified collection of new businesses – and hedge funds – which adopted unconventional investment strategies – were favoured as diversifying ‘alternative assets’. The original hedge funds were run by legendary names such as George Soros and Julian Robertson: Long-Term Capital Management was the most famous of all. But after the new economy bubble burst in 2000, pension funds and large investors poured money into these so-called alternative investments. But as demand for ‘alternative assets’ increased, the resulting increased supply of ‘alternative assets’ came more and more to resemble repackaging of existing assets.


Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

As a Princeton University economics professor, Ben had been a scholar of the Great Depression, the leading historical example of financial instability sinking the economy. As a career public servant at Treasury and later the International Monetary Fund, Tim had seen the challenges in dealing with financial crises in Mexico, Asia, and around the world. And as the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Hank had lived through episodes like the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management and the Russian default. We had all learned how quickly overheated markets could collapse, and while none of us was as worried as we should have been, none of us thought that financial innovations and the sophistication of modern finance had immunized us against crisis. The financial system is vital to the economy.

BEYOND BAGEHOT The Fed’s come-and-get-it approach did not end up luring many banks to the discount window early that fall—partly because the stigma of borrowing from the Fed persisted, partly because the turmoil eased. The stock market hit a record high, interbank lending rates stabilized, and Lehman completed its misguided acquisition of the real estate firm Archstone-Smith. So far, the crisis had played out like a rerun of 1998, when the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management’s demise produced widespread anxiety, but, after a modest intervention by the Fed, no widespread damage. But this calm did not last. First Merrill Lynch announced the biggest write-down of troubled assets in Wall Street history and ousted its CEO. Then Citigroup broke Merrill’s record and ousted its CEO, the one who had said banks needed to keep dancing while the music was playing.

We decided to bring Wall Street’s top CEOs to the New York Fed on Friday night, September 12, to try to organize a private-sector solution—perhaps something like the Bear deal with Wall Street firms taking on risk instead of the Fed; or together with the Fed, to help another larger and stronger firm acquire Lehman; or perhaps even something like the 1998 deal where the New York Fed encouraged fourteen counterparties of Long-Term Capital Management to band together to buy the firm outright and liquidate its assets. This time, Wall Street had even greater reason to help avoid a collapse. Merrill Lynch looked like it would be the next domino to fall after Lehman, and then Morgan Stanley; not even Goldman Sachs, the investment bank with the strongest balance sheet and largest liquidity cushion, could survive an all-out run on its business model.


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

As industry developed from the fifteenth century onward, credit also facilitated the financing of activities and assets for industrial development, growth, and achievement of a return.4 Financial leverage has long been an important contributor to the achievement of outstanding investment outcomes, as well as to disastrous ones. When an investment is a success, however, people do not generally talk about the role leverage has played. When it comes to failures, by contrast, leverage often takes the blame. This is precisely how most people understood the spectacular investment failure of Long-Term Capital Management, a large hedge fund management firm, in 1998. The firm, it was later discovered, had been magnifying its portfolio with leverage ratios as high as 100 to 1—that is, $100 of debt-equivalent employed for every dollar of equity committed. 6 Investment: A History Even though the firm was invested primarily in high-quality government bonds, its use of this extraordinary leverage created so much risk that even minor fluctuations in the value of its portfolio could cause extreme pressure on its available net worth.

The firm, it was later discovered, had been magnifying its portfolio with leverage ratios as high as 100 to 1—that is, $100 of debt-equivalent employed for every dollar of equity committed. 6 Investment: A History Even though the firm was invested primarily in high-quality government bonds, its use of this extraordinary leverage created so much risk that even minor fluctuations in the value of its portfolio could cause extreme pressure on its available net worth. Had it not been for a government-organized bailout, Long-Term Capital Management would almost certainly have collapsed.5 On the other hand, there have been great investment successes over extended periods of time achieved by well-regarded investors (Warren Buffett again comes to mind) through the use of more moderate levels of financial leverage coupled with good asset selection and stable financing sources.

During the years leading up to the Great Recession of 2007–2009, there were widespread attitudes in various administrations and Congresses that led to relaxation of some of the more restrictive prohibitions that were the legacy of the Great Depression and subsequent financial crises such as the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, various international crises of the 1990s, and the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. One notable example was the repeal of Glass-Steagall in the late 1990s. The Glass-Steagall Act passed by Congress in the 1930s prevented commercial banks from owning investment banks in a post-Depression attempt to prevent deposit-taking institutions from engaging in high-risk financial transactions.33 Throughout the period, competitive regulatory agencies were allowed to develop, gaps in regulatory coverage occurred and were not corrected, clarity in regulatory responsibilities was not established, and lapses in regulatory enforcement occurred.


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Never Again: Legacies of the Crisis Notes Sources Index LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS ABCP: asset-backed commercial paper ABS: asset-backed securities AIG: American International Group AIG FP: AIG Financial Products AMLF: Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility ANPR: Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking ARM: adjustable-rate mortgage ARRA: American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (2009) BofA: Bank of America CBO: Congressional Budget Office CDO: collateralized debt obligation CDS: credit default swaps CEA: Council of Economic Advisers CEO: Chief Executive Officer CFMA: Commodity Futures Modernization Act (2000) CFPA: Consumer Financial Protection Agency CFPB: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFTC: Commodity Futures Trading Commission CME: Chicago Mercantile Exchange CP: commercial paper CPFF: Commercial Paper Funding Facility CPI: Consumer Price Index CPP: Capital Purchase Program DTI: debt (service)-to-income ratio ECB: European Central Bank EMH: efficient markets hypothesis ESF: Exchange Stabilization Fund FCIC: Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission FDIC: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation FHA: Federal Housing Administration FHFA: Federal Housing Finance Agency FICO: Fair Isaac Company FOMC: Federal Open Market Committee FSA: Financial Services Authority (UK) FSLIC: Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation FSOC: Financial Stability Oversight Council G7: Group of Seven (nations) GAAP: generally accepted accounting principles GAO: Government Accountability Office GDP: gross domestic product GLB: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999) GSE: government-sponsored enterprise H4H: Hope for Homeowners HAFA: Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives Program HAMP: Home Affordable Modification Program HARP: Home Affordable Refinancing Program HAUP: Home Affordable Unemployment Program HHF: Hardest Hit Fund HOLC: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation HUD: Department of Housing and Urban Development IMF: International Monetary Fund ISDA: International Swaps and Derivatives Association LIBOR: London Interbank Offer Rate LTCM: Long-Term Capital Management LTRO: Longer-Term Refinancing Operations LTV: loan-to-value (ratio) MBS: mortgage-backed securities MOM: my own money NBER: National Bureau of Economic Research NEC: National Economic Council NINJA (loans): no income, no jobs, and no assets NJTC: new jobs tax credit OCC: Office of the Comptroller of the Currency OFHEO: Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight OMB: Office of Management and Budget OMT: Outright Monetary Transactions OPM: other people’s money OTC: over the counter OTS: Office of Thrift Supervision PDCF: Primary Dealer Credit Facility PIIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain QE: quantitative easing Repo: repurchase agreement S&L: savings and loan association S&P: Standard and Poor’s SEC: Securities and Exchange Commission Section 13(3): of Federal Reserve Act SIFI: systemically important financial institution SIV: structured investment vehicle SPV: special purpose vehicle TAF: Term Auction Facility TALF: Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility TARP: Troubled Assets Relief Program TBTF: too big to fail TED (spread): spread between LIBOR and Treasuries TIPS: Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities TLGP: Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program TSLF: Term Securities Lending Facility UMP: unconventional monetary policy WaMu: Washington Mutual PREFACE When the music stops . . . things will be complicated.

A third was the escapades of a single rogue trader, Nick Leeson, whose wild gambles in Singapore literally broke Barings, Britain’s oldest investment bank—and wound up as a movie. An inauspicious start, you might say. But that was nothing compared with what happened in the summer and fall of 1998, when losses at the now-infamous hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) helped set off a worldwide financial crisis—one that seemed monumental until it was dwarfed by the stunning events of 2007–2009. An overconfident LTCM got itself on the wrong side of a huge volume and variety of derivative bets, each of which entailed substantial amounts of synthetic leverage.

The top five took home over $1.4 billion in cash and stock sales over the years 2000–2008. Bear was also contrarian in another sense. Ten years earlier, during the height of the 1998 financial crisis, it had earned the enmity of the other Wall Street banks when it alone refused to accept its pro rata share of the emergency buyout of what was left of the faltering hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Bear’s refusal left a bitter aftertaste that Wall Streeters remembered in March 2008. One way in which Bear Stearns set its own course during the bubble was by becoming a huge player in the mortgage business, especially in the subprime mortgage business. Mortgage securitization became the largest component of Bear’s fixed-income division, which was in turn the company’s most profitable line of business, generating almost half the firm’s revenues.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Scholes served as a consultant to the investment bank Salomon Brothers and became its managing director and cohead of the fixed-income derivatives sales and trading group while still at Stanford (where he has remained as professor emeritus since 1996). In 1994, Scholes joined several former Salomon Brothers colleagues to cofound Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund focused on applying financial technology to practice. The fund was extremely successful for several years before requiring a historically major recapitalization in 1998 (an event that will be considered in more detail in chapter 7).58 In 1997, for his accomplishments, Scholes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, along with Robert C.

In 1988, Merton joined Salomon Brothers, the global investment bank then led by John Gutfreund, as a special consultant to the Office of the Chairman. John Meriwether was the head of the domestic fixed-income arbitrage group and had attracted many of Merton’s former students, most of whom had PhDs.56 Meriwether left Salomon Brothers in 1991, and in 1993 he had the idea to start a new firm. This would be a hedge fund named Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), founded to undertake global fixed-income arbitrage on, for example, price discrepancies between similar bonds trading in different markets. Merton and Scholes were among its eleven founders, seven of whom had strong connections to MIT, Harvard Business School, or both. Over $1 billion was raised from its investors, a very large investment for its time.

See Scholes and Williams (1977). 55. See Scholes, Wolfson, Erikson, Hanlon, Maydew, and Shevlin (2014). Scholes and Wolfson were coauthors through the fifth edition. The most recent edition was published in 2020. 56. Interview with authors. 57. Interview with authors. 58. For a history of Long-Term Capital Management, see Lowenstein (2000). 59. See “Award Ceremony Speech Presentation, Speech by Professor Bertil Näslund of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,” The Nobel Prize, December 10, 1997, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1997/presentation-speech.html. 60.


Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

Figure 13 shows what the dollar pyramid looked like as we headed for the twenty-first century and how MMF shares became the dominant form of retail money. There are two pyramids, one to represent the U.S. dollar system and another to represent the offshore U.S. dollar system.14 15 Figure 13 When Interbank Trust Failed Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund launched in 1994 with tremendous fanfare. Its partners painted a picture of perfection with their track record. They hailed from the mighty Salomon Brothers investment bank, the Federal Reserve, and included a pair of Nobel Prize winning economists. Their art was arbitrage, much like the first bill discounters of sixteenth century Antwerp upon which the money markets were built.

“History of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.” 1970. https://legacy.farmdoc.illinois.edu/irwin/archive/books/ Futrs_Tradng_in_Livestck/ Futures_Trading_in_%20Livestock_Part%20I_2.pdf Hearing before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Fifth, Second Session, October 1, 1998. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/policy-discussion-papers-federal-reserve-bank-cleveland-4514/lessons-rescue-long-term-capital-management-495652/fulltext Hearings before the Joint Economic Committee Congress of the United States, Eighty-Sixth Congress, First Session, October 26-30, 1959. https://www.jec.senate.gov/reports/86th%20Congress/Hearings/ Constructive%20Suggestions%20for%20Reconciling%20and%20 Simultaneously%20 Obtaining%20the%20Three%20 Objectives%20%28130%29.pdf Jefferson, Thomas.

“Innovations, Debts, and Bubbles: International Integration of Financial Markets in Western Europe, 1688-1720,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 48, no. 2, 1988, The Tasks of Economic History June 1988: 299-306. Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association. http://www.jstor.com/stable/2121172 Slivinski, Stephen. “Too Interconnected to Fail?” The Rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, Region Focus, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Summer 2009. https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2009/ summer/pdf /economic_history.pdf Steil, Benn. The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Economic ideologies are often elaborate rationales to justify taking care of some folks and neglecting others. Meanwhile, protecting the supply side of the economy, the chairman came to the rescue of the financial system and financial firms again and again, whenever they encountered serious peril or the stock market seriously wilted. The 1998 collapse of Long Term Capital Management was interpreted as threatening the safety of the financial system, so the Fed stepped in (what happened to the therapeutic effects of market discipline?). Likewise, the Fed reacted aggressively to the Russian debt crisis that year and the jitters over the “Y2K crisis” of 2000, and Greenspan provided quick liquidity or interest-rate cuts to calm other financial-market upsets.

But the essence of their strategy would have been immediately recognizable to the provincial nail manufacturer in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Monsieur de Rênal, whose financial acumen consists of “getting himself paid exactly what he’s owed, while paying what he owes as late as possible.” Rarely has the concept of leverage been more clearly explained. Nobel prizes aside, that’s basically what many of the hedge funds are doing. It’s a strategy that works great right up to the point when it doesn’t, which is what happened to Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in September 1998, when the Russian government defaulted and the hedge fund suddenly had to pay what it owed before it got paid. That led to an almost $4 billion bailout orchestrated by the Federal Reserve amid concerns by U.S. financial officials that world credit markets would, as New York Fed president William McDonough quaintly put it at the time, “possibly cease to function for a period of one or more days and maybe longer.”

Minority homeowners, like those in Cummings’s inner-city Baltimore district, are getting hit particularly hard. “I know that so often what happens is that when we’re making decisions in the suites, we forget about the people who actually have to go through this,” Cummings said. But “we’re becoming a bit alarmed.” In past financial implosions, of S&Ls in the eighties or Long Term Capital Management in the nineties, it was easy to name the villains but far trickier to find the victims. Not so here. They’re everywhere, not just in inner-city Baltimore. There are subdivisions in the exurbs that are beginning to resemble ghost towns. So what is to be done? The long-term challenge is to regulate an industry that, left to its own devices, seems to have eaten its young.


pages: 303 words: 84,023

Heads I Win, Tails I Win by Spencer Jakab

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fear index, fixed income, geopolitical risk, government statistician, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, price anchoring, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, transaction costs, two and twenty, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The stock market was still down by nearly 17 percent for the month, but Dalbar calculates that individual mutual fund investors probably lost over 24 percent—the sort of deficit that would normally take a couple of years’ worth of errors to rack up. The third-worst month came following the crash of October 1987 and the fifth-worst in August 1998 when Russia defaulted on its debts and hedge fund Long Term Capital Management threatened to blow up the world financial system. The second-worst month for investor timing, on the other hand, was a good one overall: March 2000. Stocks rose by nearly 10 percent, but investors lagged that by six percentage points, probably for two reasons. It was a very volatile month that saw technology stocks peak, but also an era during which many investors had abandoned so-called old-economy stocks that still made up a big chunk of the benchmark S&P 500 stock index.

If you’ve been paying attention, for example, then you should be asking why at least three events that shouldn’t have happened even once since the Big Bang have occurred in the past three decades alone. It’s because even the most sophisticated traders make poor predictions. When people with pointy heads and absolute conviction in models that claim to do so are united with billions of dollars of borrowed money, trouble often ensues. See Long Term Capital Management, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. You won’t blow up the global financial system, but you could blow a big hole in your nest egg by dipping in and out of the market. If you have done so successfully in the past (I plead guilty to a few naïve attempts), then it involved at least some luck.

Many were the equivalent of Hall of Famers, including two Nobel Prize winners, a man mooted as a possible Federal Reserve chairman, and some of the most profitable bond traders on Wall Street. John Meriwether, among the top brass at Salomon Brothers during its heyday, described so colorfully in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, gathered this dream team in 1993. He decided to name his firm Long Term Capital Management. Having denizens of financial Cooperstown managing your money didn’t come cheap even by hedge fund standards. Investors had to part with 2 percent of assets and 25 percent of profits yearly—more than the typical “two and twenty” fee structure then typical for competitors. But customers gladly agreed, and even seemed to be getting their money’s worth for the first few years.


pages: 504 words: 139,137

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Also, hedge funds often have negative skewness and excess kurtosis, meaning that they sometimes have extreme returns, especially on the downside. Indeed, hedge funds, especially the small ones, have a high attrition rate, and the industry has been marked by some large blowups, including the failures of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), Bear Stearns’ credit funds, and Amaranth. Rather than looking at the performance of actual hedge funds, we can circumvent some of the issues discussed above by cutting to the chase and studying the actual trading strategies that hedge funds pursue as we do in this book. As we will see, the core strategies have worked more often than not over long time periods and worked for economic reasons of efficiently inefficient markets. 1.3.

The expected shortfall is the expected loss, given that you are losing more than the VaR: Another measure of risk is the stress loss. This measure is computed by performing various stress tests, that is, simulated portfolio returns during various scenarios, and then considering the worst-case loss in these scenarios. Such stress scenarios can include significant past events, such as the 1998 price shocks around the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) bailout, September 11, and the failure of Lehman Brothers, as well as imagined future events, such as the failure of a sovereign state (e.g., Greece), a large interest rate move, a large shock to equity prices, a spike in volatility, or a sharp increase in margin requirements. While estimates of volatility and, to some extent, VaR measure the risk during relatively “normal” markets over a fixed time horizon, stress tests tell you about risk during extreme events.

I published a book in ’98 when I said I thought that markets were about to collapse, The Crisis of Global Capitalism. The prediction turned out to be false; the markets didn’t collapse. LHP: Well, it took a few more years. GS: The authorities managed to contain the problem in 1998. You had Long-Term Capital Management, and it was a pretty serious situation, which was saved by Bill McDonough, the head of the Federal Reserve in New York. He put the players in one room and said, “You’ve got to do something!” And then they saved the day. So, we survived ’98. But by allowing what I call this super bubble to develop, it grew larger and finally exploded in 2008.


Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control by Kenneth L. Grant

backtesting, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, George Santayana, global macro, implied volatility, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market design, Myron Scholes, performance metric, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Now the place is a bit more civilized; but what is perhaps even more surprising is that the topic of hedge fund risk management has held my attention for the better part of a decade. Part of the reason for this is that I’ve had the honor to manage risk for some of the world’s finest traders, including Steve Cohen and Paul Tudor Jones, and have managed to survive such wide-ranging crises as the emerging markets meltdown of 1997, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (everyone’s favorite hedge fund till the winds blew ill there), the September 11 attacks, the fraud-related collapse of Enron and WorldCom, and a host of others too pedestrian to name in this space. Along the way, it is good that I’ve learned what I think are some valuable lessons. And what’s even better (at least from an expository perspective) is that these lessons are remarkably consistent with one another and draw from a surprisingly small set of themes — themes that will form the framework for the core arguments I will put forward in this book.

Most typically and perhaps most effectively, scenario analysis is applied to various arbitrage portfolios where the interplay between individual instruments is less easily captured by VaR’s more brute force mapping of positions in an account into easy-to-comprehend risk factors. The Risk Components of an Individual Portfolio 105 For purposes of illustration, I offer some examples of the application of scenario analysis to three specific types of arbitrage portfolios: This strategy, rendered somewhat infamous by the Long-Term Capital Management episode of a few years back, involves the simultaneous purchase and sale of fixedincome instruments with similar but nonidentical economic characteristics that exhibit pricing divergence, in the hopes that this divergence disappears over the life of the transaction. Often, this may feature the purchase and sale of bonds with similar credit qualities across differing maturities or of bonds with differing credit qualities across the same maturity.

The fact that they were starting to utilize less efficient substitutes was evident in the price action of these commodities. Many speculators who had ridden the upward trend to once (or perhaps twice) in a lifetime profit levels, were rumored to be getting out while they still could. The problems here had to do with size and scale. Against the backdrop of the Russian default, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, and a rapidly deteriorating state of capital markets on a global scale, even the most 120 TRADING RISK intrepid investors were busy engaging in wholesale portfolio liquidation in a frenzied effort to accumulate cash and consolidate losses. Then, one afternoon, there was a multi-billion dollar bid for a clearly overvalued commodity.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Both disasters were caused by phenomena Greenspan had a long track record of misunderstanding. The 1987 crash was among other things caused by portfolio insurance derivatives (Greenspan was still fighting against regulation of these instruments five or six derivative-based disasters later, in 1998, after Long-Term Capital Management imploded and nearly dragged down the entire world economy), while Greenspan’s gaffes with regard to S&Ls like Charles Keating’s Lincoln Savings have already been described. His response to both disasters was characteristic: he slashed the federal funds rate and flooded the economy with money.

It was equivalent to a chemist saying that concrete becomes gold when you paint it yellow. It was lunacy. Greenspan’s endorsement of the “new era” paradigm encouraged all the economic craziness of the tech bubble. This was a pattern he fell into repeatedly. When a snooty hedge fund full of self-proclaimed geniuses called Long-Term Capital Management exploded in 1998, thanks to its managers’ wildly irresponsible decision to leverage themselves one hundred or two hundred times over or more to gamble on risky derivative bets, Greenspan responded by orchestrating a bailout, citing “systemic risk” if the fund was allowed to fail. The notion that the Fed would intervene to save a high-risk gambling scheme like LTCM was revolutionary.

The new law, which Greenspan pushed aggressively, not only prevented the federal government from regulating instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, it even prevented the states from regulating them using gaming laws—which otherwise might easily have applied, since so many of these new financial wagers were indistinguishable from racetrack bets. The amazing thing about the CFMA was that it was passed immediately after the Long-Term Capital Management disaster, a potent and obvious example of the destructive potential inherent in an unregulated derivatives market. LTCM was a secretive hedge fund that was making huge bets without collateral and keeping massive amounts of debt off its balance sheet, à la Enron—the financial equivalent of performing open heart surgery with unwashed hands, using a Super 8 motel bedspread as an operating surface.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

The financial crisis that rocked east and south-east Asia in 1997–8 was huge and spin-offs into Russia (which defaulted on its debt in 1998) and then Argentina in 2001 (precipitating a total collapse that led to political instability, factory occupations and take-overs, spontaneous highway blockades and the formation of neighbourhood collectives) were local catastrophes. In ,the United States the fall in 2001 of star companies like WorldCom and Enron, which were basically trading in financial instruments called derivatives, imitated the huge bankruptcy of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (whose management included two Nobel Prize winners in economics) in 1998. There were plenty of signs early on that all was not well in what became known as the ‘shadow banking system’ of over-the-counter financial trading and hence unregulated markets that had sprung up as if by magic after 1990.

The traders were by the mid-1990s often highly trained mathematicians and physicists (many arriving with doctorates in those fields straight from MIT) who delighted in the complex modelling of financial markets along lines pioneered back in 1972 when Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton (who later became infamous for their role in the Long-term Capital Management crash and bail-out in 1998) wrote out a mathematical formula for which they earned a Nobel Prize in Economics on how to value an option. The trading identified and exploited inefficiencies in markets and spread risks but, given its entirely new patterns, this permitted manipulations galore that were extremely difficult to regulate or even to spot because they were buried in the intricate ‘black box’ mathematics of computerised over-the-counter trading programs.

Profits earned by many individual traders soared and bonuses went stratospheric. But so too did losses. By 2002, the writing should have clearly been on the wall. A young Singapore-based trader named Nicholas Leeson brought down the venerable bank of Baring, and companies like Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and Adelphia would bite the dust, as would Long-term Capital Management and the government of Orange County, California, all of them as a result of trading in these new unregulated markets (derivatives and options) and hiding their trades in all manner of shady accounting devices and mathematically sophisticated valuation systems. Technological and financial innovations of this sort have played a role in putting us all at risk under a rule of experts that has nothing to do with guarding the public interest but everything to do with using the monopoly power given by that expertise to earn huge bonuses for gung-ho traders who aspire to be billionaires in ten years’ time and thereby secure instant membership in the capitalist ruling class.


pages: 345 words: 87,745

The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth With Less Work by Richard A. Ferri

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Madoff, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

The firm is still in business today because they won that bet. However, this strategy doesn’t always work. There have been many occasions when betting against dumb money hasn’t worked out. Long Term Capital Management thought they were betting against dumb money by purchasing Russian bonds as others were dumping them in 1998. Russia ultimately defaulted on its foreign debt obligations. This led to insolvency for Long Term Capital Management and put the country on the verge of a financial market meltdown. In order to avoid the crisis, the president of the New York Federal Reserve had to orchestrate a bailout by several leading Wall Street firms.

Investors’ love affair with last year’s top funds often turns into a messy divorce just a few years later. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan addressed manager persistence during testimony to Congress in 1998 in his Fed Speak way. Greenspan made this comment over the demise of Long-Term Capital Management, a failed hedge fund that threatened the entire financial system: This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they had built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract an abnormal return from financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be misconfigurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.9 Fund Termination Rates One interesting side study from persistence reports is fund termination rates.

Jeroen Derwall and Joop Huij, “‘Hot Hands’ in Bond Funds,” ERIM Research Paper Series (April 16, 2007). 8. Marlena Lee, “Is There Skill among Bond Managers?” (working paper, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Austin, Texas, 2009). 9. Alan Greenspan, Private-Sector Refinancing of the Large Hedge Fund, Long-Term Capital Management, Testimony before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, October 1, 1998). 10. Mark M. Carhart, “On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance,” The Journal of Finance 52, no. 1 (March 1997): 80. 11. Diane Del Guercio and Paula A. Tkac, “The Effect of Morningstar Ratings on Mutual Fund Flows” (working paper, University of Oregon Department of Finance, 2002). 12.


pages: 257 words: 13,443

Statistical Arbitrage: Algorithmic Trading Insights and Techniques by Andrew Pole

algorithmic trading, Benoit Mandelbrot, constrained optimization, Dava Sobel, deal flow, financial engineering, George Santayana, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market clearing, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, pattern recognition, price discrimination, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, transaction costs

In March 2000 a trend to a lower frequency that began in 1996 was discovered. First hinted at in 1996, the scale of the change was within experienced local variation bounds, so the hint was only identifiable later. Movement in 1997 was marginal. In 1998, the problems with international credit defaults and the Long Term Capital Management debacle totally disrupted all patterns of performance making inference difficult and hazardous. Although the hint was detectable, the observation was considered unreliable. By early 2000, the hint, there for the fourth consecutive year and now cumulatively strong enough to outweigh expected noise variation, was considered a signal.

Such dramatic discriminatory action had not previously been described; certainly there was no prior episode in the history of statistical arbitrage. There are many hypotheses, fewer now entertained than was the case at the time, about the nature of the linkages between credit and equity markets in 1998, and why the price movements were so dramatic. Without doubt, the compounding factor of the demise of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management and the unprecedented salvage operation forced by the Federal Reserve upon unenthusiastic investment banks heightened prevalent fears of systemic failure of the U.S. financial system. At the naive end of the range of hypotheses is the true, but not by itself sufficient, notion that the Fed’s actions simply amplified normal panic reactions to a major economic failing.

If it does not, then initial losses will be reversed before existing trades are unwound; damage is limited largely to (possibly stomach churning) P&L volatility. Destruction, when it occurs, is supercharged because both sides of spread bets are simultaneously adversely affected. In November 1994 Kidder Peabody, on being acquired, reportedly eliminated a pair trading portfolio of over $1 billion. Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), in addition to its advertized, highly leveraged, interest instrument bets, reportedly had a large pair trading portfolio that was liquidated (August 1998) as massive losses elsewhere threatened (and eventually undermined) solvency. 8.5 THE STORY OF REGULATION FAIR DISCLOSURE (FD) Regulation ‘‘Fair Disclosure’’ was proposed by the SEC on December 20, 1999 and had almost immediate practical impact.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Cognitive Psychology 17: 295–314. Gimein, Mark. 2005. “Is a Hedge Fund Shakeout Coming Soon? This Insider Thinks So.” New York Times, September 4. Government Accountability Office (GAO). 1999. “Long-Term Capital Management: Regulators Need to Focus Greater Attention on Systemic Risk.” GAO/GGD-00–3. ___. 2000. “Auditing and Financial Management: Responses to Questions Concerning Long-Term Capital Management and Related Events.” GAO/GGD-00–67R. ___. 2009. “Financial Markets Regulation: Financial Crisis Highlights Need to Improve Oversight of Leverage at Financial Institutions and across System.” GAO–09–739. ___. 2013.

The mix of this industry clearly is adaptive to market conditions: new funds are started to take advantage of emerging opportunities from one strategy, while other funds close down after experiencing losses from another strategy. But why should we care about hedge funds? One of my academic finance colleagues asked me just this question, right after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that failed in 1998: “Isn’t this just a case of a bunch of rich guys losing their money—who cares?” The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis provides a compelling answer: hedge funds are an important indicator species in the financial ecosystem. During good times, hedge funds are the “tip of the spear”; they’ll take advantage of new investment opportunities as soon as they arise.

Evolutionary competition caused hedge funds to trawl the universities for high-caliber mathematical talent, not merely in finance, but in physics, mathematics, and computer science—the rise of the “quants.” One of the most audacious experiments in this new style of hedge fund was based in Greenwich, Connecticut. It called itself Long-Term Capital Management, or LTCM, as it soon became known. LTCM was the brainchild of John Meriwether, the former head of the domestic fixed-income arbitrage group at Salomon Brothers, once one of Wall Street’s largest investment banks. Meriwether conceived LTCM to operate on a grand scale. If we think of hedge funds as analogous to biological species, then Meriwether’s vision of LTCM was to be one of the great filter-feeding whales of the oceanic depths, using very small fluctuations in the world’s bond markets for its financial sustenance.


Systematic Trading: A Unique New Method for Designing Trading and Investing Systems by Robert Carver

asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black Swan, buy and hold, cognitive bias, commodity trading advisor, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fear index, fixed income, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, Nick Leeson, paper trading, performance metric, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, survivorship bias, systematic trading, technology bubble, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Y Combinator, yield curve

Often requires leverage to achieve decent absolute returns in normal times; so gets killed in bad times. 40 Chapter Two. Systematic Trading Rules Positive skew Negative skew Examples: Examples: • Trend following strategies. • FX carry • Bets done by buying options, e.g. if you think the stock market will weaken then buying put options. • Fixed income relative value as practised by Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a large hedge fund that blew up in 1998.** • John Paulson in 2006 buying cheap credit default swap insurance on securities backed by mortgages.* • Market making. • Tail protect hedge funds that try and provide cheap insurance against large market moves, as practised by Nassim Taleb amongst others

This results in the available profits being reduced, the apparent risk falling, and required leverage increasing further. Then the music stops and their negative skew becomes horribly apparent. 45 Systematic Trading Two classic examples are the meltdown of fixed income relative value hedge fund manager Long Term Capital Management in mid-199836 and the Quant Quake – sharp losses seen over just two days by equity relative value systematic funds in August 2007. Achievable Sharpe ratios This section is relevant to all readers It’s important to have a realistic sense of what level of Sharpe ratios (SR) are achievable.

It turns out this system had seriously negative skew. Although this might seem like a bad result the Sharpe ratio after 21 years is still an excellent 1.7, even once the skew has revealed itself. Clearly this is not a genuine example, but less extreme instances of this have actually occurred. For example the SR of Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund which blew up in 1998 and which I mentioned earlier in the chapter, was also around 4.6. The second path to the mirage of higher Sharpe is to trade more quickly. The law of active management implies that if you can realise a Sharpe ratio of 0.40 on a single instrument when trading with a holding period of a month, then betting once a day could boost that to an SR of 1.8.


pages: 364 words: 101,286

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carbon-based life, discounted cash flows, diversification, double helix, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, electricity market, Elliott wave, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, full employment, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, informal economy, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, new economy, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, power law, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, stochastic volatility, transfer pricing, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Kurtosis bell curve with calculation of La Revue Britannique (Delacroix) Lagrange legacy of Lakebed sediments Langbein, Walter Laplace, Marquis Pierre-Simon de Bachelier and legacy of Least-squares method Gauss and Legendre and mathematics of Legendre, Adrien-Marie chance explored by Gauss v. least-squares method of Leibniz, Gottfried von Lenin Leontief, Wassily Lévy, Paul Bachelier and exceptional chance law from probability theory from Ligeti, Gyorgy Lintner, John Lo, Andrew W. Long-Term Capital Management LP (LTCM) Lorenz, Edward LTCM. See Long-Term Capital Management LP Lynch, Peter Machiavelli, Niccolo Madan, Dilip B. Magellan Fund Magnetism stochastic view of Mandelbrot, Benoit cotton mystery solved by eureka moment of Hurst heard of by IBM work of main work of persistence of Mandelbrot fractals Marcus, Alan J.

Nobel prize for price changes understood by Santa Fe Institute Scaling patterns Bouchaud’s model with cotton prices with multifractal modeling of Nile river flooding with physics with probability curve with proportions controlled by railroad stock with theory of time-scale with turbulence with Scholes, Myron background of influence of Long-Term Capital Management with modern finance influenced by Nobel prize for options valued by stress test encouragement of Schoutens, Wim SEC. See Securities and Exchange Commission Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) price continuity viewed by research need and turbulent trading viewed by Security Analysis (Graham and Dodd) Seismology Shakespeare, William Sharman, F.A. Sharpe, William F. asset valuation of CAPM discovered by economists’ view of expected return beta of influence of Long-Term Capital Management viewed by Markowitz and modern finance influenced by Nobel prize for risk understood by Sierpinski, Waclaw Sierpinski gasket fractals Skinner, B.F.

And it is one of the greatest that the truly wild nature of markets was re-discovered, at their cost, by two of the most ardent formulators of orthodox economics, Scholes and Merton. In 1993, the two Nobel laureates joined some heavyweight Wall Street bond traders in the creation of a new hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management LP. The partners collectively contributed $100 million and raised a war-chest that eventually topped $7 billion. Their strategy was straightforward. They would scour the world for occasions when, by their orthodox valuation formulae, the prices of individual options appeared to be wrong.


pages: 311 words: 99,699

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 by Gillian Tett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kickstarter, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, McMansion, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Plato's cave, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, value at risk, yield curve

Aggressive and high-risk hedge funds exploded onto the scene, some growing so large that they were competing in earnest with the new banking behemoths. The financial world was becoming “flat,” morphing into one seething, interlinked arena for increasingly free and fierce competition. Those playing in this twenty-first-century domain of unfettered cyberfinance knew these changes carried risks. The fate of hedge fund maverick Long-Term Capital Management was a deeply troubling cautionary tale. LTCM, which had been created in 1994, epitomized the new era of finance. It was run by a group of academics and traders who ardently believed in libertarian economics and who were dedicated to the cause of using computing power and mathematical skills to hunt for trading opportunities all over the world.

In late 2004, he acted, encouraging Corrigan to head a study of a group of leading Wall Street financiers to examine the state of the complex financial world. By then Corrigan was working as a managing director at Goldman Sachs and had already conducted one such exercise, back in 1999, which set out the lessons to be learned after the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund collapsed. This second study would have a much wider agenda, analyzing the state of complex finance more generally. When the three-hundred-page report was finally released in the summer of 2005, it duly demanded that banks overhaul their back office procedures for credit derivatives.

Only a few days after Bear Stearns collapsed, Timothy Geithner had urged Jerry Corrigan, his predecessor at the New York Fed, to organize a “voluntary” Wall Street report on how complex finance could be made less risky. Corrigan was only too happy to oblige. Corrigan had already overseen two earlier studies, one on the lessons from the implosion of Long-Term Capital Management, and the second, in 2005, just as the credit bubble was getting under way, on the state of complex finance. Corrigan was convinced that his third report, though, would be the most important. “We need to ask some important rhetorical questions—like, Why did everyone miss the boat?” Corrigan observed.


pages: 241 words: 81,805

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, Kevin Coldiron

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, currency risk, debt deflation, disinformation, distributed ledger, diversification, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, global reserve currency, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, negative equity, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk/return, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, yield curve

But for currency carry trades, there are two sides to a currency exchange rate, and if a carry crash means a crash of carry recipient currencies, it is also likely to mean a “melt-up” in the value of the funding currency. The first true example of this was the melt-up of the yen that occurred in early October 1998, at the end of the Asia and Russia crisis and following the collapse of giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Over October 7–8 of that THE RISE OF CARRY 24 year, the dollar collapsed against the yen by almost 15 percent, much of that melt-up of the yen exchange rate occurring during lunchtime hours in London (beginning of the day’s trading in the United States), when the yen moved a number of “big figures” in just a few minutes.

It defies the logic of economics, based on rationality, that the market would price the yen to generate an even bigger trade surplus in the future when the prospective path of net foreign assets is already unsustainable based on the current surplus. . . . The reason . . . is the growth of “carry trades.” . . . Since March 2004 banks’ gross foreign assets have now increased roughly Yen 30 trillion, the same magnitude as the huge rise from August 1996 to December 1997, the heyday of Long-Term Capital Management. It is worth mentioning that over the period since early 2004 the Korean Won has now appreciated by about 33% against the yen, and at this point is still rising sharply against the yen despite looking increasingly overvalued even against the dollar. This was written in January 2006, but over the subsequent year the yenfunded carry trade became far larger in size.

By comparison global stock market capitalization has roughly tripled over that same period. Moreover, the influence of hedge funds is magnified by two additional factors: leverage and trading frequency. The use of leverage means that hedge funds control far more securities than represented by their AUM. This was most dramatically illustrated in 1998 when Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), the gold standard for hedge funds at the time, collapsed spectacularly. Entering that year, LTCM managed just under US$5 billion, but with an estimated leverage of 25 to 1, it controlled securities worth US$125 billion. Leverage not only multiplies the assets under a hedge fund’s control; it also directly reduces its margin for error, in turn making the portfolio much less stable.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

(Treasury secretary Rubin and his deputy and then successor, Lawrence Summers, were principal architects of these measures, and finance lobbied vigorously for them.) Too much money had flowed into the markets too quickly, ending up in speculative projects that were now going bust. Dominos were falling in Asia, Brazil, Russia, and the West, eventually toppling an infamous hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which nearly tanked the US financial system. Citigroup alone lost half its quarterly profit, year over year, as a result. The Fed was once again left to pick up the pieces—though in that case, unlike with the bailouts of 2008, the banks themselves had to take responsibility for their losses.

According to former CFTC head Gary Gensler, also a former Goldman Sachs derivatives expert (and now CFO of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign), prior to the 2008 crisis around 90 percent of the entire derivatives market was in an unregulated space, not subject to oversight or central clearing on public exchanges.23 Gensler, who made it his business while at the CFTC to try to change that, has special insight into just how damaging that opacity can be. In 1998, while working in the Clinton administration for then–Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, he was assigned the task of trying to sort out the potential financial implications of the implosion of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). The culprit: a $1.25 trillion swaps portfolio gone bad. Gensler remembers going out to LTCM’s headquarters in Greenwich, Connecticut, on a Sunday to investigate. “It quickly became clear to me that we had no idea what the ramifications would be in our financial system, and where, because these trades were booked in the Cayman Islands,” he says.

The task is particularly difficult since in the thirty years leading up to the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act in 2010, nobody in Washington paid much attention to such firms. As part of the shadow banking sector, they were presumed to operate in a sphere that wouldn’t touch the average consumer’s finances too much, which turned out to be untrue. Just think of the demise of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management and the global market ripples it created; the government’s intervention to offset the impact of the fund’s failure belies the notion that shadow banking entities don’t enjoy federal backstopping of the Too Big to Fail kind, albeit implicitly rather than explicitly. Since the financial crisis of 2008, it’s the shadow banking sector rather than the federally guaranteed banks that has grown like kudzu, as risk migrates to the darkest parts of the system.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

The bull market psychology appeared impervious to financial and economic shocks. The first wave of the Asian crisis sent the market down a record 554 points on October 27, 1997, and closed trading temporarily. But this did little to dent investors’ enthusiasm for stocks. The following year, the Russian government defaulted on its bonds, and Long-Term Capital Management, considered the world’s premier hedge fund, found itself entangled in speculative positions measured in the trillions of dollars that it could not trade. These events sent the Dow Industrials down almost 2,000 points, or 20%, but three quick Fed rate cuts sent the market soaring again.

A Treasury auction of three-month bills conducted that afternoon was so heavily oversubscribed that buyers sent the interest rate down to 6 hundredths of 1 percent. I had monitored markets closely for almost 50 years, through the savings and loan crises of the 1970s, the 1987 stock market crash, the Asian crisis, the Long-Term Capital Management crisis, the Russian default, the 9/11 terrorist attack, and many other crises. But I had never seen investors rush to Treasuries like this. The last time Treasury bill yields had fallen toward zero was during the Great Depression, 75 years earlier.4 My eyes returned to the screen in front of me, and a chill went down my spine.

FIGURE 14-2 S&P 500 and Fed Funds Rate, 1990–2013 As the economy recovered and inflation threatened once again, the Fed tightened 25 basis points on March 25, 1997; yet stocks continued to rise. In response to the Asian crisis and chaos in the Treasury market caused by the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in August 1998, the Fed lowered the funds rate on September 29, 1998. But the stock market was 33.0 percent higher than it was 18 months earlier when the Fed first raised rates. As the U.S. economy sloughed off the Asian crisis, the Fed began tightening again on June 30, 1999, when the S&P Index rose to 1,373.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

He decided to start a hedge fund. It was a good time to do that. Princeton-Newport’s long run had convinced many wealthy investors of the possibility of beating the market while containing risk scientifically. Scores of new hedge funds were started in the early 1990s. Of all these new funds, Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management was to become the best known. Ed Thorp first heard of Meriwether’s fund through a mutual friend. The friend knew some of the people who were writing software for the new fund. “It’s gonna be a great investment,” Thorp was told, “and for ten million dollars you can get into it.” Like most of the new group of fund managers, Meriwether promised better-than-market returns through science and software.

“The general chatter was that he was a high roller, and it wasn’t clear that the size of his bets were justified,” Thorp recalled. “The story was that if he got in the hole, if things went against him, he’d bet more. If things still went against him, he’d bet more.” Kicking and Screaming LONG-TERM CAPITAL MANAGEMENT (LTCM) was the first fund to raise a billion dollars. It did this by projecting a 30 percent annual return net of fees—better than even Princeton-Newport had done. LTCM’s partners charged 25 percent of profits (rather than the usual 20) plus 1 percent of invested assets per year. The 25 percent fee was a deal-breaker for the trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, who decided they did not have that kind of money to burn.

He persuaded many of them to roll their money over into a new fund that Koonmen was starting, Eifuku Master Trust. One of the first things Koonmen had to explain to his investors was how to pronounce “Eifuku.” It was ay-foo-koo. Eifuku means “eternal luck.” Soros invested in Eifuku. So did several high-net-worth Kuwaitis and UBS, a Swiss bank still smarting from the distinction of having been Long-Term Capital Management’s largest investor. Like Meriwether, Koonmen believed that his management was worth a 25 percent cut of the profits. He also intended to rake in 2 percent of the fund’s assets each year, profitable or not. Koonmen installed his LTCM pool table in Eifuku’s offices on the eleventh floor of the Kamiyacho MT Building.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

The embarrassed representative had to ask the visitor to kindly turn off his machine. They were going a bit overboard. At that point, no one really cared what Simons and his team were up to. His two largest rivals, Long-Term Capital Management and D. E. Shaw, were commanding the full attention of investors. Founded by John Meriwether—himself a former mathematics instructor—Long-Term Capital Management also filled its ranks with professors, including Eric Rosenfeld, an MIT-trained finance PhD and computer devotee, and Harvard’s Robert C. Merton and Myron Scholes, who would become Nobel laureates. The team—mostly introverts, all intellectuals—downloaded historic bond prices, distilled overlooked relationships, and built computer models predicting future behavior.

One staffer was so shocked by the terms of the financing that he shifted most of his life savings into Medallion, realizing the most he could lose was about 20 percent of his money. The banks embraced the serious risk despite having ample reason to be wary. For one thing, they had no clue why Medallion’s strategies worked. And the fund only had a decade of impressive returns. In addition, Long-Term Capital Management had imploded just a few years earlier, providing a stark lesson regarding the dangers of relying on murky models. Brown realized there was another huge benefit to the basket options: They enabled Medallion’s trades to become eligible for the more favorable long-term capital gains tax, even though many of them lasted for just days or even hours.

Lux, “The Secret World of Jim Simons.” 6. Robert Lipsyte, “Five Years Later, A Female Kicker’s Memorable Victory,” New York Times, October 19, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/19/sports/colleges-five-years-later-a-female-kicker-s-memorable-victory.html. 7. Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000). 8. Suzanne Woolley, “Failed Wizards of Wall Street,” BusinessWeek, September 21, 1998, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1998-09-20/failed-wizards-of-wall-street. 9. Timothy L. O’Brien, “Shaw, Self-Styled Cautious Operator, Reveals It Has a Big Appetite for Risk,” New York Times, October 15, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/15/business/shaw-self-styled-cautious-operator-reveals-it-has-a-big-appetite-for-risk.html. 10.


pages: 161 words: 51,919

What's Your Future Worth?: Using Present Value to Make Better Decisions by Peter Neuwirth

backtesting, big-box store, Black Swan, collective bargaining, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Long Term Capital Management, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, the scientific method

Unfortunately, our memories are short. The fact that hedge funds based on these mathematical models crash and burn far more often than the theory that they are based on says is possible has not seemed to slow the growth of this paradigm. Each time there is a spectacular blow up (e.g., Long Term Capital Management’s collapse in 1998), it is written off as a “failure to execute,” an “impossible to predict event,” or some technical flaw in the model, which can simply be tweaked so that it doesn’t happen again.34 Present Value to the Rescue—What Step 3 is Really About At this point, you may be asking yourself why I have spent so much time telling stories about the impossibility of making predictions.

Taleb, The Black Swan (Random House [Trade Paperback edition], 2010). 32. From 1/1/1982 to 1/1/2000 the S&P 500 rose from 122.55 to 1469.25, a return of almost 15%/year 33. Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, 113–115. 34. There were countless postmortems after the LTCM collapse. See for example: Philippe Jorion, “Risk Management Lessons from Long-Term Capital Management,” European Financial Management 6 (September 2000): 277–300. Chapter 8 35. Peter Neuwirth, “The Time Value of Time.” Contingencies, Vol. 9 No.1 January/February 1997: 47–50. 36. Frederick, Shane, George Lowenstein, and Ted O’Donoghue, “Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review.”

See also “Black Swan”; fooled by randomness; Taleb, Nassim Nicholas information age, 1 Internet, 92 Ippolitto, Dean, 99 K Kahneman, Daniel, 10, 77 L Leiber, Fritz, 65–66 licensed actuary, 3. See also actuarial exams liquidity premium, 54 Live Long and Prosper (Vernon), 158–159 Long Term Capital Management, 94 M McLeish, David, 80–83. See also expanding funnel of doubt medical tests and Present Value, 135–138 modeling, 83. See also Big Data Money for Life (Vernon), 157 N Newtonian physics, 90 non-financial decision, 40 now and the later, weigh the, 97–108 O OPERS, 121, 122, 124, 128 Oregon Public Employees Retirement System.


pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

., New Frontier social programmes, 83, 84 Keynes, John Maynard: Bretton Woods conference, 59, 60, 62, 109; General Theory, 37; ICU proposal, 60, 66, 90, 109, 254, 255; influence on New Dealers, 81; on investment decisions, 48; on liquidity, 160–1; trade imbalances, 62–6 Keynsianism, 157 Kim Il Sung, 77 Kissinger, Henry, 94, 98, 106 Kohl, Helmut, 201 Korea, 91, 191, 192 Korean War, 77, 86 labour: as a commodity, 28; costs, 104–5, 104, 105, 106, 137; hired, 31, 45, 46, 53, 64; scarcity of, 34–5; value of, 50–2 labour markets, 12, 202 Labour Party (British), 69 labourers, 32 land: as a commodity, 28; enclosure, 64 Landesbanken, 203 Latin America: effect of China on, 215, 218; European banks’ exposure to, 203; financial crisis, 190 see also specific countries lead, prices, 96 Lebensraum, 67 Left-Right divide, 167 Lehman Brothers, 150, 152–3 leverage, 121–2 leveraging, 37 Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), 187 liberation movements, 79, 107 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 148 liquidity traps, 157, 190 Lloyds TSB, 153, 156 loans: and CDOs, 7–8, 129–31; defaults on, 37 London School of Economics, 4, 66 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund collapse, 13 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) hedge fund collapse, 2, 13 Luxembourg, support for Dexia, 154 Maastricht Treaty, 199–200, 202 MacArthur, Douglas, 70–1, 76, 77 machines, and humans, 50–2 Malaysia, 91, 191 Mao, Chairman, 76, 86, 91 Maresca, John, 106–7 Marjolin, Robert, 73 Marshall, George, 72 Marshall Plan, 71–4 Marx, Karl: and capitalism, 17–18, 19, 34; Das Kapital, 49; on history, 178 Marxism, 181, 182 Matrix, The (film), 50–2 MBIA, 149, 150 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 73 mercantilism, in Germany, 251 merchant class, 27–8 Merkel, Angela, 158, 206 Merrill Lynch, 149, 153, 157 Merton, Robert, 13 Mexico: effect of China on, 214; peso crisis, 190 Middle East, oil, 69 MIE (military-industrial establishment), 82–3 migration, Crash of 2008, 3 military-industrial complex mechanism, 65, 81, 182 Ministry for International Trade and Industry (Japan), 78 Ministry of Finance (Japan), 187 Minotaur legend, 24–5, 25 Minsky, Hyman, 37 money markets, 45–6, 53, 153 moneylenders, 31, 32 mortgage backed securities (MBS) 232, 233, 234 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 214 National Bureau of Economic Research (US), 157 National Economic Council (US), 3 national income see GDP National Security Council (US), 94 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (US), 106 nationalization: Anglo Irish Bank, 158; Bradford and Bingley, 154; Fortis, 153; Geithner–Summers Plan, 179; General Motors, 160; Icelandic banks, 154, 155; Northern Rock, 151 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 76, 253 negative engineering, 110 negative equity 234 neoliberalism, 139, 142; and greed, 10 New Century Financial, 147 New Deal: beginnings, 45; Bretton Woods conference, 57–9; China, 76; Global Plan, 67–71, 68; Japan, 77; President Kennedy, 84; support for the Deutschmark, 74; transfer union, 65 New Dealers: corporate power, 81; criticism of European colonizers, 79 ‘new economy’, 5–6 New York stock exchange, 40, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19 Nixon, Richard, 94, 95–6 Nobel Prize for Economics, 13 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 214 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 76 North Korea see Korea Northern Rock, 148, 151 Obama administration, 164, 178 Obama, Barack, 158, 159, 169, 180, 230, 231 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 73 OEEC (Organisation for European Economic Co-operation), 73, 74 oil: global consumption, 160; imports, 102–3; prices, 96, 97–9 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 96, 97 paradox of success, 249 parallax challenge, 20–1 Paulson, Henry, 152, 154, 170 Paulson Plan, 154, 173 Penn Bank, 40 Pentagon, the, 73 Plaza Accord (1985), 188, 192, 213 Pompidou, Georges, 94, 95–6 pound sterling, devaluing, 93 poverty: capitalism as a supposed cure for, 41–2; in China, 162; reduction in the US, 84; reports on global, 125 predatory governance, 181 prey–predator dynamic, 33–5 prices, flexible, 40–1 private money, 147, 177; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; toxic, 132–3, 136, 179 privatization, of surpluses, 29 probability, estimating, 13–14 production: cars, 70, 103, 116, 157–8; coal, 73, 75; costs, 96, 104; cuts in, 41; in Japan, 185–6; processes, 30, 31, 64; steel, 70, 75 production–distribution cycle, 54 property see real estate prophecy paradox, 46, 47, 53 psychology, mass, 14 public debt crisis, 205 quantitative easing, 164, 231–6 railway bubbles, 40 Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), 15–16 RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Reagan, Ronald, 10, 99, 133–5, 182–3 Real Business Cycle Theory (RBCT), 15, 16–17 real estate, bubbles, 8–9, 188, 190, 192–3 reason, deferring to expectation, 47 recession predictions, 152 recessions, US, 40, 157 recycling mechanisms, 200 regulation, of banking system, 10, 122 relabelling, 14 religion, organized, 27 renminbi (RMB), 213, 214, 217, 218, 253 rentiers, 165, 187, 188 representative agents, 140 Reserve Bank of Australia, 148 reserve currency status, 101–2 risk: capitalists and, 31; riskless, 5, 6–9, 14 Roach, Stephen, 145 Robbins, Lionel, 66 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 165; attitude towards Britain, 69; and bank regulation, 10; New Deal, 45, 58–9 Roosevelt, Theodore (‘Teddy’), 180 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Rudd, Kevin, 212 Russia, financial crisis, 190 Saudi Arabia, oil prices, 98 Scandinavia, Gold Standard, 44 Scholes, Myron, 13 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19 Schuman, Robert, 75 Schumpter, Joseph, 34 Second World War, 45, 55–6; aftermath, 87–8; effect on the US, 57–8 seeds, commodification of, 163 shares, in privatized companies, 137, 138 silver, prices, 96 simulated markets, 170 simulated prices, 170 Singapore, 91 single currencies, ICU, 60–1 slave trade, 28 SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), 186 social welfare, 12 solidarity (asabiyyah), 33–4 South East Asia, 91; financial crisis, 190, 191–5, 213; industrialization, 86, 87 South Korea see Korea sovereign debt crisis, 205 Soviet Union: Africa, 79; disintegration, 201; Marshall Plan, 72–3; Marxism, 181, 182; relations with the US, 71 SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle), 174 see also EFSF stagflation, 97 stagnation, 37 Stalin, Joseph, 72–3 steel production, in Germany, 70 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 60, 254, 255 Summers, Larry, 230 strikes, 40 sub-prime mortgages, 2, 5, 6, 130–1, 147, 149, 151, 166 success, paradox of, 33–5, 53 Suez Canal trauma, 69 Suharto, President of Indonesia, 97 Summers, Larry, 3, 132, 170, 173, 180 see also Geithner–Summers Plan supply and demand, 11 surpluses: under capitalism, 31–2; currency unions, 61; under feudalism, 30; generation in the EU, 196; manufacturing, 30; origin of, 26–7; privatization of, 29; recycling mechanisms, 64–5, 109–10 Sweden, Crash of 2008, 155 Sweezy, Paul, 73 Switzerland: Crash of 2008, 155; UBS, 148–9, 151 systemic failure, Crash of 2008, 17–19 Taiwan, 191, 192 Tea Party (US), 162, 230, 231, 281 technology, and globalization, 28 Thailand, 91 Thatcher, Margaret, 117–18, 136–7 Third World: Crash of 2008, 162; debt crisis, 108, 219; interest rate rises, 108; mineral wealth, 106; production of goods for Walmart, 125 tiger economies, 87 see also South East Asia Tillman Act (1907), 180 time, and economic models, 139–40 Time Warner, 117 tin, prices, 96 toxic theory, 13–17, 115, 133–9, 139–42 trade: balance of, 61, 62, 64–5; deficits (US), 111, 243; global, 27, 90; surpluses, 158 trades unions, 124, 137, 202 transfer unions, New Deal, 65 Treasury Bills (US), 7 Treaty of Rome, 237 Treaty of Versailles, 237 Treaty of Westphalia, 237 trickle-down, 115, 135 trickle-up, 135 Truman Doctrine, 71, 71–2, 77 Truman, Harry, 73 tsunami, effects of, 194 UBS, 148–9, 151 Ukraine, and the Crash of 2008, 156 UN Security Council, 253 unemployment: Britain, 160; Global Plan, 96–7; rate of, 14; US, 152, 158, 164 United States see US Unocal, 106 US economy, twin deficits, 22–3, 25 US government, and South East Asia, 192 US Mortgage Bankers Association, 161 US Supreme Court, 180 US Treasury, 153–4, 156, 157, 159; aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 160; Geithner–Summers Plan, 171–2, 173; bonds, 227 US Treasury Bills, 109 US (United States): aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 161–2; assets owned by foreign state institutions, 216; attitude towards oil price rises, 97–8; China, 213–14; corporate bond purchases, 228; as a creditor nation, 57; domestic policies during the Global Plan, 82–5; economy at present, 184; economy praised, 113–14; effects of the Crash of 2008, 2, 183; foreign-owned assets, 225; Greek Civil War, 71; labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188; profit rates, 106; proposed invasion of Afghanistan, 106–7; role in the ECSC, 75; South East Asia, 192 value, costing, 50–1 VAT, reduced, 156 Venezuela, oil prices, 97 Vietnamese War, 86, 91–2 vital spaces, 192, 195, 196 Volcker, Paul: 2009 address to Wall Street, 122; demand for dollars, 102; and gold convertibility, 94; interest rate rises, 99; replaced by Greenspan, 10; warning of the Crash of 2008, 144–5; on the world economy, 22, 100–1, 139 Volcker Rule, 180–1 Wachowski, Larry and Andy, 50 wage share, 34–5 wages: British workers, 137; Japanese workers, 185; productivity, 104; prophecy paradox, 48; US workers, 124, 161 Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (documentary, Greenwald), 125–6 Wall Street: Anglo-Celtic model, 12; Crash of 2008, 11–12, 152; current importance, 251; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; global profits, 23; misplaced confidence in, 41; private money, 136; profiting from sub-prime mortgages, 131; takeovers and mergers, 115–17, 115, 118–19; toxic theory, 15 Wallace, Harry, 72–3 Walmart, 115, 123–7, 126; current importance, 251 War of the Currents, 39 Washington Mutual, 153 weapons of mass destruction, 27 West Germany: labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188 Westinghouse, George, 39 White, Harry Dexter, 59, 70, 109 Wikileaks, 212 wool, as a global commodity, 28 working class: in Britain, 136; development of, 28 working conditions, at Walmart, 124–5 World Bank, 253; origins, 59; recession prediction, 149; and South East Asia, 192 World Trade Organization, 78, 215 written word, 27 yen, value against dollar, 96, 188, 193–4 Yom Kippur War, 96 zombie banks, 190–1

POSTCRIPT TO THE NEW EDITION NOTES RECOMMENDED READING SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX Abbreviations AC alternating current ACE aeronautic–computer–electronics complex AIG American Insurance Group ATM automated telling machine CDO collateralized debt obligation CDS credit default swap CEO chief executive officer DC direct current ECB European Central Bank ECSC European Coal and Steel Community EFSF European Financial Stability Facility EIB European Investment Bank EMH Efficient Market Hypothesis ERAB Economic Recovery Advisory Board EU European Union FDIC Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation GDP gross domestic product GM General Motors GSRM global surplus recycling mechanism IBRD International Bank for Reconstruction and Development ICU International Currency Union IMF International Monetary Fund LTCM Long-Term Capital Management (hedge fund) MIE military–industrial establishment NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OEEC Organisation for European Economic Co-operation OMT outright monetary operations OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries RBCT Real Business Cycle Theory RBS Royal Bank of Scotland REH Rational Expectations Hypothesis RMB renminbi – Chinese currency SME small and medium-sized enterprise SPV Special Purpose Vehicle TARP Troubled Asset Relief Program For Danae Stratou, my global partner Preface to the new edition This book originally aimed at pressing a useful metaphor into the service of elucidating a troubled world; a world that could no longer be understood properly by means of the paradigms that dominated our thinking before the Crash of 2008.

Unlike previous crises, such as the dotcom crash of 2001, the 1991 recession, Black Monday,1 the 1980s Latin American debacle, the slide of the Third World into a vicious debt trap, or even the devastating early 1980s depression in Britain and parts of the US, this crisis was not limited to a specific geography, a certain social class or particular sectors. All the pre-2008 crises were, in a sense, localized. Their long-term victims were hardly ever of importance to the powers-that-be, and when (as in the case of Black Monday, the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund fiasco of 1998 or the dotcom bubble of two years later) it was the powerful who felt the shock, the authorities had managed to come to the rescue quickly and efficiently. In contrast, the Crash of 2008 had devastating effects both globally and across the neoliberal heartland.


When Free Markets Fail: Saving the Market When It Can't Save Itself (Wiley Corporate F&A) by Scott McCleskey

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, break the buck, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, place-making, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, web of trust

Clearly, a big firm has the capacity to take down a number of other firms because it has positions or other exposures to a large number of firms. But a medium-size firm that is highly leveraged (borrows a great deal of money and then invests it) can easily punch above its weight in the market, and its failure can thus also be magnified. It is doubtful, for instance, that regulators would have identified Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) as too big to fail until it failed, its size having increased dramatically but away from the eyes of the regulators as it bet, ultimately the wrong way, on arbitrage between the prices of bonds. It was only after the Asian and Russian financial crises led to huge losses at LTCM that it became apparent how exposed the large investment banks were to LTCM, and how its failure could have systemic consequences.

This was a question of two parts: first, whether it is possible for a firm to become so big that its failure would cause irreversible destruction to the system, and second, what to do when such a firm teeters on the brink of collapse. This has not always been an entirely academic parlor game, since large firms have felt the icy hand of death on their shoulders before—Barings and Long Term Capital Management, among others. But the crisis thrust the question into the real world, and questions of ideology and principle gave way to expediency and practicality. That is not necessarily a bad thing; it simply reflected the fact that big decisions needed to be made immediately if not sooner. As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2, the notion of a firm being too big to fail is really shorthand for a firm being too interconnected to fail.

See also Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) accountability of senior management and boards, 22 Anti-Trust Division of Justice and phone market, 17–18 anti-trust powers/legislation, 18 assets weighted by level of risk, 16 banks, keep them small, 17–18 bonds, arbitrage between prices of, 16 capital cushion requirements, 17 capital requirements, increase, 19–20 commercial vs. investment banking activities, 18 conclusion, 22–23 do nothing, 22 financial disclosures, mandatory, 19 Glass-Steagall Act, bring back, 18–19 government intervention vs. free market principles, 17, 21 government support is swiftest, 23 hedge funds, 16, 19, 102, 105, 157–58 highly leveraged firm, 16 Long Term Capital Management, 16 market capitalization, 16 moral hazard encourages inordinate risks, 22 pay limits for officers, 20 n 191 Plan B, 10, 20, 22, 30, 81, 144 policy options, 17–22 proprietary trading by commercial banks, 19 Resolution Authority, 20–22 risk of unknown loss, 21 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 18 systemic risk, identify, 22 too-big-to-fail concept, 15–17 Volcker, Fed Chairman Paul, 18–19 Volcker Rule, 19 Insurance Core Principles, 140 International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS), 140–41 International Organization of Securities Commissioners (IOSCO), 140 international regulations Asia, regulatory initiatives in, 136 Basel Committee for Banking Supervision (BCBS), 140 Code of Conduct Fundamentals for Credit Rating Agencies, 140 conclusion, 141 EU privacy laws, 137, 141 Europe, stock exchanges in, 135 The European Union, 136–38 Financial Stability Board (FSB), 54, 139– 40, 184–85 FSA’s Handbook of regulations, 138 global markets, interconnectedness of, 134 herd mentality (short-term market movements), 134 Insurance Core Principles, 140 International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS), 140–41 International Organization of Securities Commissioners (IOSCO), 140 international organizations, 139–41 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), 136 overseas regulators, 135–39 privacy laws, 134–35, 137, 141 Prospectus Directive governs filing requirements, 137 regulation, principles based vs. rulesbased, 138–39 SEC and shift toward principles-based regulation, 138 Sunday is the new Monday, 133–35 U.S.


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Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

“The computer system of the US Customs and Border protection agency”: see Schlossberg, D. “LAX Computer Crash Strands International Passengers.” ConsumerAffairs.com, August 13, 2007, [http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/ 2007/08/lax_computers.html]; and Schwartz, J., “Who Needs Hackers?” New York Times, September 12, 2007. “Long-Term Capital Management”: see, e.g., Government Accounting Office, Long-Term Capital Management: Regulators Need to Focus Greater Attention on Systemic Risk. Report to Congressional Request, 1999, [http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GGD-00-3]; and Coy, P., Woolley, S., Spiro, L. N., and Glasgall, W., Failed wizards of Wall Street. Business Week, September 21, 1998.

The Customs agency could not process arriving international passengers, some of whom had to wait on airplanes for more than five hours. A third example shows that cascading failures can also happen when network nodes are not electronic devices but rather corporations. August–September 1998: Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a private financial hedge fund with credit from several large financial firms, lost nearly all of its equity value due to risky investments. The U.S. Federal Reserve feared that this loss would trigger a cascading failure in worldwide financial markets because, in order to cover its debts, LTCM would have to sell off much of its investments, causing prices of stocks and other securities to drop, which would force other companies to sell off their investments, causing a further drop in prices, et cetera.

Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging? Paleobiology, 6, 1980, pp. 119–130. Gould, S. J. Sociobiology and the theory of natural selection. In G.W. Barlow and J. Silverberg (editors), Sociobiology: Beyond Nature/Nurture?, pp. 257–269. Boulder, CO: Westview Press Inc., 1980. Government Accounting Office. Long-Term Capital Management: Regulators Need to Focus Greater Attention on Systemic Risk. Report to Congressional Request, 1999 [http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GGD-00-3]. Grant, B. The powers that be. The Scientist, 21(3), 2007. Grene, M. and Depew, D., The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

As markets sank, the hedge fund lost $2 billion: Ibid. At least $1 trillion was at risk: Ibid. The heads of more than a dozen: Michael Fleming and Weiling Lui, “Near Failure of Long-Term Capital Management,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Federal Reserve History, September 1998, www.federalreservehistory.org/Events/DetailView/52. “Had the failure of LTCM”: FRB: Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan, “Private-Sector Refinancing of the Large Hedge Fund, Long-Term Capital Management,” Committee on Banking and Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, October 1, 1998, www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/1998/19981001.htm.

The few post-meeting notices about coming changes in monetary policy that the Fed issued were short, under two hundred words, and full of Fedspeak, code words that people on Wall Street parsed like witch doctors examining sheep entrails for clues to the future. Words like “slightly” and “moderately” in Fedspeak did not mean the same thing. Every nuance mattered. Two years after I arrived in New York, tremors shook the markets when the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) shocked the Street by declaring it was on the verge of insolvency. The brainchild of John Meriwether, former head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers, LTCM was launched in February 1994 with $1.25 billion in capital and a cadre of hotshots who built financial models that would take bond arbitrage to never-before-seen heights of profitability.

., 36 Gorton, Gary, 125–27, 128 government shutdown, 234 Grant, James, 198 Great Depression, 177 Great Moderation, 65, 87 Greece, bailout of, 188–89 Greenburg, Alan, 105 Greenspan, Alan, 6, 13, 16–17, 19, 26, 47, 60, 77, 78, 91, 153, 220 Black Friday and, 64–65 education of, 48–49 financial crisis and, 167 housing bubble and, 8, 20–21, 23, 27, 50 inflation targeting and, 195–96 irrational exuberance comment of, 11, 12 Long-Term Capital Management crisis and, 14, 15 on too-big-to-fail banks, 187 Greenspan Put, 64–65 Gregory, Joe, 131 groupthink, 9, 50, 166, 197 Gunther, Jeffrey, 207, 208 Hackett, Jim, 71 Haines, Mark, 216 Harker, Patrick, 259 Hartnett, Michael, 1 Hatzius, Jan, 29 Hayes, Samuel L., 144 Hayman Capital Management, 115 high-frequency trading, 190 Hilsenrath, Jon, 80, 195, 223, 228, 233, 237, 245, 260, 262 Hoenig, Thomas, 181, 197, 210, 213 household formation, 211 housing bubble, 6, 20–29 adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) and, 22 author’s warnings regarding, 23–26 Bernanke and, 23, 74 Fisher on, 89 FOMC conclusions regarding lack of, 78–79 Geithner’s failure to anticipate, 55 Greenspan and, 8, 20–21, 23, 27, 50 lowered mortgage standards and, 21–22 reinflating of, in 2012, 232 subprime mortgages and, 21, 22, 27, 28, 74–75 systemic risk and, 26, 28 Yellen’s failure to see, 86–87, 88–89 housing market, 4–5, 215.


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Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, call centre, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Thorp, Etonian, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, interest rate swap, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, pets.com, proprietary trading, Red Clydeside, shareholder value, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, value at risk, warehouse robotics

There are obviously considerable risks. Hedge funds do blow up if there are just a few misjudgements, and they are lightly regulated. In 1998 the implosion in the United States of the splendidly misnamed Long-Term Capital Management necessitated a $3.6bn rescue by Wall Street firms, at the instigation of the authorities, because the fear was that its failure would spread panic in the markets.3 Long-Term Capital Management was a Greenwich-based firm. For a while its failure shook the prevailing confidence that complex computerised models and innovative new financial products offered stability and ever-bigger profits.

They had worked together at Salomon Brothers in the late 1980s, collaborating on what may even have been Wall Street’s first ever securitisation of sub-prime mortgages. McGinnis had joined Greenwich in 1997 and experienced the Royal Bank takeover when it bought NatWest.8 Greenwich had weathered the crisis in the markets when Long-Term Capital Management fell over in 1998. After the shock of 9/11 Greenwich had prospered, as most of its competition was based in lower Manhattan near the ruins of the World Trade Center and faced months of disruption. Now, after everything, Levine was effectively dumping him over lunch. ‘Why do you carry on working, Bob?

Thorp was one such pioneer in America, a Maths professor who perfected a gambling system and wrote the best-selling books Beat the Dealer and then Beat the Stock Market. In the early 1970s he applied his talents to creating a hedge fund, Princeton Newport Partners. 3 When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-term Capital Management, Roger Lowenstein, 2000. 4 ‘$363m is average pay for top hedge fund managers’, USA Today, 26 May 2005. 5 Kruger founded Five Mile Capital. 6 Angelo Mozilo built Countrywide, plunged deep into sub-prime and after the crisis was targeted by the US authorities. See ‘Mozilo settles Countrywide fraud case for $65m’, Reuters, 15 October 2010. 7 See Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe, Gillian Tett, 2009. 8 The senior team at Greenwich were initially contemptuous of their new owners, just a small Scottish bank, say several of those there at the time. 9 ‘RBS revealed as key part of consortium behind Ferrovial’s BAA bid’, Scotsman, 6 March 2006. 10 A complaint of some senior RBS investment bankers was that it paid too little, because Goodwin was reluctant to sanction salaries of a similar size to those paid to Diamond and his colleagues at Barclays.


pages: 468 words: 145,998

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System by Henry M. Paulson

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doha Development Round, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, price discovery process, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, too big to fail, trade liberalization, young professional

They couldn’t sell their Russian holdings, which had become worthless, so they started selling other investments, like mortgage securities, which drove down their value. Even if you had a conservatively managed mortgage business, as Goldman did, you lost heavily. The markets began to seize up, and securities that had been very liquid suddenly became illiquid. The biggest victim of this was the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, whose failure, it was feared, might lead to a broad collapse of the markets. The investment banking industry, prodded by the Federal Reserve, banded together to bail out LTCM, but the pain was broader. I remember watching some of our competitors struggling for survival because they had relied on short-term funding that they couldn’t roll over.

Bear had found itself in increasingly difficult straits since the previous summer, when, in one of the first signs of the impending crisis, it had been forced to shut down two hedge funds heavily invested in collateralized debt obligations. For all that, I also knew Bear as a scrappy firm that liked to do things its own way: alone on Wall Street it had refused to help rescue Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Bear’s people were survivors. They had always seemed to find a way out of trouble. For months, Steel and I had been pushing Bear, and many other investment banks and commercial banks, to raise capital and to improve their liquidity positions. Some, including Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, had raised billions from big investors such as foreign governments’ sovereign wealth funds.

CHAPTER 6 Late March 2008 For the first few days after the Bear Stearns rescue, the markets calmed. Share prices firmed up, while credit default swap spreads on the investment banks eased. Some at Treasury, and in the market, thought that after seven long months, we had finally reached a turning point, just as the industry intervention in Long-Term Capital Management had marked the beginning of the end of 1998’s troubles. But I remained wary. Bear Stearns’s failure had called into question not only the business models but also the very viability of the other investment banks. This uncertainty was unfair for those firms that, after adjusting for accounting differences, had stronger capital positions and better balance sheets than many commercial banks.


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Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The advent of handheld calculators, made by Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard, which could be programmed to calculate option prices using the model, appeared. Texas Instruments advertised in The Wall Street Journal: “you can find the Black-Scholes value using our...calculator.”12 Black went on to a long career at Goldman Sachs. Scholes moved to Salomon Brothers and Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), where Merton joined him. As the Nobel prize in Economics is not awarded posthumously, Fischer Black’s death in 1995 robbed him of a share of the award that went to Scholes and Merton for the development of option pricing models. During his life, when Black appeared infrequently on the floor of the CBOE, trading would halt momentarily and a loud cheer and clapping would break out.

Bear Stearns agreed, under pressure, to provide a $1.6 billion loan (over 10 percent of the firm’s equity) to the less leveraged High Grade Structured Credit Fund, letting its more leveraged sibling fail. Jimmy Cayne, cigar-smoking, bridge-playing, and (allegedly) pot-smoking Bear Stearns’ CEO, sought a one-year moratorium on margin calls. In 1998, when Wall Street bailed out Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), Bear famously rejected a similar proposal. Merrill, a big lender, now seized and tried to auction off $800 million of collateral. There were few buyers in sight and the prices were in free fall. Shortly after the Bear funds collapsed, the UK hedge fund Peleton Partners (the name refers to the leading group in a bicycle road race) failed.

Soros, Tudor Jones, and James Simons, an ex-mathematics professor and former code breaker, have outstanding records. For others, investment Viagra boosted performance. Some, like the Bear Stearns hedge funds, used leverage to increase returns. In 2009, in a Freudian slip, George Soros referred to Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) as “leveraged capital.”14 Others increased returns by investing in illiquid or complex securities. Some managers seek an information edge. The credo of SAC, a hedge fund operated by billionaire art collector Steve Cohen, is: “Get information before anyone else.”15 Hedge funds test the boundary of insider trading and market abuse.


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The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

There are systems that are complex, but we do not see them as such because we have more than enough time to navigate through them. Reflexivity Now we get to the critical source of complexity we must address when we are operating in the human sphere, the one that comes from the nature of human interaction and experience: reflexivity. In September 1998, when the vaunted but ill-fated hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was facing strains on its capital, the firm issued its famous “Dear Investor” letter asking clients for more funding. LTCM explained, rationally, that there were large opportunities ahead, but recent losses had left it a bit short of cash. Would you send us some? With that letter its failure was all but guaranteed, because the letter contributed to the perception that LTCM was in trouble, and investors reacted in a way that led those perceptions to be realized.

Vayanos (2004) argues for a similar dynamic through the path of anticipated mutual fund redemptions: investors redeem from mutual funds when asset prices—and hence fund performance—drop to a low enough level, so when the mutual fund thinks it is close to a point where redemptions will start to occur, it will take actions to increase fund liquidity. Kyle and Xiong (2001) show how a decline in prices can lead to liquidations because of decreasing absolute risk aversion. 6. Bookstaber (2007). Market breakdowns after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 (Lowenstein 2000) and during the 2008 financial crisis have similar story lines. Large declines in asset prices were exacerbated by sales from leveraged investors (and borrowers), overwhelming the balance sheets and capacity of traditional market makers. The result was accelerating price declines, more deleveraging, and, in the worst cases, a breakdown of market functioning.

Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 1: 151–78. doi: 10.1257/jel.50.1.151. Lorenz, Edward N. 1963. “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20, no. 2: 130–41. doi: 10.1175/1520-0469(1963)020<0130:DNF>2.0.CO;2. Lowenstein, Roger. 2000. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House. Lucas, Robert, Jr. 1977. “Understanding Business Cycles.” Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 5: 7–29. doi: 10.1016/0167-2231(77)90002-1. ———. 1981. Studies in Business-Cycle Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2009. “In Defense of the Dismal Science.”


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The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

Prell’s staff had tested the correlations going back four decades, and the results were quite clear. Even during the 1980s, when inflation and inflation expectations had been on everybody’s minds, their influence on long-term interest rates had been marginal. Vice Chairman David Mullins, who would soon leave the Fed for the efficient-market-minded hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, could scarcely contain himself. Prell’s model was “transparently nonsensical and violates enormous evidence which has been accumulated on the way markets work, including market efficiency,” he insisted. A core assumption of academic finance was that investors were forward-looking—what mattered was not their experience of short rates in the past, but rather their expectation of short rates in the future.

The quants delighted in slicing ordinary bonds into strange “strips”; the flows of money they generated were separated into interest-only payments and principal-only repayments, creating new securities known as IOs and POs; there were inverse IOs, inverse POs, and even a mind-boggling creature called the forward inverse IO. Firms such as Morgan Stanley assembled teams of scientists to apply ideas like chaos theory to markets, and hedge funds such as Long-Term Capital Management began to bet not on the direction of a market’s move but rather on how far it would move in either direction. The sheer speed with which derivatives proliferated was remarkable. As of the end of 1987, the face value of privately negotiated derivatives—mostly interest-rate swaps—amounted to under $1 trillion.

Rather, he was expounding on the advent of the new megabanks, and explaining why they were not actually threatening. With the benefit of hindsight, the Fed’s refusal to be emotionally exercised by the disruptive proliferation of unregulated swaps was a failure of the Greenspan era. • • • If there was one institution that embodied Greenspan’s optimism about the new finance, it was Long-Term Capital Management. Founded four years earlier by quantitative wizards from Salomon Brothers, Long-Term’s partners included the financial economists Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, who had received the Nobel Prize for their “new method to determine the value of derivatives.” David Mullins, the former Fed vice chairman who had lectured Mike Prell about the efficiency of markets, was another principal at LTCM; and for its first two and a half years, the firm performed spectacularly.


Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business by Ernie Chan

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, Brownian motion, business continuity plan, buy and hold, classic study, compound rate of return, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, endowment effect, financial engineering, fixed income, general-purpose programming language, index fund, Jim Simons, John Markoff, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, p-value, paper trading, price discovery process, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, transaction costs

., trading an overly large portfolio): In despair, one tries to recoup the losses by adding fresh capital; in greed, one adds capital too quickly after initial successes with a strategy. Therefore, the one golden rule in risk management is to keep the size of your portfolio under control at all times. This is, however, easier said than done. Large, well-known funds have succumbed to the temptation to overleverage and failed: Long-Term Capital Management in 2000 (Lowenstein, 2000) and Amaranth Advisors in 2006 (epchan. blogspot.com/2006/10/highly-improbable-event.html). In the Amaranth Advisors case, the leverage employed on one single strategy (natural gas calendar spread trade) due to one single trader (Brian Hunter) is so large that a $6 billion dollar loss was incurred, comfortably wiping out the fund’s equity—a textbook case of risk mismanagement.

uantitative trading gained notoriety in the summer of 2007 when some enormous hedge funds run by some of the most reputable money managers rung up losses measured in billions in just a few days (though some had recovered by the end of the month). They brought back bad memories of other notorious hedge fund debacles such as that of Long-Term Capital Management and Amaranth Advisors (both referenced in Chapter 6), except that this time it was not just one trader or one firm, but losses at multiple funds over a short period of time. And yet, ever since I began my career in the institutional quantitative trading business, I have spoken to many small, independent traders, working in shabby offices or their spare bedrooms, who gain small but steady and growing profits year-in and year-out, quite unlike the stereotypical reckless day traders of the popular imagination.

See Sharpe ratio Information, slow diffusion of, 117–118 Interactive Brokers, 15, 73, 82, 83 Investors, herdlike behavior of, 118–119 J January effect, 143–146 backtesting, 144–146 Java, 80, 85 P1: JYS ind JWBK321-Chan October 2, 2008 14:7 178 K Kalman filter, 116 Kavanaugh, Paul, 149 Kelly formula, 95, 97, 100–103, 105, 107, 153, 161 calculating the optimal allocation based on, 100–102 calculating the optimal leverage based on, 99 simple derivation of, when return distribution is Gaussian, 112–113 Kerviel, Jérôme, 160 Khandani, Amir, 104 Kirk Report, 10 L LeSage, James, 168 Leverage, 5, 95–103 Liquidnet, 73 Lo, Andrew, 104 Logical Information Machines, 35, 36 Long-only versus market-neutral strategies, calculating Sharpe ratio for, 45–47 Long-Term Capital Management, 110, 157 Long-term wealth, maximizing, 96 Look-ahead bias, 51–52 Loss aversion, 108–109 M Market impact, 22 MarketQA (Quantitative Analytics), 35 Markov models, hidden, 116, 121 Printer: Yet to come INDEX R , 21, 32–34, MATLAB 137–139 calculating optimal allocation using Kelly formula, 100–102 a quick survey of, 163–168 using in automated trading systems, 80, 81, 83, 85 using to avoid look-ahead bias, 51–52 using to backtest January effect, 144–146 mean-reverting strategy with and without transaction costs, 61–65 year-on-year seasonal trending strategy, 146–148 using to calculate maximum drawdown and its duration, 48–50 using to calculate Sharpe ratio for long-only strategies, 46–47 using for pair trading, 56–58, 59–60 using to scrape web pages for financial data, 34 MCSI Barra, 35, 136 Mean-reverting versus momentum strategies, 116–119 Mean-reverting time series, calculation of the half-life of, 141–142 Millennium Partners, 12 Model risk, 107 ModelStation (Clarifi), 35 Momentum strategies, mean-reverting versus, 116–119 P1: JYS ind JWBK321-Chan October 2, 2008 14:7 Index Money and risk management, 95–113 optimal capital allocation and leverage, 95–103 psychological preparedness, 108–111 risk management, 103–108 Murphy, Kevin, 168 N National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) Series 7 examination, 70 National Bureau of Economic Research, 10 Neural networks, 116 New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), 16, 149 Northfield Information Services, 136 O Oanda, 37, 73 Octave, 33 O-Matrix, 33 Ornstein-Uhlenbeck formula, 140–141, 142 Out-of-sample testing, 53–55 P Pair trading of GLD and GDX, 55 Paper trading, 55 testing your system by, 89–90 Parameterless trading models, 54–55 PFG Futures, 73 Plus-tick rule, elimination of, 92, 120 Posit (ITG), 73 Position risk, 107 Printer: Yet to come 179 Post earnings announcement drift (PEAD), 118 Principal component analysis (PCA), 136–139 Profit and loss (P&L), 6, 89 curve, 20 Programming consultant, hiring a, 86–87 Psychological preparedness, 108–111 Q Qian, Edward, 154 Quantitative Analytics, 35 Quantitative Services Group, 136 Quantitative trading, 1–8 business case for, 4–8 demand on time, 5–7 marketing, nonnecessity of, 7–8 scalability, 5 the way forward, 8 special topics in, 115–156 exit strategy, 140–143 factor models, 133–139 high-frequency trading strategies, 151–153 high-leverage versus high-beta portfolio, 153–154 mean-reverting versus momentum strategies, 116–119 regime switching, 119–126 seasonal trading strategies, 143–151 stationarity and cointegration, 126–133 who can become a quantitative trader, 2–4 Quotes-plus.com, 37 P1: JYS ind JWBK321-Chan October 2, 2008 14:7 180 R Random walking, 116 REDIPlus trading platform (Goldman Sachs), 73, 82, 83, 84 Regime shifts, 25, 91–92 Regime switching, 119–126 academic attempts to model, 120–121 Markov, 121 using a machine learning tool to profit from, 122–126 Regulation T (SEC), 5, 14, 69–70 Renaissance Technologies Corporation, 104 Representativeness bias, 109 Reverse split, 38 Risk management, 103–108.


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The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History by David Enrich

Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Downton Abbey, eat what you kill, electricity market, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, performance metric, profit maximization, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, tulip mania, work culture , zero-sum game

After the 1987 market crash, a White House report blamed derivatives for worsening the crisis by intensifying the snowball-like nature of panicked selling. In April 1994, derivatives landed on the cover of Time under the headline “Risky Business on Wall Street.” (The magazine’s cover illustration was of an evil-looking nerd staring at a computer screen.) And in 1998, the chaotic collapse of the giant, derivatives-investing hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, run by mathematicians and Nobel Prize–winning economists, further underscored the instruments’ risks. “Every time there’s been a fire, these guys [derivative traders] have been around it,” the former U.S. Treasury secretary Nicholas Brady noted in response. But derivatives were not going anywhere

Before long, Hayes’s trading positions became common knowledge across Tokyo. Rival banks started to attack. This was hardly an unprecedented phenomenon—and it made Hayes’s willingness to talk openly to rivals and brokers about his trading positions especially tough to comprehend. Back in the late 1990s, Long-Term Capital Management, at the time the world’s largest hedge fund, unraveled in the space of six late-summer weeks partly because Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs had gleaned valuable information about what assets it was holding. (Hayes was familiar with this tale, having read When Genius Failed, the definitive account of the fund’s collapse.)

I read a number of books—fiction and nonfiction—in preparation for writing The Spider Network. I reread some of the classics of the business genre, especially those that Hayes had mentioned to me were influential to him. Those included Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, and When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein, as well as a smattering of Michael Lewis books. I also read a number of fascinating books related to Asperger’s syndrome. They included the sublime The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison; and The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion.


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The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

. : Scott Patterson, Jenny Strasburg, and Jacob Bunge, “Knight Upgrade Triggered Old Trading System, Big Losses,” Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444318104577589694289838100. bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management . . . : The author was general counsel of Long-Term Capital Management and the principal negotiator of the 1998 bailout arranged by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. While LTCM was a well-known trader in fixed-income and derivatives markets, the extent of its trading in equity markets was not well known. LTCM was the largest risk arbitrageur in the world, with over $15 billion in equity positions on pending deals.

A major panic will spread exponentially and lead to total collapse absent an act of force majeure by government. This panic dynamic has actually commenced twice in the past sixteen years. In September 1998 global capital markets were hours away from total collapse before the completion of a $4 billion, all-cash bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, orchestrated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In October 2008 global capital markets were days away from the sequential collapse of most major banks when Congress enacted the TARP bailout, while the Fed and Treasury intervened to guarantee money-market funds, prop up AIG, and provide trillions of dollars in market liquidity.

Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. New York: Harper, 2012. Litan, Robert E., and Benn Steill. Financial Statecraft: The Role of Financial Markets in American Foreign Policy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Lowenstein, Roger. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House, 2000. Luman, Ronald R., ed. Unrestricted Warfare Symposium. 3 vols. Laurel, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 2007–9. McGregor, James. No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers. Westport, Conn.: Prospecta Press, 2012. Mackay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.


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No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos

Alan Greenspan, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, offshore financial centre, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, your tax dollars at work

Fifth, Rampart’s returns from products similar to Madoff’s had been substantially less than those claimed by Madoff. As I wrote, “In down months, our ... program experienced losses ... whereas Madoff reports only 3 losing months out of 87, a claim I believe impossible to obtain using option income strategies. In August 1998, in the midst of the Russian default and the Long Term Capital Management twin crises, the S&P dropped 14.58 percent, yet Madoff earned 0.30 percent. In January 2000, the S&P 500 dropped 5.09 percent, yet Madoff earned 2.72 percent. Our current test portfolios do not support this....” And the sixth red flag specifically noted that while the market had 26 down months in the 87-month period presented, Madoff had only 3, and “the methods given for the return generation are not possible or even plausible.

So not only did he urge me to go public, but he also introduced me to John Wilke, an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal whom he greatly respected. “This is the guy,” he told me. “This is the guy.” Pat Burns made the initial contact with Wilke. In preparation for that I sent him a one-page memo suggesting a three-part package for the Journal, which that paper could promote as “the largest hedge fund blowup since that of Long-Term Capital Management in August-October 1998. And, in reality, since it will likely involve hundreds of billions in selling pressure, the losses to investors will be akin to the largest company in the S&P 500, General Electric (with a market capitalization of $373 billion) suddenly collapsing.” I sat in my office late into the night, and as I wrote this I could almost feel the hope igniting inside me again.

With the hedge fund market estimated to be $1 trillion, having one hedge fund with 2% - 5% of the industry’s assets under management suddenly blow up, it is hard to predict the severity of the resulting shock wave. You just know it’ll be unpleasant for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks but the fall out shouldn’t be anywhere near as great as that from the Long Term Capital Management Crises. Using the hurricane scale with which we’ve all become quite familiar with this year, I’d rate BM turning out to be a Ponzi Scheme as a Category 2 or 3 hurricane where the 1998 LTCM Crises was a Category 5. 2. Hedge fund, fund of funds with greater than a 10% exposure to Bernie Madoff will likely be faced with forced redemptions.


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Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Llewellyn, “Fragile Banking in Norway, Sweden and Finland: An Empirical Analysis,” Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money 4 (1994): 5-19. 28 savings and loan associations: Timothy Curry and Lynn Shibut, “The Cost of the Savings and Loan Crisis: Truth and Consequences,” FDIC Banking Review 13 (2000): 26-35. 28 countries in Latin America and Asia: Nouriel Roubini and Brad Setser, Bailouts or Bail-Ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Economies (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 2004). 29 Long-Term Capital Management: Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000). 29 Crises continued to materialize: Roubini and Setser, Bailouts or Bail-Ins, 61-70. 31 “There is no national housing bubble”: Daniela Deane, “In Real Estate Fever, More Signs of Sickness,” Washington Post, April 17, 2005. 31 “the charm of history . . .”: Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), 259. 31 greed: See, for example, Ruth Gledhill, “Rowan Williams Says ‘Human Greed’ to Blame for Financial Crisis,” Times (London), October 15, 2008. 33 “we should be quite cautious . . .”: Alan Greenspan, “Consumer Credit and Financial Modernization,” remarks to Economic Development Conference of the Greenlining Institute, San Francisco, Calif., October 11, 1997, online at http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1997/19971011.htm. 33 “lenders are now able . . .”: Alan Greenspan, remarks to the Federal Reserve System’s Fourth Annual Community Affairs Research Conference, Washington, D.C., April 8, 2005, online at http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/20050408/default.htm. 33 slashing the rate: Jean Claude Trichet, “Activism and Alertness in Monetary Policy,” lecture to “Central Banks in the 21st Century” conference, Madrid, June 8, 2006, online at http://www.ecb.int/press/key/date/2006/html/sp060608_1.en.html.

Doubts grew about its ability to maintain the value of the ruble and its commitment to honor its debts. In the summer of 1998 investors fled the country, and the value of the ruble collapsed. The Russian government defaulted on debt owed to its citizens and stopped payments on most of the debt owed to foreign creditors. The effects of these actions reverberated around the world. Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund based in the United States, had placed extremely complicated bets on the prices of other countries’ government bonds that failed to factor in the possibility of a financial crisis. As panic over Russia’s default spread, the usual relationships among different kinds of bond prices went haywire, and LTCM was forced to liquidate its assets in order to survive.

But the ranks of too-big-to-fail institutions—the TBTF club—contain few such traditional banks. Instead, most TBTF institutions belong to another species: big broker dealers like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs; AIG and other sprawling insurance companies; government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and hedge funds like Long-Term Capital Management. While the crisis left fewer such firms intact, those that remain are often larger, thanks to the waves of consolidation that followed the panic. JPMorgan Chase took over Bear Stearns and then Washington Mutual; Bank of America absorbed Countrywide and then Merrill Lynch. Finally, Wells Fargo and Citigroup fought over who would gobble up Wachovia, an enormous but otherwise insolvent bank.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

See Financial leaders thought, 47–51 LeFrak, Richard, 129, 192 Legal norms, 222 “Legalized corruption,” 175–176 Lehman Brothers, 8, 20, 41, 56, 61, 157, 172, 177, 181–183, 205 Lending Club, 189 Lennon, John, 199 Levitt, Steven, 140 Leyne, Strauss-Kahn & Advisors, 195 Leyne, Thierry, 195 Liar’s Poker, 221 Liberia, 27, 171 Limits to Growth, The, 220 Links definition of, xxvi to hubs, 19 in human relationships, 19 system stability through, 215 Lipton, David, 165 Liversis, Andrew, 205 Lloyds, 137 Lobbying, 122 Lobbyists, 175 Loeb, Daniel, 91, 109 London, 43 London Business School, 48, 166, 175 London School of Economics, 16, 63, 142 “London Whale,” 57 Long Term Capital Management, 207–209 Loungani, Prakash, 50 Louvre, 132 Lowenstein, Roger, 208 Loyalty, 23 LTCM. See Long Term Capital Management “Lucky Sperm Club,” 137 Lutnick, Howard, 76 M Ma, Jack, 103 Macroeconomic trends, 70 Magic Mountain, The, 2 “Magic roundabout,” 134 Malloch-Brown, Lord Mark, 27 Manchurian Candidate, The, 67 Mankiw, Greg, 84 Mann, Thomas, 2 Mannesmann AG, 142–143 “Mansplaining,” 152–153 Marks, Howard, 90 Marrakech, 194 Marron, Donald, 209 Marx, Karl, 219 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 36, 81, 84, 149, 185 Masters, Blythe, 156 “Matchers,” 104 Matrix Advisors, 184 “Matthew Effect,” 52 McDonough, William J., 209 McKinsey, 87, 115, 152 Meade, Michael, 201 Media scrutiny, 136–137 Meditation, 62, 70 Medley, Richard, 43 Mentoring gap, 154–155 Meritocracy, 71, 80, 83, 213 Meriwether, John, 207–209 Merkel, Chancellor Angela banker interactions with, 174 at Davos, 114 in Euro crisis, 177 general references to, 39, 61, 193 Josef Ackermann and, 142–144 Merrill Lynch, 56, 179, 183 Merton, Robert, 52, 208 Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Benefit, 76 Metzler, Jakob von, 136 Microsoft, 153 Middle East, 171 Milgram, Stanley, 18 Miliband, Ed, 137 Milken, Lowell, 191 Milken, Mike, 63–64, 129, 190–193 Milken Institute, 190, 192 Min Zhu, 27 Mindich, Eric, 109, 170 “Mind-reading,” 149 Minimum wage, 211 Minorities discrimination against, 148 integration of, 226 old boys’ network exclusion of, 82 Misinformation, 41 MIT.

We will examine how the system should be recalibrated in order to create a more inclusive society with a fairer economy that benefits all. CHAPTER 12 Super-Crash: “Executive Contagion” THE CRASH OF A TITAN: JOHN MERIWETHER Few people can take credit for generating billions of dollars in losses and single-handedly bringing01he0.inancial system to the brink of collapse. John Meriwether of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) is one of them. At a wine tasting at Chef Daniel Boulud’s DBGB in the East Village, hosted by my friend Jim, a financier and avid wine collector, I met the now infamous Meriwether. I arrived later than most of the other guests, who had gathered in the center of the private wood-paneled room featuring an elegant table set with a myriad of different wine glasses, shiny silverware, and sharply folded napkins.

Adam Lashinsky and Katie Benner, “A tale of money, sex and power: The Ellen Pao and Buddy Fletcher affair,” Fortune, October 25, 2012, http://fortune.com/2012/10/25/ellen-pao-buddy-fletcher/. 17. Maya Kosoff, “Ellen Pao Is Writing a Tell-All About Silicon Valley’s ‘Toxic Culture,’” Vanity Fair, June 8, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/ellen-pao-memoir-silicon-valley-toxic-culture. CHAPTER 12 1. Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2001), Kindle locations 575-6, Kindle edition. 2. Mitchell, Complexity, Kindle locations 4250-55. 3. Richard Dobbs, Susan Lund, Jonathan Woetzel, and Mina Mutafchieva, “Debt and (Not Much) Deleveraging,” McKinsey Global Institute, February 2015, http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/debt-and-not-much-deleveraging. 4.


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Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms by Mark Spitznagel

Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, commodity trading advisor, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, financial engineering, Fractional reserve banking, global macro, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Spitznagel, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, spice trade, Steve Jobs, tail risk, the scientific method, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

These citation rings or circular support groups were called mutua muli by the ancients: the association of mutually respecting mules. COST‐EFFECTIVE RISK MITIGATION Most financial and business returns come from rare events—what happens in ordinary times is hardly relevant for the total. Financial models have done just the opposite. A fund miscalled Long Term Capital Management that blew up in 1998 was representative of such decorated mutua muli misunderstanding. The Nobel‐decorated academics proved in a single month the fakeness of their models. Practically everyone in the 1980s, particularly after the crash of 1987, must have known it was quackery. However, most if not all financial analysts exhibit the clarity of mind of a New York sewer after a long weekend, which explains how the mutua muli can take hold of an entire industry.

(A plot of the Sharpe ratios overlaid on the previous chart would simply be a horizontal line—more free money for all as leverage increases, meanwhile ending wealth plunges.) And less risk would always only mean less return. What a disaster those superficial, pseudoscientific tools are! Leverage can indeed kill the golden goose. (Just ask the investors of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management.) Now think about this for a second. If setting aside 60% of your stack of cash raises your end‐point wealth from 0 to 7 times your starting wealth over 300 rolls, then in a vacuum you could reason that the rate of return on that cash must have compounded at a fixed 0.8% on each toss—like a fixed annuity.

See also Holism value, 104 Investment risk, 8 J “Jack of the Baltic,” 43–45, 197 Jevons, William Stanley, 36 Jobs, Steve, 8 “Joyful wisdom,” 60 Julius Caesar, 23 Jung, Carl, 17 K Kahneman, Daniel, 53 Kamikaze criterion, 86 Kelly, John, 79–81 Kelly criterion, 78–87 Kelly optimal bet size, 81–87, 89–90, 93–94, 134 Klipp, Everett, 6, 195 Knew‐it‐all‐along phenomenon, 113, 114, 194 Kundera, Milan, 200 L Latané, Henry, 80, 81 Law of large numbers, 30 Leverage, 11, 83–84, 116–117 Le Verrier, Urbain, 167 Localized thinking, specialized thinking vs., 157–160 Logarithmic cost, 46–48 Logarithmic Rhine Falls, 54–56 Logarithm of wealth, 38–39 The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper), 19 Log utility maximization criterion, 54 Long Term Capital Management, 84 Long volatility strategy, 108, 177–178 Losses. See also Returns and buying into crashes, 149–150 diminishing marginal utility with, 53 in fair value of wagers, 34–35 focusing on, 6 horizontal vs. vertical, 48 insuring against, 44–52 Klipp on, 34–35 potential for, 8 reducing costliness of, 11 scaled by total wealth, 37–38 Loving your fate, 199–201 Ludic fallacy, 25 Lynch, Peter, 109, 115 M Mantle, Mickey, 63 Marcus Aurelius, 199 Marginal Revolution, 36–37 Markowitz, Harry, 80 Mean, 41 Mechanical payoffs, 168, 170 Median ending wealth: expected, 74–76 with insurance, 92 and Kelly‐optimal best size, 81, 86 raising, by lowering risk, 163 with real‐world safe havens, 163 Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), 199 Menger, Carl, 36 Merchant marine insurance, 202 Mises, Ludwig von, 37, 165, 180 Modern portfolio theory, 80, 99, 115 Modus tollens, 18–22 and groundhog problem, 18, 21–22 Monetary interventions, 11 Moonraker (Fleming), 36 Morgenstern, Oskar, 37 Multiverse thought experiment, 64–69, 74–76, 79, 89, 90 Murphy, Robert, 182 N Naïve empiricism, 127 Naïve falsificationism, 167–170 Napier (Scottish mathematician), 40 Narrow framing, 152–158 Neptune, 167, 169, 175, 187 Net portfolio effect: with combined payoff strategy, 79 in cost‐effectiveness analysis, 136–142 for gold, 178 and Kelly optimal bet size, 84–86 in no‐crash bootstrap, 146 in Petersburg merchant trade, 47 for real‐world safe havens, 184 and safe haven frontier, 186 for US Treasuries, 172, 174 value known by, 151 when reshuffling, 142–143 Neumann–Morgenstern utility function, 37 Newton, Isaac, 167 Niederhoffer, Victor, 114 Nietzsche, Friedrich: admonition and imperative of, 195 background of, 57–58 Dionysian ideal of, 69 eternal return (demon) thought experiment of, 58–63, 69–73, 75, 76, 79, 89, 90, 193, 199 on fighting monsters, 109 on forgetting one's purpose, 157 on forgetting umbrella, 203 on formula for greatness, 201 “joyful wisdom” idea of, 60 on loving your fate, 199 on merchant and pirate, 197 on what doesn't kill you, 199 on what is written with blood, 3 Non‐crash payoff: for safe haven imposters, 112 for safe haven phenotypes, 105, 106, 145–148 Non‐ergodicity, 72–77, 80 O Offensive defense, 148–151 120‐sided die (d120), 118–122, 127–129, 166 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 102 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller), 158 Opportunity cost, 152–155 Opportunity cost neglect, 153 Overspecialization, 158–159 P Pascal, Blaise, 23 Paths.


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Fred Schwed's Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: A Modern-Day Interpretation of an Investment Classic by Leo Gough

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, book value, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, disinformation, diversification, fixed income, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, short selling, South Sea Bubble, The Nature of the Firm, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, young professional

This has come about because of a number of mathematical discoveries, most notably the Black Scholes model, for which its discoverers won a Nobel Prize, which enabled more accurate pricing of these exotic products. The most important thing you should know about derivatives is that they do not represent ‘real’ financial assets that you own. They are contracts – i.e. promises – that are ‘derived’ from real assets, indices or events. And promises can be broken. When Long Term Capital Management, one of the first firms to use derivatives on a massive scale, got into trouble, there was a serious danger of global financial meltdown if it reneged on the derivatives contracts it had taken out. A consortium of major banks had to step in to prop up the firm for long enough for it to ‘unwind’ its positions.

A Abramovich, Roman 112 accounts, comparing 36–7 AIM (Alternative Investment Market) 70 analysis fundamental analysis 54–5 technical analysis (TA) 40–1 analysts 95, 96 annual reports 36–7 annuities 61 Aristotle 26 Arthur Andersen 53 assets, living off 22–3 astrology, use in predicting share prices 41 Austen, Jane 22 average performance 34–5 average returns 105 B bankers and financial crisis 28–9 banks, merger activity 89 bargains, finding 92–5 Barlow Clowes affair 74, 75 Baruch, Bernard 76 ‘bear raiders’ 82–3 behavioural finance 104–5 benchmarks 35, 87 Bernard, Claude 34 Black Scholes model 32–3 blue chip companies 51, 53 Bogle, John 110 ‘bond washing’ 75 bonds investing in 10–11, 50–2, 53 in the US 80 book value 92 books about the stock market 112–13 booms 18–19 dot.com 30 excessive borrowing in 29 mergers and acquisitions in 88–9 regulators in 85 selling in 76–7 borrowing and the financial crisis 29 British Rail 66–7 Brown, Gordon 18 Buffett, Warren 13, 32, 48, 50, 52, 54, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 83, 90, 96, 100, 105, 110 bull markets, new issues in 57 businesses, start-up 106–7 business failure 106 buying high 64–5 C capital raising 24–5 spending 22–3 car manufacturers 67 charting 40–1 China, government bonds 51 ‘churning’ 71– 2 Cisco Systems 90 ‘closed-end’ funds 86 collapses 74–5 collective investment 86–7 companies mergers 88–9 raising capital 24–5 under threat 66–7 compensation for collapses 74–5 compound interest 102 compounding 111 costs of transactions 70–1 counter-cyclical investments 76–7 crashes 28–9 reacting to 108 regulators in 85 credit card debts, during a boom 19 crooks 72–3 see also fraud cycles, economic 19 D debts, during a boom 19 deflationary periods 103 derivatives 32–3, 85 descendants entrusting with money 59 investing for 16–17 Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) 94–5 diversification 48–9 dividend discount model 95 dot.com boom 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) 35 Duttweiler, Rudolph 42 E earnings management 90 Ebbers, Bernard 73 economic cycles 19 economy, growth rate 42–3 Einhorn, David 83 Einstein, Albert 102 Enron 53 equity investment 80–1 estimating returns 80–1 execution-only brokers 71 executives, benefitting from mergers 89 F fact finds 98 false information 72–3, 90, 91 family, building 99 fees, transaction 70–1 Fibonacci numbers 40 figures, ‘managing’ 90–1 financial crisis, who to blame 28–9 financial professionals 96, 98 commissions 72 and investment skills 47, 54–5 risk aversion 58 see also fund managers financial statements 91 Fisher, Irving 56 Fisher, Philip 94, 113 fluctuations in share prices 38–9 Foreman, George 60 Franklin, Benjamin 10 fraud 73, 74–5 and blue chip companies 53 FSA (Financial Services Authority) 14, 74, 83, 84 FTSE 100 64–5 fund managers 35, 54–5, 101 and tracker funds 62 see also financial professionals fundamental analysis 54–5 fundamentals 110 G Garland, Judy 98 ‘gilts’ 50–1 globalisation 78–9 Goldstein, Phil 82 Goldwyn, Sam 40 good stories about companies 42–3 government bonds 10–11, 50–2 in the US 80 Graham, Benjamin 92, 104, 113 growth rate of economies 42–3 Grubman, Jack 73 ‘gurus’ 96–7 H ‘head and shoulders’ pattern 40 hedge funds 33, 82–3, 100–1 Hendrix, Jimi 16 I Icelandic banks 11 income from capital 22–3 index investing 34–5, 62–3, 110, 111 Indonesia 76–7 government bonds 10–11 Industrial Revolution 78 inflation 61 and rate of return 103 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) 56–7 innovations, investing in 30–1 insurance for investments 74 insurance companies 72 annuities 61 interest calculating 103 on interest 102 rates 11 international diversification 49 international investment 79 internet, investing in 30–1 investment mergers before88–9 collective 86–7 income 10–11 and inflation 61 international 79 long term 16–17, 64–5, 98–9, 102, 111 popular 30–1 risks in 44–5 short term 63 skill in 20–1 trusts 35, 48–9, 58–9, 86 IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) 56–7 J Johnson, Ross 89 K Keynes, J. M. 28 L Lehman Brothers 83 Lewis, Michael 9 life plans 98–9 lifespan, allowing for 60 liquidity 25 Livy (Roman historian) 108 Lloyds Names affair 45 Long Term Capital Management 32–3 long term investment 16–17, 98–9, 102, 111 returns on 64–5 losses 44–5 avoiding 74–5, 108–9 lottery wins 22–3 lump sums 23 M Mackay, Harvey 106 macro-management 101 Madoff, Bernie 72, 73, 75, 84, 113 manufacturers 67 market capitalisation 35 media reporting of financial crisis 28–9 Mencken, H.


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Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

The rocket scientists in the investment banks not only invented new trading strategies, they also dreamed up new assets to accomplish such trades. Given this symbiotic relationship, the investment banks increasingly provided hedge funds with cash to supplement their investor equity and finance larger trades. Not all went smoothly. In particular, in 1998 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) had to be rescued.23 LTCM was a high-profile hedge fund whose general partners included a former head of bond trading at Salmon Brothers (John Merriweather), a former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve (David Mullins), and two Nobel laureates in finance (Myron Schoales and Robert Merton).

Assets of the broker-dealers at the core of the investment banking groups had increased steadily from just 2 percent the economy in 1980 to 10 percent in 1990 and over 20 percent by the early 2000s. The risks to the investment banking industry posed through financing reckless market behavior were well illustrated by the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, which had managed to amass over a trillion dollars in assets on a narrow capital base. When it collapsed, the investment banks had to band together for a rescue. The second area for concern was the increasing participation of rapidly growing European universal banks in US markets. These firms further supported the expansion of investment banking and derivative markets and also provided a conduit to European banks to buy securitized assets with which they were less familiar.

Dybvig, “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity”, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 91, No. 3 (June 1983), pp. 401–19. Dooley (1994): Michael P. Dooley, “A Retrospective on the Debt Crisis”, NBER Working Paper No. 4963, December 1994. Edwards (1999): Franklin R. Edwards, “Hedge Funds and the Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 189–210. Eichengreen (1992): Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression 1919–1939, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992. Eichengreen (2008): Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, 2nd edn, Princeton University Press, 2008.


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The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

During the financial meltdown, even sophisticated investors, such as the banks that produced securitized loans in the first place, appear to have been mistaken about how risky these products were. In other words, the models that were supposed to make these products risk-free for their manufacturers failed, utterly. Models have failed in other market disasters as well — perhaps most notably when Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a small private investment firm whose strategy team included Myron Scholes among others, imploded. LTCM had a successful run from its founding in 1994 until the early summer of 1998, when Russia defaulted on its state debts. Then, in just under four months, LTCM lost $4.6 billion.

Since first predicting the October 1997 crash, Sornette has had a remarkable track record of identifying when market crashes will occur. He saw the log-periodic pattern in advance of the September 2008 crash, for instance, and was able to predict the timing. Similarly, the 1998 collapse in the Russian ruble that brought Long-Term Capital Management to its knees showed the signs of an impending crash — indeed, Sornette has claimed that even though the largely unanticipated Russian debt default may have triggered the market turmoil that summer, the crash showed the log-periodic precursors characteristic of herding behavior. This means that a market crash would likely have occurred during that period whether the ruble had collapsed or not.

.”: This story is based on an interview I performed with Clay Struve, as well as a published interview with Michael Greenbaum (Jung 2007), and Cone (1999). Greenbaum mentions that O’Connor was using jump diffusion models in the late 1970s; Struve confirmed it. Cone (1999), meanwhile, described how Struve saved O’Connor in October 1987. “Models have failed in other market disasters as well . . .”: For more on Long-Term Capital Management, see Lowenstein (2000). 6. The Prediction Company “When the Santa Fe Trail . . .”: For more on the Santa Fe Trail, see Duffus (1972). “A century and a half later, two men . . .”: The narrative history of the founding of the Prediction Company is from Bass (1999). Additional biographical details concerning the founders of the Prediction Company come from Bass (1985, 1999), Gleick (1987), Kelly (1994a, b), and Kaplan (2002), as well as interviews and e-mail exchanges with Doyne Farmer and others knowledgeable about the early history of the company.


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Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino by Jim McTague

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, computerized trading, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, housing crisis, index arbitrage, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market bubble, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, naked short selling, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, technology bubble, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K

A renaissance man with degrees in science and law, Hu in 1993 had written a forward-looking piece for the Yale Law Review predicting that big financial institutions would make significant mistakes employing relatively new products called derivatives. This was 5 years before the blowup of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that had made interest rate bets using the exotic products and 15 years before insurer AIG would blow itself up dealing in the exotic products. Part of Hu’s thinking was that credit default swaps, which decoupled loans from the actual lender, led to “empty creditor” situations, undermining what it meant to be a debt holder.

The Quants, who predated the HFT industry by 20 years, often founded hedge funds as opposed to trading exclusively on their own dime. This practice invited regulatory scrutiny and the associated expenses whenever a member of the Quant fraternity had an exceptional meltdown. The SEC tried to regulate hedge funds in the wake of the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund debacle in 1998, but the courts threw out its rules. Congress eventually stepped in and required regulation for some of the larger hedge funds in the Dodd-Frank Financial reform Law of 2010. So a spotlight had been shone on that industry. Quants in the late 1990s and early 2000s learned the hard way what should have been fairly obvious—the longer one’s time horizon, the more difficult it is to predict the future.

., 108 Island (ECN), 144-145 Ivandjiiski, Krassimir, 42 Ivandjiiski, Dan, 41-42 J–K Johnson, Lyndon, 114 Johnson, Simon, 186 Junger, Sebastian, 67 justifiable trades, 88 Kanjilal, Debases, 189 Kanjorski, Paul, 81-83 Kaufman, Ted, 37, 47-61, 103, 183-187, 193-198, 208-210 Kay, Bradley, 231-232 Kim, Edward, 142 King, Elizabeth, 196 Kirilenko, Andrei, 171, 201 Kotok, David, 234 Kotz, David, 197 L latency, 167 layering, 210-212 Leibowitz, Larry, 42 Lemov, Michael, 114 Levitt, Arthur, 14, 35, 50, 110, 118, 140-144 Lewis, Michael, 191 life-cycle funds, 230 LIFFE (London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange), 30 limit orders, market orders versus, 224 Lincoln, Abraham, 48 liquidity during Flash Crash, 72-73 Liquidity Replenishment Point (LPR), 78 Liquidnet, 173-174 Lo, Andrew W., 160 London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE), 30 Long Term Capital Management, 98, 159 Loomis, Philip A., 121 LPR (Liquidity Replenishment Point), 78 Luddites, 150 Lukken, Walt, 28 M Madoff, Bernie, 56 Malyshev, Misha, 39 market manipulation, HFT (high-frequency traders) accused of, 39-45 market orders, limit orders versus, 224 market volatility. See volatility Markman, Jon, 4 Massey, Raymond, 49 Mathisson, Dan, 36, 141 Maulden, John, 234 Mayer, Martin, 127 McCaughan, Jim, 178, 229-230 McGinty, Tom, 197 Mecane, Joseph M., 159 Melton, Mark, 151 Merrill Lynch, 99, 189-190 Merrin, Seth, 173-174 Merton, Robert C., 159 Mikva, Ab, 53 Minner, Ruth Ann, 48 momentum ignition, 18, 23 Moss, John E., 113-122 Murphy, Eddie, 29 mutual funds, ETFs (exchange-traded funds) versus, 232 N Nagy, Chris, 8, 225 naked puts, 127-128 naked short selling, banning, 47-59 naked sponsored access, 226 Nanex, 200 Narang, Manoj, 152-156 NASD (National Assocation of Securities Dealers), 102 regulation after Black Monday (October 19, 1987), 136-137 NASDAQ on Black Monday (October 19, 1987), 133 initial public offerings (IPOs), 142-144 investigation of price fixing, 139 modernization of, 33 Regulation NMS changes to, 21 regulation of ATSs (Automatic Trading Systems), 139-144 SOES (Small Order Execution System), 136-138 National Association of Securities Dealers.


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

You can only fit about $1 million cash into a briefcase. Without offshore, the illegal drugs trade would be more like a cottage industry. Financial deregulation and globalization? Offshore is the heart of the matter, as I will show. The rise of private equity and hedge funds? Offshore. Enron? Parmalat? Long Term Capital Management? Lehman Brothers? AIG? Offshore. Multinational corporations could never have grown so vast and powerful without the tax havens. Goldman Sachs is very, very much a creature of offshore. And every significant financial crisis in the world since the 1970s, including, as noted, the latest global economic crisis, is very much an offshore story.

Offshore banks are likely to be highly leveraged, that is less solvent, than onshore banks.” The report, which contains plenty more along these lines, frets especially about lax offshore regulation. It was a direct warning, long before the crisis struck. That report followed soon after the implosion of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a classic slice-and-dice offshore structure that nearly destroyed the U.S. banking system in 1998 after the fund took on massive risks, covered by near-paranoid secrecy. LTCM’s managers were in Greenwich, Connecticut; the hedge fund was incorporated in Delaware; and the fund it managed was in the Cayman Islands.

Financial markets seized up in 2007 because nobody knew, or trusted, what the other players in the market were doing, or what they were worth, or what or where their risks were. It is no coincidence that so many of those involved in great financial trickery, like Enron, or the empire of the fraudster Bernie Madoff, or Sir Allen Stanford’s Stanford Bank, or Long Term Capital Management, or Lehman Brothers, or AIG, were so thoroughly entrenched offshore. The secrecy jurisdictions specialize in bamboozlement. Along with the secrecy, and a curmudgeonly reluctance to co-operate with foreign jurisdictions, the offshore system provides endless incentives for corporations—especially financial ones—to festoon their affairs across jurisdictions, usually a complex mix of onshore and offshore, to fox the regulators.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

We tried to avoid data mining, but the market has only one past, and we knew what it was. The bias introduced by that knowledge cannot be removed. After they were developed, these models made money in some countries, but not in others. Arguably, there were structural changes in the markets that ran contrary to what any rearview model based on the past would predict. Long Term Capital Management, a veritable who’s who on Wall Street with multiple Nobel laureates as founders, had similar, though more spectacular, troubles. No matter how much we want to think otherwise, financial markets are not physics experiments. They reflect a shifting combination of economic forces and human emotion.

Lehman Brothers’ leverage was widely reported to be more than 30:1 when they turned out the lights, and other firms were equally overextended, which, while not without precedent, proved particularly toxic when applied to what proved to be nearly incomprehensible securities. Robert Merton, who shared the Nobel Prize for economics in 1997, was also one of the founders of Long Term Capital Management, the firm at the center of a $5 billion crisis in 1998. At the time there was a sense of great peril, and the size of the rescue, which now seems quaint, seemed overwhelming. Merton wrote, As we all know, there have been financial “incidents” and even crises that cause some to raise questions about the innovations and scientific soundness of the financial theories used to engineer them.

Still Mad, but Ever Hopeful It took great deal of imagination, in a negative sense, to create the Great Mess of ’08, and we will need a great deal of positive imagination to get out of it. The magnitude of the problem is staggering. Previous financial crises have involved dollar amounts that are lost in the roundoff for this one. Long Term Capital Management’s near failure was a $3.5 billion problem. The size of the federal rescue goes well beyond the $700 billion in the initial rescue plan. One estimate,9 including the 324 Nerds on Wall Str eet hidden tax breaks for banks and the Citigroup rescue, totals $4.62 trillion through November 2008, and compares this figure to total inflationadjusted dollar equivalents for virtually every major federal project in the history of the country, which add up to less than $4 trillion: Cost Inflation-Adjusted Cost Marshall Plan $12.7 billion $115.3 billion Louisiana Purchase $15 million $217 billion Race to the moon $36.4 billion $237 billion S&L crisis $153 billion $256 billion Korean War $54 billion $454 billion New Deal $32 billion (est


pages: 407 words: 114,478

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William J. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, carried interest, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Only after you’ve formulated a program that focuses on asset classes and the behavior of asset-class mixtures will you have any chance for overall success. A deficiency in any of the Four Pillars will torpedo this program with brutal dispatch. Here are a couple of examples of how a failure to master the Four Pillars can bring grief to even the most sophisticated investors: Big time players: The principals of Long-Term Capital Management, the firm that in 1998 almost single handedly crippled the world financial system with their highly leveraged speculation, had no trouble with Pillar One—investment theory—as they were in many cases its Nobel Prize-winning inventors. Their appreciation of Pillars Three and Four—psychology and the investment business—was also top drawer.

After all, this book is a humble how-to tome; it has no pretension of being a documentary work. But of the four key areas of investment knowledge—theory, history, psychology, and investment industry practices—the lack of historical knowledge is the one that causes the most damage. Consider, for example, the principals of Long Term Capital Management, whose ignorance of the vagaries of financial history almost single-handedly brought the Western financial system to its knees in 1998. A knowledge of history is not essential in many fields. You can be a superb physician, accountant, or engineer and not know a thing about the origins and development of your craft.

When you adjust for risk, their performance looks better, but their compensation structure alone should give pause—managers are often paid a hefty percentage of returns, and in some years, total fees can easily exceed 10%. These are the kinds of margins that even Lynch and Buffett in their heydays would have trouble overcoming. Lastly, there is the risk of picking the wrong hedge fund. The list of institutions and wealthy investors shorn by Long-Term Capital Management’s flameout in 1998, which almost single-handedly devastated the world economy, constituted the cream of the nation’s A List. If it could happen to them, it could happen to anybody. My experience is that the wealthier the client, the more likely he is to be badly abused. Brokerage customers are judged by their ability to generate revenues for the firm.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

But the depth of the contagion had already been registered on Wall Street, as a massive flight to the safety of US Treasury bonds after the Russian default precipitated a sharp upward revaluation of risk in bond and foreign-exchange markets, and in the derivative markets based on them. With the US commercial paper market in corporate debt already in turmoil, word quickly got out that the formerly remarkably profitable US hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (founded by two prestigious economists who had won Nobel prizes for their econometric contributions to the development of derivative markets) suddenly faced collapse. With the massive losses LTCM took on the $125 billion portfolio of securities it had amassed with money borrowed from many of Wall Street’s biggest banks, its default on a trillion dollars in over-the-counter derivatives contracts appeared imminent.77 Since it could not be known who would be left holding the bag if all the counterparties tried to liquidate their positions with LTCM, “this was a classic set up for a run: losses were likely, but nobody knew who would get burned.”78 Reflecting the concern that credit markets generally might freeze up, Wall Street’s leading CEOs were once again summoned to William McDonough’s office at the New York Federal Reserve.

There “simply was no other substitute for the New York Fed” in the crisis: The head of a securities firm or a bank is not paid to be a patriot; he or she is paid to serve the best interests of the shareholders, so the most that one could do in a position like mine is to say the public interest may well be served by Long Term Capital Management not failing . . . Now if somebody has had many years of experience like me, the people you’re talking to at least think, well, this guy knows what he is talking about; he’s been through some of these firefights himself, and so we’re not dealing with somebody who doesn’t understand how we think or what we can do.79 With the political implications of bailing out a private hedge fund ruling out public funds being brought into play in this instance (as they very much had been in the Korean bailout less than nine months earlier), and with the pressure on them from the Fed by most accounts rather heavier than McDonough suggests, fourteen of Wall Street’s leading financial institutions agreed to organize a creditors’ consortium to take over LCTM and the responsibility to meet its obligations.

For its part, the US Treasury organized, first, a consortium of international banks and investment funds, and then an overlapping consortium that included mortgage companies and financial securitizers, to take concrete measures to calm the markets. As they had done a decade earlier during the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis, Treasury officials convened the CEOs of the nation’s ten largest commercial banks in September 2007, with the goal of determining whether there were “market-based solutions that could help reduce the possibility of a disorderly solution in the marketplace.”37 Sovereign wealth funds of other countries were also encouraged to invest directly in Wall Street banks to beef up their capital.


pages: 145 words: 43,599

Hawai'I Becalmed: Economic Lessons of the 1990s by Christopher Grandy

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, dark matter, endogenous growth, inventory management, Jones Act, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, minimum wage unemployment, open economy, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996

By July 1997, when the Thai baht collapsed, the Fed’s maximum target for the U.S. federal funds rate (the rate at which banks lend to each other) stood at 5.5%, having been raised a quarter of a percentage point in March. The Fed held to the 5.5% rate for 13 more months. Then, in September 1998, following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, a prominent U.S. hedge fund, the Fed lowered the target rate by a quarter point. The Fed continued lowering the rate in quarter-point increments for the next two months until the federal funds target stood at 4.75% in November. This action probably contributed to the continued expansion of the stock market, consumption, and the U.S. economy.

., 8n. 1 Keynesian fiscal policy, 27, 36–37, 38, 39, 44n. 5 King, Charles, 65 Koki, Stan, 82, 84 Krueger, Alan, 98 Krugman, Paul, 30–31, 33n. 18 Kuwait, 23 La Croix, Sumner, ix, x Laffer curve, 26 Land Use Commission. See LUC land use regulation, 1, 4, 18, 48, 51–52, 79, 104, 105 Laney, Leroy, 43 Leppert, Thomas, 66 lessons of 1990s, 7, 101, 104, 108–110 Lingle, Linda, 5, 77, 79–81, 82, 84–85, 106, 119–122 Long-Term Capital Management, 74 Loui, Patricia, 65 low-income tax credit, 67, 99, 115 LUC (Land Use Commission), 18, 51, 52, 58n. 13, 67, 70, 116 Lucas, Robert, 102n. 8 mainland economy, 30, 34, 56, 74, 82, 91, 96, 99; recession, 3, 6, 23, 26–30, 33n. 17, 36, 105, 112–113; unemployment, 26, 30, 41, 56, 99 Mak, James, ix, x, 53, 54 Malaysia, 33n. 18, 71, 72, 73, 93 Malcolm, Donald, 65 maritime regulation, 48, 50–51, 79, 105, 111 mass transit.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

The ruble crisis followed in August ’98 when Russia, hamstrung by chronic fiscal deficits, devalued its currency and defaulted on its debt. American investors grew nervous about a nation with 10,000 nukes and no money; the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged more than 10% in a matter of days. People were right to worry. The ruble crisis set off a chain reaction that brought down Long-Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged U.S. hedge fund. LTCM managed to lose $4.6 billion in the latter half of 1998, and still had over $100 billion in liabilities when the Fed intervened with a massive bailout and slashed interest rates in order to prevent systemic disaster. Europe wasn’t doing that much better.

Kaczynski, Ted Karim, Jawed Karp, Alex, 11.1, 12.1 Kasparov, Garry Katrina, Hurricane Kennedy, Anthony Kesey, Ken Kessler, Andy Kurzweil, Ray last mover, 11.1, 13.1 last mover advantage lean startup, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2 Levchin, Max, 4.1, 10.1, 12.1, 14.1 Levie, Aaron lifespan life tables LinkedIn, 5.1, 10.1, 12.1 Loiseau, Bernard Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) luck, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 Lucretius Lyft MacBook machine learning Madison, James Madrigal, Alexis Manhattan Project Manson, Charles manufacturing marginal cost marketing Marx, Karl, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Masters, Blake, prf.1, 11.1 Mayer, Marissa Medicare Mercedes-Benz MiaSolé, 13.1, 13.2 Michelin Microsoft, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 5.1, 14.1 mobile computing mobile credit card readers Mogadishu monopoly, monopolies, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 5.1, 7.1, 8.1 building of characteristics of in cleantech creative dynamism of new lies of profits of progress and sales and of Tesla Morrison, Jim Mosaic browser music recording industry Musk, Elon, 4.1, 6.1, 11.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 Napster, 5.1, 14.1 NASA, 6.1, 11.1 NASDAQ, 2.1, 13.1 National Security Agency (NSA) natural gas natural secrets Navigator browser Netflix Netscape NetSecure network effects, 5.1, 5.2 New Economy, 2.1, 2.2 New York Times, 13.1, 14.1 New York Times Nietzsche, Friedrich Nokia nonprofits, 13.1, 13.2 Nosek, Luke, 9.1, 14.1 Nozick, Robert nutrition Oedipus, 14.1, 14.2 OfficeJet OmniBook online pet store market Oracle Outliers (Gladwell) ownership Packard, Dave Page, Larry Palantir, prf.1, 7.1, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1 PalmPilots, 2.1, 5.1, 11.1 Pan, Yu Panama Canal Pareto, Vilfredo Pareto principle Parker, Sean, 5.1, 14.1 Part-time employees patents path dependence PayPal, prf.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1 founders of, 14.1 future cash flows of investors in “PayPal Mafia” PCs Pearce, Dave penicillin perfect competition, 3.1, 3.2 equilibrium of Perkins, Tom perk war Perot, Ross, 2.1, 12.1, 12.2 pessimism Petopia.com Pets.com, 4.1, 4.2 PetStore.com pharmaceutical companies philanthropy philosophy, indefinite physics planning, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2 progress without Plato politics, 6.1, 11.1 indefinite polling pollsters pollution portfolio, diversified possession power law, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 of distribution of venture capital Power Sellers (eBay) Presley, Elvis Priceline.com Prince Procter & Gamble profits, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 progress, 6.1, 6.2 future of without planning proprietary technology, 5.1, 5.2, 13.1 public opinion public relations Pythagoras Q-Cells Rand, Ayn Rawls, John, 6.1, 6.2 Reber, John recession, of mid-1990 recruiting, 10.1, 12.1 recurrent collapse, bm1.1, bm1.2 renewable energy industrial index research and development resources, 12.1, bm1.1 restaurants, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1 risk risk aversion Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) Romulus and Remus Roosevelt, Theodore Royal Society Russia Sacks, David sales, 2.1, 11.1, 13.1 complex as hidden to non-customers personal Sandberg, Sheryl San Francisco Bay Area savings scale, economies of Scalia, Antonin scaling up scapegoats Schmidt, Eric search engines, prf.1, 3.1, 5.1 secrets, 8.1, 13.1 about people case for finding of looking for using self-driving cars service businesses service economy Shakespeare, William, 4.1, 7.1 Shark Tank Sharma, Suvi Shatner, William Siebel, Tom Siebel Systems Silicon Valley, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 10.1, 11.1 Silver, Nate Simmons, Russel, 10.1, 14.1 singularity smartphones, 1.1, 12.1 social entrepreneurship Social Network, The social networks, prf.1, 5.1 Social Security software engineers software startups, 5.1, 6.1 solar energy, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4 Solaria Solyndra, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5 South Korea space shuttle SpaceX, prf.1, 10.1, 11.1 Spears, Britney SpectraWatt, 13.1, 13.2 Spencer, Herbert, 6.1, 6.2 Square, 4.1, 6.1 Stanford Sleep Clinic startups, prf.1, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1 assigning responsibilities in cash flow at as cults disruption by during dot-com mania economies of scale and foundations of founder’s paradox in lessons of dot-com mania for power law in public relations in sales and staff of target market for uniform of venture capital and steam engine Stoppelman, Jeremy string theory strong AI substitution, complementarity vs.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

The state has to step in and replace ‘bad’ money with its own supposedly ‘good’ money—which explains the pressure on central bankers to maintain confidence in the soundness of state money. State power has often been used to bail out companies or avert financial failures, such as the US savings and loans crisis of 1987–8, which cost US taxpayers an estimated $150 billion, or the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1997–8, which cost $3.5 billion. Internationally, the core neoliberal states gave the IMF and the World Bank full authority in 1982 to negotiate debt relief, which meant in effect to protect the world’s main financial institutions from the threat of default. The IMF in effect covers, to the best of its ability, exposures to risk and uncertainty in international financial markets.

The crisis first spread to Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and then to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. Estonia and Russia were then hit hard, and shortly afterwards Brazil fell apart, with serious and long-lasting consequences for Argentina. Even Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey were affected. Only the US seemed immune, although even there a hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management (with two Nobel prizewinning economists as key advisers), which had bet the wrong way on Italian currency movements, had to be bailed out to the tune of $3.5 billion. The whole ‘East Asian regime’ of accumulation facilitated by ‘developmental states’ was being put to the test in 1997–8.

The bank and savings and loan failures of 1987 cost nearly $200 billion to remedy, and in that year matters became so bad that William Isaacs, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, warned that ‘the US may be headed towards the nationalization of banking’. And the huge bankruptcies of Long Term Capital Management, Orange County, and others who speculated and lost, followed by the collapse of several major companies in 2001–2 in the midst of astonishing accounting lapses, not only cost the public dear but also demonstrated how fragile and fictitious much of neoliberal financialization has become.


pages: 302 words: 84,428

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side by Howard Marks

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, uptick rule, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

Investors will like them less at $60 than they did at $100. Fear of losing the remaining $60 will overtake the urge to make back the lost $40. Risk aversion eventually will reassert itself (and usually go to excess). How about some quantification of this cycle? In mid-1998, just before the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management brought investors other than techies to their senses, only $12.5 billion of non-defaulted bonds yielded more than 20% (one possible threshold for the label “distressed debt”). Because investors weren’t very worried about risk, they demanded ultra-high returns from relatively few non-defaulted bonds; the word “blithe” might best describe their attitude.

(“The Race to the Bottom,” February 2007) The Impact of the Credit Cycle One of the main points in this book is the extent to which events within one cycle have influence in other fields and on other kinds of cycles. Nowhere is this clearer than in the credit cycle. In “Genius Isn’t Enough” on the subject of Long-Term Capital Management (October 1998), I wrote “Look around the next time there’s a crisis; you’ll probably find a lender.” Over-permissive providers of capital frequently aid and abet financial bubbles. There have been numerous recent examples where loose capital markets contributed to booms that were followed by famous collapses: real estate in 1989–92; emerging markets in 1994–98; Long-Term Capital in 1998; the movie exhibition industry in 1999–2000; venture capital funds and telecommunications companies in 2000–01.

See high yield bonds K Karsh, Bruce, 6, 161, 231, 235, 282 Kass, Doug, 5 Kaufman, Henry, 273 Kaufman, Peter, 5, 271 Keele, Larry, 6 Keynes, John Maynard, 72, 240–41 Klarman, Seth, 5 L Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, 59, 129, 154–55, 233, 235, 237 listen, definition, 3–4 Lombardi, Vince, 1 long term trends, 48–51, 63–64 Long-Term Capital Management, 117, 146 M market assessment guide to, 212–14 qualitative awareness, 216 valuation, 215, 220 market bottoms definition of, 235–37 identifying, 242, 308–9 market efficiency, 110 Marks, Howard—memos “bubble.com,” 220 “Ditto,” 171 “Everyone Knows,” 100 “First Quarter Performance,” 83 “Genius Isn’t Enough,” 146 “Happy Medium, The,” 86–87, 90–91, 116–17, 147 “It Is What It Is,” 212 “It’s All Good,” 84 “Limits to Negativism, The,” 128–29, 133, 233–34 “Long View, The,” 29–30, 48 Most Important Thing, The, 1–2, 5, 7, 23, 39, 134, 208, 212–14, 290–92 “Now It’s All Bad?”


pages: 413 words: 117,782

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

But first with the transition to LLC and then with an IPO, they would be freed from this liability, which a number feared would lead to a stronger appetite for growth and risk and would quicken change. They had already seen evidence of greater risk-taking even before the IPO. In my interviews, many of the partners pointed to their personal liability as having been a constraining factor on “doing stupid things.” Some pointed to the risk Goldman took in bailing out the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998 as an early case of taking on more risk than the firm had traditionally been comfortable with. LTCM was a speculative hedge fund that used a lot of leverage and faced failure that year. As LTCM teetered, Wall Street feared that its failure could have a ripple effect and cause catastrophic losses throughout the financial system.

One report quotes Robert Khuzami, the SEC’s enforcement director, as saying, “[H]igher-risk trading and business strategies require higher-order controls” and that “Goldman failed to implement policies and procedures that adequately controlled the risk that research analysts could preview upcoming ratings changes with select traders and clients.” Goldman agreed to pay the penalty, split between the SEC and FINRA, and to revise its policies.9 There are older examples as well. One is of allegations that Goldman mishandled information related to the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) books when Goldman was analyzing how it could potentially bail out LTCM in 1998. Roger Lowenstein writes in his account of the collapse of LTCM, When Genius Failed: In Greenwich, Goldman’s sleuths, who had the run of the office, left no stone unturned … A key member of the Goldman team … [who] appeared to be downloading Long-Term’s positions, which the fund had so zealously guarded, from Long-Term’s own computers directly into an oversized laptop (a detail that Goldman later denied).

At the time of its acquisition, CC had approximately $2 billion in assets under management, primarily as a fund of hedge funds: a fund investing in a variety of hedge funds to diversify risk. It was part of GSAM’s continued push into higher-margin, more-sophisticated products for its clients. The firm merges J. Aron with fixed income to create the division known as FICC, to be run by Blankfein (O, C). 1998: Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund, is about to fail. Wall Street fears that LTCM is so big that its failure would cause a chain reaction in numerous markets, causing significant losses throughout the financial system. Goldman, AIG, and Berkshire Hathaway offer to buy out the fund’s partners for $250 million, to inject $3.75 billion, and to operate LTCM within Goldman’s own trading division.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

Last, but not least, some creditors may have bet that the government would not allow Lehman to fail. Few governments have the stomach to allow big banks or highly interdependent financial intermediaries to fail, unless they are pushed to do so by outsiders, such as the International Monetary Fund on which these governments depend for their own survival. When Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that boasted several Nobel Prize laureates among its founders and managers, tumbled in 1998, for example, the US Federal Reserve organized a private bailout; and in March 2008, the New York Fed provided a substantial dowry when Bear Stearns was forced into a shotgun marriage with JP Morgan Chase.

They hoped to realize their dream of “banking without money.”58 More than a century later, Robert Merton, co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his contribution to Option Pricing Theory, lived out a similar dream about “returns without investments,” by co-founding the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM).59 It is not without irony that the Péreire brothers, who were followers of the socialist spiritual movement known as Saint-Simonianism, and a contemporary economist who is deeply versed in the art of mathematic modeling financial assets, sought to realize the same dream. Sadly, for them and for the rest of us, not many dreams come true.

For a new, illuminating account of the Euro crisis in the context of the global financial crisis, see Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018), Part III, pp. 319ff. 67. A detailed history of the evolution of option pricing theory can be found in Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 68. Franklin R. Edwards, “Hedge-Funds and the Collapse of Long Term Capital Management,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 13, no. 2 (1999):189–210, p. 199. 69. Perry Mehrling, “Minsky and Modern Finance: The Case of LongTerm Capital Management,” Journal of Portfolio Management Winter 2000 (2000):81–89. 70. The banks involved in the rescue included Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, J.


pages: 726 words: 172,988

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Wall, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, open economy, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, Yogi Berra

See bank lending; bank loans; borrowing lobbying, bank, 192–207; on Basel III, 96, 97, 187, 194, 315n79; campaign contributions in, 203, 205, 324n46; on capital regulation, 96, 97, 99, 310n51; on Dodd-Frank Act, 3, 231n13, 326n60; effectiveness of, 3, 193–94, 213–14, 231n12, 324n46; fallacies in (See fallacies); after financial crisis of 2007–2009, 1; and home-team bias, 195, 205, 324n44, 326n59; “level playing field” rhetoric in, 194–99; liquidity narrative in, 330n12; reasons for success of, 2, 213–14; regulatory capture by, 194, 203–7; and revolving doors, 203, 204–5, 324n44, 325n56; in savings and loan crisis of 1980s, 55, 252n35; on single-counterparty credit limit proposal, 268n24; as source of funds for politicians, 193–94; spending on, 229n4, 324n46, 326n60; on Volcker Rule, 3, 231n10, 231n13, 270n34 London Economics, on covered-bond markets, 255n48 London interbank offered rate. See LIBOR Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), as systemically important financial institution, 72, 90, 219 long-term refinancing operations (LTRO), 138, 289n16 looting, of savings banks, 252n33 Lopez, Robert S., 250n16 LoPucki, Lynn, 245n12, 247n19 Lowenstein, Roger, 261n46, 262n53 low-income families, mortgages for, 323n38. See also subprime mortgage(s) Lown, Cara S., 249n15, 253n38 Lowrey, Annie, 327n66 LTCM. See Long Term Capital Management LTCM crisis of 1998, 72; bailout in, 72, 74, 90, 219; contagion in, 72, 258n20, 261n45; unanticipated risks in, 73 LTRO.

For example, large gambles involving complicated formulas and trading strategies were one reason that a small change in interest rates set by the Federal Reserve gave a large shock to the financial system in 1994; the size of the shock came as a surprise because most people were unaware how sensitive the positions of many derivatives investors were to the Federal Reserve’s policy.44 Another early example of this risk magnification was seen in the so-called LTCM crisis of 1998, named after the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). With $4.7 billion in equity and $125 billion in debt at the end of 1997, LTCM was a relatively small institution. However, when LTCM incurred large losses in 1998, the Federal Reserve was afraid that an LTCM bankruptcy might trigger a chain reaction, pushing other institutions into insolvency as well.

In Chapter 11 we discuss how this form of “deleveraging” worked in Europe in the fall of 2011. 20. As we discuss later in the chapter, the fear of a systemic chain reaction associated with asset liquidations and price declines was also an important reason that in 1998 the Federal Reserve did not want the insolvent hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) to be put into bankruptcy. A historical example of how liquidation sales in bankruptcy triggered contagion in a crisis is analyzed by Schnabel and Shin (2004). 21. This role of expectations in the developments of 2007–2008 is noted by BIS (2008). 22. See Reinhart and Rogoff (2009, Table A.3.1).


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

On the American side of the Atlantic, there was a sense of triumphalism about the superiority of the U.S. economy and its “New Paradigm,” with its Silicon Valley heroes and soaring stock market. Shocks like the 1995 Mexican near-default, the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis and the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, and even the technology stock crash of 2001 and the horrors of 9/11 that year, were shrugged off after brief periods of crisis management. The economy appeared to be strong enough to weather anything, and GDP continued to expand for years to come, after a mild and brief downturn in 2001.

See also production boundary Landes, David, 63 Layard, Richard, 112 legal traditions, 134 Leontief, Wassily, 29 Lewis, C. S., The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 112 life expectancy, 61, 74, 117 lighting, 86 The Limits to Growth, 60, 70 living standards: British, 46; in communist countries, 57, 67; in developing countries, 54; GDP as indicator of, 140; postwar Western, 62–63, 69; PPP and, 49–52 Long Term Capital Management, 90 Love Canal, 69 low-income countries. See developing/low-income countries Luxembourg, 25 luxury taxes, 112 MacArthur, Douglas, 71 Macmillan, Harold, 46 macroeconomics, 19–21, 23 Maddison, Angus, 11–12, 34, 79–80, 96 Mandel, Michael, 130 Mao Zedong, 67 Marshall, Alfred, 11, 12 Marshall, George, 18 Marshall Aid, 18–19, 42, 47, 57 Marx, Karl, 10 Material Product System, 47.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

In 1994, Orange County was forced into bankruptcy after its treasurer, Bob Citron, took the county’s $7.6 billion investment pool, borrowed more money from Wall Street firms, and invested it in some derivative securities known as “inverse floaters.” A year later, the misplaced bets of a single derivatives trader, Nick Leeson, brought down the venerable Barings Bank. In 1998, the giant (and unregulated) hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, which was a big player in many derivatives markets, had to be propped up and then wound down by a consortium of Wall Street banks, with the Fed playing a coordinating role. The demise of Long-Term Capital, which had two economics Nobel winners as partners—Robert Merton and Myron Scholes—demonstrated the limitations of counterparty regulation.

In estimating the worst-case losses of entire portfolios, or balance sheets, the models reward those that are widely diversified and punish those that are heavily invested in one or two assets. Unfortunately, during periods of great stress, the relationships between different asset classes tend to change dramatically. As the big hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management discovered to its cost during the international financial crisis of 1998, many assets that seem to have little or nothing in common suddenly move in the same direction. Prior to the blowup, for example, the correlation coefficient between certain bonds issued by the governments of the Philippines and Bulgaria was just 0.04: as the crisis unfolded, their correlation coefficient rose to 0.84.

With this sort of leverage, a mere 4 percent drop in the value of a firm’s assets can wipe out its entire capital base. Bear was the smallest of the top Wall Street banks, and its leading figures—such as its chairman, Jimmy Cayne, a championship bridge player, and its former CEO Alan “Ace” Greenberg, who at the age of eighty still came to work every day—had reputations as mavericks. In 1998, with Long-Term Capital Management on the brink of collapse, Bear had been the only Wall Street firm that refused to participate in the rescue. (As LTCM’s prime broker, it argued that it already had a big exposure to the firm.) In the period since 2000, Bear had established itself in the fast-growing hedge fund business, acting as the prime broker to dozens of funds, including some of the biggest.


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

What they didn’t understand is the unwritten rule that overrides all the other rules: If you screw enough people, eventually they will get you back. Have people learned since then? No, as the recent Citibank European government bond debacle, complete with a juvenile name for the strategy (Dr. Evil), demonstrates. JWPR007-Lindsey May 7, 2007 17:9 Julian Shaw 241 But the most spectacular example of all is Long Term Capital Management. Here we had the two most famous living quants supposedly helping to run an enormous hedge fund, which got blown to pieces when credit spreads blew out. Jorion provides a devastating analysis of LTCM’s risk management mistakes.7 Incidentally, LTCM demonstrated an enduring belief, that there are lots of really smart people who could make tons of money if only they weren’t inhibited by pesky regulators, unimaginative boards, and overbearing risk-management departments.

My insight was later recognized in Pensions & Investments by Editorial Director Michael Clowes, who noted that I was “one of the first to warn that portfolio insurance . . . probably would be destabilizing” (“More to say about crash,” July 12, 1999), and in the Wall Street Journal, where Roger Lowenstein (“Why Stock Options Are Really Dynamite,” November 6, 1997) said that I had “predicted before the 1987 crash that portfolio insurance would trigger chain-reaction selling.” After the crash, I saw the same dynamics behind portfolio insurance roiling the markets over and over again in other guises, including synthetic put options and the relative value arbitrage strategies pursued by hedge funds such as Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Prior to the collapse of LTCM, I had expressed my concerns in two Pensions & Investments pieces (Barry Burr, “Nobel-Winning Strategy Criticized,” December 8, 1997, and Bruce Jacobs, “Option Replication and the Market’s Fragility,” June 15, 1998), taking issue with Nobel laureates Merton Miller and Myron Scholes (an LTCM partner).

Some of this “higher correlation in extremes” is fallacious. Boyer, Gibson, and Loretan show that the correlation of big market moves will measure higher even if the underlying correlation that generates the returns is constant: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/ 1997/597/default.htm. 7. Phillipe Jorion, “Risk Management Lessons from Long-Term Capital Management” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract id=169449. 8. Many people could have written this book but they didn’t. Hull’s genius was to pitch it at exactly the right level for the working quant. 9. Preprint http://math.nyu.edu/research/carrp/papers/pdf/faq2.pdf, to appear in Journal of Derivatives.


pages: 297 words: 91,141

Market Sense and Nonsense by Jack D. Schwager

3Com Palm IPO, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brownian motion, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, diversified portfolio, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Jim Simons, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, negative equity, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, tail risk, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, yield curve

How is it that an investment with a one-time worst loss of 22 percent is considered much riskier than one that has lost more than double that amount on two separate occasions during the same time frame? Perhaps no single event contributed more to the lasting distorted perception of the risk in hedge fund investment than the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), no doubt the most famous hedge fund failure in history.2 In its first four years of operation, this multibillion-dollar hedge fund generated steady profits, quadrupling the starting net asset value. Then in a five-month period (May to September 1998), it all unraveled, with the net asset value of the fund plunging a staggering 92 percent.

Although biased for all the reasons we detailed, sector indexes can be used in comparisons with each other based on the implicit simplifying assumption that they will be about equally impacted by these biases. Indeed, we used such comparisons in the hedge fund performance analysis in Chapter 3. Chapter 15 The Leverage Fallacy Leverage can be dangerous. There is no shortage of hedge funds that have collapsed as a result of excessive leverage, with Long-Term Capital Management, detailed in Chapter 13, being the classic example. Investors have learned the lesson that leverage is dangerous rather than leverage can be dangerous. In this sense, they are much like the cat that sits on a hot stove. As Mark Twain observed, “She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.”

Treasury bills types of Hedge funds investment about advantages of hidden risk managed futures perception vs. reality rationale for single fund risk Hedge selling Hedgers Hedging Hidden risk Hidden risk evaluation qualitative assessment quantitative measures High-water mark Housing bubble (mid-2000s) Hseigh, David Hulbert Financial Digest Human emotions Idiosyncratic risk Illiquid portfolio Illiquid trades Illiquidity risk Incentive fees Index funds Indicators contrarian credit quality of differentiation of diversification of future performance futures market as interest rates merger arbitrage past as past returns return levels risk volatility Inflation Information availability efficient use of Initial public offerings (IPO) Insider trading Institutional investors Interest rates Internet bubble In-the-money options Inverse correlated fund Inverse relationship Investment analysis Investment decisions Investment durations Investment insights correlation diversification hedge fund of funds hedge funds leverage managed accounts past performance portfolio allocations portfolio considerations portfolio rebalancing pro-forma statistics track records volatility Investment principle Investment size, maximum Investment strategies Investment timing Investor behavior Investor fees Investor requirements IPO price Irrational behavior Irrational choices Jones, Alfred Winslow Junk bonds Kahneman, Daniel Knowledge use Kudlow, Larry Lack, Simon Lagged shifts in supply Leverage about danger from investor performance and and risk Leverage risk Leveraged EFTs Leveraged/rebalanced funds Liar loans Life, Liberty and Property (Jones) Limit orders Linear relationships Liquidation selling Liquidations Liquidity of futures Liquidity crunch Liquidity risk Lockups London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) London Metal Exchange Long bias position Long only hedge funds Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) Long-term investment Look-back period Loomis, Carol J. Lowenstein, Roger Luck Mad Money Madoff scandal Managed accounts advantages of vs. funds in hedge funds individual vs. indirect management objections to Managed futures Management fees Manager performance Managers hedge funds vs.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Another reason prices can diverge from fundamentals for a considerable period is that arbitrage, whereby investors simultaneously buy and sell identical or similar financial instruments which are temporarily mis-priced and thus bring prices back into line, is rarely free of risk. This was amply demonstrated by the near-collapse in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund run by former Salomon Brothers trader John Meriwether, which counted two distinguished finance academics, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, on its strength. LTCM used complex mathematical models to exploit minute divergences in the relative value of different bonds. It was betting on the idea that the valuations would inevitably converge by buying the underpriced security and selling the overpriced security in the hope of making a small margin on the trade when convergence took place.

id=o00JAAAA QAAJ&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=Defoe 81 Irrational Exuberance, second edition, Princeton University Press, 2005. 82 See, for example, ‘From Efficient Markets Theory to Behavioral Finance’, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, Paper No. 1055, 2003. 83 The title also caused serious concern to academics at the London School of Economics, who feared that it would deter potential sources of funds in the financial sector. Paul Woolley – who had accumulated a fair-sized fortune as a fund manager – made the title an absolute condition of his financing of the centre. The LSE backed down and took the money. 84 When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2000. 85 Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan, Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Penguin Books, 2001. 86 ‘Letter from Chicago: After the Blow-up’, 11 January 2010. 87 In Going Off the Rails: Global Capital and the Crisis of Legitimacy, John Wiley, 2003, I argued that Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s asymmetric and morally hazardous approach to monetary policymaking, which involved the repeated extension of a safety net to markets, was undermining capitalism’s immune system; the use of highly complex financial instruments meant that central banks and bank supervisors were over-dependent on experts in private banks to monitor the plumbing of the system and that supervision had been semi-privatised by default; financial institutions’ risk management was fundamentally flawed; financial innovation had failed to come up with any way of hedging against liquidity risk in banking; and the system’s pro-cyclicality was being exacerbated by the Basel capital adequacy regime.

H. 1 Laws (Plato) 1, 2 Lay, Kenneth 1 Lazard Brothers 1 Le Rêve (Picasso) 1 Leeson, Nick 1 Lehman Brothers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Lenin 1, 2 Leonardo da Vinci 1 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (Friedrich Schiller) 1 Lettres Philosophiques (Voltaire) 1 Lewis, John Spedan 1 Lewis, Michael 1, 2 Lewis, Sinclair 1 Liar’s Poker (Michael Lewis) 1 liberal internationalism 1, 2, 3 limited liability 1, 2, 3, 4 Little Dorrit (Dickens) 1, 2 Livermore, Jesse 1 Lloyd George, David 1 ‘Locksley Hall’ (Tennyson) 1 London Interbank Offered Rate 1 Long-Term Capital Management (hedge fund) 1 Louis XIV of France 1, 2 Lowenstein, Roger 1 Lucas, Robert 1 Lunar Society 1 McDonald’s theory of conflict 1 McDonough, William 1 Machiavelli 1, 2 Mackay, Charles 1, 2, 3, 4 McKenna, Reginald 1, 2 McKinley, William 1 Madame Nui’s toad 1 Maddison, Angus 1 madness of crowds 1 Madouros, Vasileios 1 Major Barbara (George Bernard Shaw) 1 Making of the English Working Class (E.


pages: 309 words: 95,495

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

Well, I remember her answering, it’s a central bank’s duty to act when the financial system is threatened. In the following decades, I saw a fiscal crisis convulse interest rates and the dollar in my native Canada, an exchange rate crisis erupt in Europe in 1992, the Asian financial crisis, the near failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, and then the rise and fall of the technology bubble. By 2007, I was looking for the next crisis everywhere: in home prices, leveraged buyouts, the trade deficit. I was not, however, looking for catastrophe. I had by now developed a deep respect for the authorities’ ability to counteract mayhem; I assumed that the economy, though it might get bumped around a bit, would come out okay.

Subsequent reforms created circuit breakers to halt sudden drops in the markets, while the dealers who handled stock trading were required to bulk up their capital. Stock markets faced numerous bear markets over the subsequent decades, but not since 1987 have they again come close to total meltdown. In 1998, when Russia defaulted and Long-Term Capital Management, a giant hedge fund, threatened to fail and inflict chaos on the markets, the Fed cut interest rates three times and brokered a bailout of LTCM by the banks that were its principal creditors. The Fed was alarmed at how little it, and the banks it oversaw, knew about LTCM, and so it began instructing banks to keep much closer tabs on the leverage its hedge fund customers were allowed to accumulate.

When inflation was high and volatile, the Fed would drag its feet about cutting interest rates even if unemployment was high, fearing a rapid reacceleration in price pressure. But once inflation became anchored at such a low level, the Fed felt far more comfortable cutting interest rates when threats to growth materialized. This became apparent when the Fed briefly slashed interest rates in the fall of 1998 to deal with the turmoil of Long-Term Capital Management. Inflation barely budged. It cut them even further and faster in 2001 and 2002, after the collapsing dot-com bubble and then the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The 2001 recession was the mildest since the Second World War. With steady growth and stable inflation, the 1990s became known as the “Goldilocks” economy: not too hot, not too cold.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

The Bank of England responded by assembling a consortium of private banks to rescue Baring because of fears that its collapse would bring down the British financial system. (Something similar occurred in 1998 when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management after Russia’s sovereign default.) The intervention was insufficient to prevent a broader financial panic, however. British lenders responded to the Argentine crisis by slashing foreign lending, which contributed to a series of international panics around the world for the next three years.26 The Argentina crisis was eventually resolved, and international lending to Latin America resumed until World War I.

See United Kingdom entrepreneurship: in China, 101, 116 and container shipping, 25 in Japan, 72 and savings and investment, 72 in United Kingdom, 11 in United States, 13, 25 Eurodollar market, 61–62 Europe and European Union: banking glut in, 62–65, 63f class inequalities in, 4–5 current account balances in, 229–30 and German surpluses, 159–60, 165f and global value chains, 28 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 140, 146 and Marshall Plan, 22 policy choices for, 229–31 Stability and Growth Pact (1997), 146, 170 surpluses in, 170–73, 173f Treaty on Stability, Coordination, and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (2012), 170 European Central Bank (ECB), 146, 148, 156, 164, 171, 217 European Exchange Rate Mechanism, 196 European Investment Bank, 231 exchange rate regimes: in China, 108–10, 199–200 European Exchange Rate Mechanism, 196 in Germany, 137 and gold standard, 185–89, 219, 220 in New Zealand, 195 in Sweden, 195 in Taiwan, 197 in United Kingdom, 196, 218–19 and United States, 20, 189–201 Facebook, 35 Fannie Mae, 203, 205 Federal Reserve (U.S.): and Asian Financial Crisis (1997), 198 on China’s current account balance, 123 and dollar as reserve asset, 191 and global financial crisis (2008), 63 and gold standard, 188, 193 and less-developed-country lending boom, 62 and Long-Term Capital Management bailout, 60 on U.S. manufacturing, 77 Feldstein, Martin, 180 finance. See global finance fiscal policy: in European Union, 231 in Germany, 147, 167, 170, 173 in United States, 180–85, 182f, 210 foreign exchange. See exchange rate regimes Foxconn, 33–34 France: colonial territories of, 6, 17, 21 corporate tax avoidance in, 33 and EU banking glut, 63 and German Empire (1870s), 93–94, 95–96 and global credit boom (1820s), 47, 51 and global financial crisis (1873), 55, 56 and gold standard, 187–88 tariffs in, 16 U.S. corporation income in, 37.

See also specific countries League of Nations, 21 Lenin, Vladimir, 73 less-developed-country lending boom, 61–62 Leverkusen Bridge (Germany), 168 Li Keqiang, 104 List, Friedrich, 15–16, 17, 71, 122 Lithuania, budget surpluses in, 170 living standards: in China, 101, 105, 106–7, 111, 129, 211 in Germany, 135, 138–39, 152, 158–59 in Indonesia, 198 in Japan, 75 and savings and investment, 66, 68–70, 75–76, 80, 86, 231 in South Korea, 76, 197 in United Kingdom, 219 Long-Term Capital Management, 60 Louis Napoleon (emperor), 55, 92–93 Luxembourg: budget surpluses in, 170 as tax haven, 35 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 140, 146 MacGregor, Gregor, 49 Made in China 2025 agenda, 121, 124 Madison, James, 14 Malaysia: and Asian Financial Crisis (1997), 198 savings and investment in, 197 Malta, budget surpluses in, 170 Manifest Destiny, 18 manufacturing: in China, 110, 112, 115, 122–23, 125 and economic development, 72, 73, 77, 77f and GATT, 23 in Germany, 140, 141–42 and global value chains, 27 and savings and investment, 72, 73, 77, 77f tariffs on, 16–17 and transportation costs, 24–25 in United States, 14–15, 23, 178–79, 210–11, 212–13, 214, 227 Marichal, Carlos, 57 Marshall Plan, 22 Martin, Philippe, 164 Mazière, Lothar de, 136 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 133 MBS (mortgage-backed securities), 64, 204–5 McLean, Malcom, 26 mercantilism, 41 Merkel, Angela, 152, 170 Mexico: bilateral trade imbalances in, 98–100 and global credit boom (1820s), 49 U.S. corporation income in, 37 U.S. exports to, 28 Microsoft, 34, 35, 38 Milhaupt, Curtis J., 122 Monroe, Arthur, 95 Morgenthau, Henry, 22 mortgage-backed securities (MBS), 64, 204–5 Nahles, Andrea, 150 Naughton, Barry, 106 Navarro, Peter, 97–100 Netherlands: banking industry in, 231 budget surpluses in, 170 colonial territories of, 6 current account balance in, 96 and EU banking glut, 63 exports from, 147 and global credit boom (1820s), 51 policy choices in, 230 savings and investment in, 69–70, 225 tariffs in, 17 as tax haven, 35 U.S. corporation income in, 37 U.S. exports to, 29–30 Neuer Markt (Germany), 144–45 New York Stock Exchange, 57, 58 New Zealand: capital controls in, 223 colonial interests in, 17 exchange rate regime in, 195 Nixon, Richard, 194, 219 North Korea, savings and investment in, 76 Norway, current account balance in, 87 Odendahl, Christian, 152 Ohno, Kenichi, 72 Open Door Policy (U.S.), 18–19 Party of Democratic Socialism (Germany), 135, 136 People’s Bank of China (PBOC), 109, 110, 119, 199 Peru: global credit boom (1820s) in, 49 guano exports of, 56 Pfizer, 35 pharmaceutical industry, 34–35 Philippines: and Asian Financial Crisis (1997), 198 savings and investment in, 197 Philippon, Thomas, 164 Poland: end of communism in, 132–33 exports from, 147 and global value chains, 28 manufacturing in, 142 Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), 132–33 Portugal: banking industry in, 231 and EU banking glut, 63 external debt in, 163 German surpluses absorbed by, 4 and global credit boom (1820s), 49 and global value chains, 28 Internet access speeds in, 169 savings and investment in, 171 productivity: in China, 105, 106, 109, 114–15, 117–18, 127 in Germany, 138, 141, 166 and global trade, 11, 12–13, 31 and Hamilton’s “Report on the Subject of Manufactures,” 12–13 and savings and investment, 69, 71, 75–76 in United States, 210–11 property rights, 111, 117, 129 protectionism, 17, 71.


pages: 237 words: 50,758

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

Oblique approaches rely on a tool kit of models and narratives rather than any simple or single account. To fit the world into a single model or narrative fails to acknowledge the universality of uncertainty and complexity. The reputation of financial economics has never recovered from the blow of the virtual collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, a sophisticated practitioner of the risk models outlined in chapter twelve, and the involvement of two Nobel Prize winners, Robert C. Merton and Myron Scholes. The fund built huge positions on the basis of estimated mispricings, relying on its models to control its exposures. When the Asian financial crisis blew up in 1997, the fund managers extended their positions.

leprosy Levitt, Theodore Lewis, Michael Liar’s Poker (Lewis) life expectancy Lincoln, Abraham Lindblom, Charles literacy rate Litton Industries Lives of the Painters (Vasari) loans lobsters local goals logic London Business School London Underground Long-Term Capital Management McDonnell Douglas Machiavelli, Niccolò MacIntyre, Alasdair McKeen, John McNamara, Robert Maginot Line Malaya Mallory, George Malthusianism management management consultants man-and-dog problem manuals maps market capitalization market economies market fundamentalism market research market segments Marks, Simon Marks & Spencer marriage Marxism mass production materialism mathematics Mean Business (Dunlap) Merck Merck, George Merton, Robert C.


Risk Management in Trading by Davis Edwards

Abraham Maslow, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, business cycle, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, discrete time, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, implied volatility, intangible asset, interest rate swap, iterative process, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, p-value, paper trading, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, systematic trading, time value of money, transaction costs, value at risk, Wiener process, zero-coupon bond

A common thread between many of these events is that immediately prior to these losses, market prices in a market dominated by a single trader were observed to move in a manner that was seemingly at odds with rational markets. As a result, the dominant trader suffered mark‐to‐market losses, was unable to get out of their positions, and prices rebounded after the forced liquidation of the dominant market participant. Long Term Capital Management Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) went bankrupt in 1998 following a panic in Asian and Russian bonds. The hedge fund was the darling of Wall Street in the 1990s after being founded by the former vice‐chairman of Solomon Brothers, John Meriwether, and included Nobel Prize winners Myron Scholes and Robert Merton on its board of directors.

See good till canceled orders H hedge accounting, 188 hedge effectiveness, 193 logarithmic returns and, 194–195 hedge effectiveness testing, 187–189 hedge funds, 3–6 hedge-accounting memo, 189–191 hedging, 2, 11, 177–179 costs, 180 creating volatile earnings via, 187 using, 179–180 hedging calculations, 185 highest and best use, 130–131 historical backtesting, 99 holistic view of risk, 115–117 I illiquid market, 35, 124 implementing credit limits, 259–260 implied volatility, 160–161 Information Ratio, 109–110 integration, calculus, 85–87 interest rate swap contracts, 37, 54–55 interest rates, 201 intraday monitoring, 117–118 K kurtosis, 70–72 J JP Morgan, London whale, 138 L leverage, 4 LGD. See loss given default lifespan of orders, 19–20 limit orders, 17–19 limitations of approximations, 224 limits, trading, 147–148 liquid market, 34–35, 124 litigation risk, 25 live testing, 101 log-normal distributions, 82 logarithmic returns, hedge effectiveness and, 194–195 Long Term Capital Management, 137–138 304 loss given default, 240–241, 245–247 probability of default and, 254–255 losses calculating, 2, 10–11 profits and, 121–123 M managing risk, 28–29 (end of chapter 1 managing trading risk, 21–23 margining, 14 mark, 122 mark to market market crashes and, 126–128 market liquidity and, 125–126 mark-to-market accounting, 124, 128–130, 188 market, 122 market crashes, mark to market and, 126–128 market liquidity, mark to market and, 125–126 market orders, 17–19 market price, 123–125 market risk, 23, 25 market stability, speculators and, 136 market-based probability of default, 252–254 criticisms of, 254 markets, 16–17 Maslow, Abraham, 267 master netting agreement, 239 master netting, credit risk and, 256–257 mathematical derivative, 88 MBS.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

In fact, the history of cultural markets is crowded with examples of future blockbusters—Elvis, Star Wars, Seinfeld, Harry Potter, American Idol—that publishers and movie studios left for dead while simultaneously betting big on total failures.4 And whether we consider the most spectacular business meltdowns of recent times—Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Enron in 2001, WorldCom in 2002, the near-collapse of the entire financial system in 2008—or spectacular success stories like the rise of Google and Facebook, what is perhaps most striking about them is that virtually nobody seems to have had any idea what was about to happen.

World Politics 47 (1):42–101. Lombrozo, Tania. 2006. “The Structure and Function of Explanations.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (10):464–70. ———. 2007. “Simplicity and Probability in Causal Explanation.” Cognitive Psychology 55 (3):232–57. Lowenstein, Roger, 2000. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House. Lukes, Steven. 1968. “Methodological Individualism Reconsidered.” British Journal of Sociology 19 (2):119–29. Luo, Michael. 2004. “ ‘Excuse Me. May I Have Your Seat?’ ” New York Times, Sept. 14. Lyons, Russell. 2010. “The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis.”

General information about production in cultural industries is given in Caves (2000) and Bielby and Bielby (1994). 5. In early 2010, the market capitalization of Google was around $160B, but it has fluctuated as high as $220B. See Makridakis, Hogarth, and Gaba (2009a) and Taleb (2007) for lengthier descriptions of these and other missed predictions. See Lowenstein (2000) for the full story of Long-Term Capital Management. 6. Newton’s quote is taken from Janiak (2004, p. 41). 7. The Laplace quote is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace’s-demon. 8. Lumping all processes into two coarse categories is a vast oversimplification of reality, as the “complexity” of a process is not a sufficiently well understood property to be assigned anything like a single number.


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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, financial engineering, fixed income, global village, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, power law, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Yogi Berra

Somehow when one gets involved in financial economics, owing to the culture of the field, one becomes likely to forget these basic facts (pressure to publish to keep one’s standing among the other academics). An immediate result of Dr. Markowitz’s theory was the near collapse of the financial system in the summer of 1998 (as we saw in Chapters 1 and 5) by Long Term Capital Management (“LTCM”), a Greenwich, Connecticut, fund that had for principals two of Dr. Markowitz’s colleagues,“Nobels”as well. They are Drs. Robert Merton (the one in Chapter 3 trouncing Shiller) and Myron Scholes. Somehow they thought they could scientifically “measure” their risks. They made absolutely no allowance in the LTCM episode for the possibility of their not understanding markets and their methods being wrong.

Literally, people don’t learn from their past reactions to good and bad things. Literature on bubbles: There is a long tradition, see Kindleberger (2001), MacKay (2002), Galbraith (1991), Chancellor (1999), and of course Shiller (2000). Shiller with a little work may be convinced to do a second edition. Long-term capital management: See Lowenstein (2000). Stress and randomness: Sapolsky (1998) is a popular, sometimes hilarious presentation. The author specializes among other things on the effect of glucocorticoids released at times of stress on the atrophy of the hycocampus, hampering the formation of new memory and brain plasticity.

Phillips, 1977, “Calibration of Probabilities: The State of the Art.” In Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (1982). Loewenstein, G. F., E. U. Weber, C. K. Hsee, and E. S. Welch, 2001, “Risk As Feelings.” Psychological Bulletin, 127, 267–286. Lowenstein, Roger, 2000, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House. Lucas, Robert E., 1978, “Asset Prices in an Exchange Economy.” Econometrica, 46, 1429–1445. Luce, R. D., and H. Raiffa, 1957, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey. New York: Dover. Machina, M. J., and M. Rothschild, 1987, “Risk.” In Eatwell, J., Milgate, M., and Newman P., eds., 1987, The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics.


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Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio by Victor A. Canto

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, global macro, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Phillips curve, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, the market place, transaction costs, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

See also elasticity elasticity and, 187-189 large-cap stocks and, 190-193, 202-204, 273-274 regional stock indices and, 198-202 small-cap stocks and, 193-198, 202-204, 213, 273-274 location portfolios, Sharpe ratio, 61-63 location-based asset allocation cyclical asset allocation and, 34-37, 125-126 optimal mixes, 24-25 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 257 long-run asset allocation. See also strategic asset allocation (SAA) length of sample period, 285n optimal mixes, 40-43, 118, 127, 274-275 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) example, 228 low cost-managed index funds, 110 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) example, 228 M M&As (mergers and acquisitions), 77 market allocations for benchmark portfolio, 108-115, 266-269 312 market breadth, size cycles and, 168-170, 237-238 market portfolio, 3 market risk, 19 market valuation, CEM (capitalized earnings model), 90-94 modifying for earnings growth, 94-96 performance indicators and, 96-100 market-timing strategy, value-timing strategy versus, 243-250, 276-277 markets, correlation of, 186 mean return, Sharpe ratio, 2 mean-reversion hypothesis, 4, 18, 46, 59 mergers and acquisitions (M&As), 77 Meriwether, John, 228 Microsoft, 84 Milkin, Michael, 75-76 mobile factors, immobile factors versus, 187-189, 273-274 mobility, elasticity and, 208 monetary policy style cycles and, 55-56 tax rates and, 88-90 Monte Carlo simulations, 4-6 N national factor, 191 negative incentives, 81 new-economy view, mean-reversion hypothesis versus, 59 NIPA (National Income and Product Accounts), 77 Nixon, Richard, 89 nominal interest rate, 128 O-P oil prices global economy and, 219-224 location effect and, 200-201 supply shift and tax increase example, 216-219 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 220 P/E ratio, 79, 90-94 passive management, 164.

Relative Value strategies look to take advantage of the relative price differentials between related instruments. Short Selling strategies maintain a net or simple short exposure relative to the market. Chapter 12 Keeping the Wheels on the Hedge-Fund ATV 227 The potential downside of hedge-fund strategies is, if misapplied, they can bring disastrous results. The Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) debacle is such an example. John Meriwether, a bond trader from Salomon Brothers with a well-known and favorable track record, founded LTCM in 1993. Investment banks quickly poured more than $1 billion into the fund, yet in only a few years the fund was well overexposed to risk and near belly-up.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

In the words of former stockbroker and hedge fund manager Jim Cramer (2002): “When you smell blood in the water, you become a shark… when you know that one of your number is in trouble…you try to figure out what he owns and you start shorting those stocks.” A famous victim was hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). The troubles of this huge fund during the 1997/1998 Asian Crisis brought the world financial system to the brink of a collapse. Economists have found evidence that LTCM’s problems were exacerbated by brokers and business partners who had information about the short positions that the fund urgently needed to close and engaged in large-scale front running against the hedge fund.

Derivatives will continue to cause billions of dollars in losses by hundreds of derivatives victims, along the way destroying reputations, twisting lives and emptying bank books. And Wall Street will continue to argue that there is no compelling reason to regulate derivatives. Greenspan, Summers and Rubin cannot credibly claim that they remained unaware of the possible consequences. Already in the fall of 1998, the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was suddenly near bankruptcy. LTCM had piled a hundred billion dollars of debt and more than a trillion dollars of derivatives on top of a few billion dollars of equity from investors and had sold massive amounts of options (a type of derivative). LTCM’s derivatives positions were so large that a relatively small decline in the world financial markets was enough to wipe out its capital (Partnoy 1997/2009).

Morgan (bank) 54, 59, 70, 87, 105 labor xii, 4–6, 8, 10, 18, 33–4, 137, 139, 141, 143, 146, 153–5, 157–9, 163–5, 167–73, 176, 178–83, 189–94, 197, 200, 203–5 legitimacy 16, 25 Lehman Brothers 17, 90, 94, 96 Leviathan (government) 210 liberty 8, 25, 207 liquidity xi, 66, 103–5, 112 London School of Economics 20, 27, 40, 144 Long-Term Capital Management (LCTM) 66, 92 macroeconomics 14 Madoff, Bernard 217 managerial power approach 119, 120, 124, 126, 132 marginal cost 142–4 marginal product 156–8, 189, 192 marginal rate of substitution 14 marginal utility 5–6, 13, 214 marginalism 1, 4–5 market forces x, 126, 169, 171–2, 180–82 market power xii, 154, 161, 164, 170, 203 Marshall, Alfred 5, 10, 16, 188, 193 Marx, Karl 5, 188, 198 Marxism 5–6, 10, 165 mass production 7, 15, 143, 161 Mazur, Paul 17–18 median voter theory 212, 214 Menger, Carl 5, 12 mercantilism 2–3 Merrill Lynch 90, 112, 133 Methuen Treaty 3 military vii, 3, 19–20, 22, 25, 45, 116, 208, 215 minimum wage 140–41, 154, 158, 183, 188–9, 192–7, 203–4 Mises, Ludwig von 12 monopoly viii, 9, 18, 26, 41, 86–7, 97–9, 142, 145–7, 149–54, 161, 171, 177 monopsony 153–4 Moody’s (ratings agency) 97–9 Morgan Stanley 49, 63, 90, 217 mutual fund 56, 58, 64–6, 68, 97, 134 NASDAQ 55 natural selection 167 negotiating power 160, 179, 205 net present value 159 new welfare economics 14, 19 news 53, 56, 114, 122, 143, 220 Nobel Prize 7, 17, 20, 22–4, 26, 44, 170, 186 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 20, 30, 41, 187, 189, 203 Olson, Mancur 23–4 optimal contracting 109, 119–20, 124, 126–7, 132 ordinalism 1, 11, 17, 21 outrage constraint 119–21, 124, 126–7, 136 outsourcing 165, 177, 184–6 over the counter (OTC) (derivatives) 90 Paretian welfare economics 14 Pareto, Vilfredo 12–13, 21, 157 INDEX pay-for-performance 95, 107–8, 111–12, 115, 119, 121–2, 126, 128, 139 pensions viii, 36, 39, 57, 58, 98, 113, 140, 134 perfect competition (economic) x, xii, 141–2, 145–6, 168, 187, 193 perfectly substitutable (economically) x performance-related pay 109, 111; see also pay-for-performance perverse incentive 113, 133 Pigou, Arthur C. 10, 188, 192–3, 198 Pimco (fund) 96, 215 Ponzi (scheme) 95, 217 poststructuralism 8 power viii–xii, 1–4, 8–9, 18, 25, 27–32, 42, 145, 147, 153–4, 159–61, 164, 166–8, 171, 174, 177–9, 184–7, 193, 198, 203–4 corporate 107–40 economic xii, 1, 32, 45, 46, 54, 208, 219 financial 47–106 informational 207–20 managerial (see managerial power approach) political ix, xii, 32, 86, 208, 210, 219 principal–agent theory 107 prisoner’s dilemma 38 private equity 68, 136 productivity (economic) ix, 10, 32, 34–6, 48, 79–80, 101, 137, 141, 146–7, 156, 171, 173, 176, 178, 180, 186, 189, 192, 194, 196, 201, 204–5 professions, the viii, 1, 25 profit xii, 2, 7, 43, 46, 54–6, 59, 61–2, 65, 68, 76, 82–3, 85, 91, 97, 99– 100, 105, 109–10, 112–13, 118, 127–8, 130, 135, 137, 141–3, 145–50, 153, 155, 157, 159–60, 164, 166, 171, 173, 175, 177–9, 184, 186, 197, 205, 215–16 profitability 49, 53, 60, 74, 84, 95, 97, 100, 132–3, 139, 143, 151, 183, 191, 194 245 profit margin 3, 195 profit maximization 120, 143, 147, 149–51 property rights 22, 215 public relations (PR) 15–16 quadratic weighting (inflation) 33 rating agencies x, 97–100 rational choice movement 1, 21–3, 25, 214 raw materials 2–3, 184 redistribution 10, 12, 19, 39, 161, 186, 210, 213 representative agent 14 reserve requirement 82–4, 103–4 risk management 94 Robbins, Lionel 12–13, 17, 21, 210–11 Robinson, Joan 146, 159–60, 208 Ross, Edward 9–10, 18, 38 Rothschild, Mayer Amschel 72–3, 75 S&P 500 110, 120 Samuelson, Paul 159–60 Sarbanes–Oxley Act 92, 99, 123 Schumpeter, Joseph 19 Second (Workingmen’s) International 5 Second World War 2, 18–19, 30, 79–80 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 52–3, 69, 90, 93–4, 97–8, 115, 123–4, 130, 217 securitization 112 selfishness 7, 38, 40, 108, 167, 170, 211, 213 shareholder franchise 133 shareholders xii, 93, 102, 107–10, 112–15, 120–22, 128, 131, 133–6, 138 SMD assumptions/conditions 7, 14 Smith, Adam 3–4, 42, 155, 163, 188, 198 social norms 38, 108, 117, 120, 135, 138–9, 164 social security 36, 39, 188, 198–9 246 ECONOMISTS AND THE POWERFUL socialism 5–6 , 9–10, 19, 24, 27, 193 Solow, Robert 159 Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem: see SMD assumptions/ conditions Soros, George 47, 67, 105 spring loading (stock options) 122 Squam Lake Group 44 Sraffa, Piero 141, 144, 159–60 staggered board (of directors) 126, 134 stagnation 32, 101, 218 stakeholders xii, 107–8, 117, 136–7 Standard & Poor’s (rating agency) 97, 99 Stanford University 10, 18, 93 stock option backdating 122 stock options 43, 67, 92–3, 96, 108–10, 112–13, 120, 122–5, 128, 131–3 structural reforms 188–9 subprime xi, 43, 47, 69–71, 82, 88, 90, 95, 97–8, 101, 105, 108, 111, 113, 120, 133, 136, 205, 217 supply and demand 108, 167 sustainability ix, 13 Syracuse University 9 takeover 70, 102, 113, 126, 135 tariffs 3, 16, 84 TARP: see Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) taxation 83, 109, 139, 214 Thatcher, Margaret 40 “too big to fail” 83, 105 transaction costs 7, 74, 168–9 transportation 7, 41, 73, 118, 143, 144–5, 169, 186 treasury secretary xi, 69, 71, 87, 90, 96 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) 70 UBS (bank) 105 unemployment 170, 180–81, 188–9, 197–200, 203–5, 213 university 9, 16–17, 20–21, 27, 41, 101, 117, 142 University of Chicago: see Chicago, University of value added 31, 136 Wall Street xi, 38, 42, 54, 63, 67, 69–70, 88, 92–3, 96, 99, 105, 122–3 Walras, Leon 5–7 Warwick Commission 100–101, 103 Washington Mutual (bank) 95–6 wealth viii, xii, 2, 9, 42, 45, 69, 71–2, 96, 101, 110–11, 120, 135, 207–10 welfare economics 14–15 welfarism 10–11 Wieser, Friedrich von 12–13 worker representatives 137 World Bank 27–8, 31 Worldcom 52, 61, 92, 98, 110, 113, 128, 132 Yale University 10, 13


pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

The widespread implications of the 1929 Great Crash and the more recent 1987 stock market crash show how, already in the twentieth century, world systems were integrated and highly sensitive to distant shocks. More recently the turmoil of 1997–98 that began with the devaluation of the Thai baht led to the financial contagion associated with the Russian loan default, the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, and crises across Asia.35 The common element in these crises was the intimate relationship of the nature and the depth of their potency to the characteristics of globalization. As in the example of pandemics, during the financial crisis of 2007/2008 the fiscal “pathogen” originated locally in the relatively small subprime market, but the disease spread quickly through intertwined balance sheets and risk-sharing vehicles that relied on one another in a complex web of interdependence.

This led to a commitment to light-touch regulation and the use of overly expansionary monetary policy.37 Policy makers were taken by arguments that the future of their financial capitals and a significant share of their tax revenues required a reduction in regulatory burdens and red tape.38 They argued that regulation would constrain the innovation needed to support further economic growth and stability.39 Above all, politicians and regulators drew comfort from the economists’ consensus of “the Great Moderation,” which argued that the U.S. economy had exhibited low volatility since the 1990s and that there were no hidden risks building in the system as a result of their actions.40 The implications of national deregulation and an integrated market led to a global financial network that Andrew Haldane from the Bank of England has described as a “monoculture.”41 In the United Kingdom, the financial and insurance sector grew 108 percent between 2000 and 2011, vastly outpacing all other sectors.42 By 2011 financial and insurance services contributed over £125 billion annually to the U.K. economy and were responsible for 9.4 percent of total value added.43 As securitization of subprime mortgages increased, the government became increasingly beholden to what was becoming a homogeneous source of employment and tax revenue. Consequently, national intervention in financial institutions became increasingly difficult as banks grew more powerful and more influential. At the same time that regulators were stumbling, the collapse of the U.S.-based hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management following the 1997–98 financial crisis signaled that banks deemed “too big to fail” could expect to be bailed out by national governments. Together with the widespread use of value-at-risk models (which underestimated tail risks), this expectation obscured risk managers’ incentives and effectively eliminated the downside risk for those large financial institutions that were systemically the most relevant.

See extremist political parties legal responsibilities, coordination of, 218 Lehman Brothers, 34, 36, 45, 47, 52b lessons: for environmental risk management, 141–43; from financial crisis of 2007/2008, 65–69, 203–5; for global infrastructure, 120–22; for global policy reform, 212–19; for inequality reduction, 195–97; from pandemic management, 164–67; for supply chain management, 95–99 life expectancies, 31, 32 Liu Jianlun, 144, 148 loans. See asset-backed securities; debt lobbying, 187–88, 195, 196 logistics. See supply chains Long-Term Capital Management, 24, 50 Lorenz, Edward, xiii Mali, 206 management. See lean management management education: homogenization of, 86–87, 88–90, 96, 213; MBA programs, 87–88, 88f, 89f, 89t, 213 manufacturing: geographic concentration of, 29–30, 81, 84, 96, 98, 131; greenhouse gas emissions from, 135f; innovation in, 77–78; just-in-time, 78, 79, 85.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

I believe that many will come to expect the Singularity, but even if I’m wrong, Singularity expectations will still have a massive impact on the economy if a few thousand hedge fund managers and venture capitalists become Singularity predictors. Hedge funds take money from rich people and invest in financial instruments such as stocks and bonds. These funds collectively control trillions of dollars in assets. In 1998, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management had, all by itself, financial positions of around $1.3 trillion.323 Because of the huge sums involved, hedge funds attract the best and brightest as employees. Consider a hedge fund that has convinced rich people to invest $100 billion with it. The hedge fund then uses this $100 billion to borrow $900 billion from banks, allowing the fund to make financial bets totaling $1 trillion.

Pretend that if this fund were run by the second-most-qualified person on Earth, it would earn a 10 percent yearly return, but if the fund were managed by the best person, it would have a 10.2 percent return. This difference amounts to $2 billion a year, meaning that the fund would greatly benefit from employing the best manager for a salary of $1 billion a year, a salary that would tempt almost anyone. Hedge funds do sometimes screw up. Long Term Capital Management, for example, lost billions in 1998, and the US government so feared what would happen to the world economy if the fund imploded that it arranged a bailout. The ever-present possibility of failure motivates hedge funds to eagerly seek out all relevant information. Hence, if a very smart, rational, and well-informed person should be able to see a signpost to the Singularity, then you can bet that several hedge fund managers will read and act on such a sign.

., 124 Khan, Genghis, 22, 24, 77–78 Khrushchev, Nikita, 220 Kling, Arnold, 107 Kool-Aid, 38 Korean study on autism, 91 Krishna (Hindu God), 3 Kurzweil, Ray billions of nanobots in our brains will record real-time data on how our brains work, 11 computing power, limits to exponential growth in, 6 computing speed, exponential improvements in, 4 Cryonics Institute, 214 on exponential growth, 1 Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, 179 humans will be fantastically productive and earn higher wages, 189 investor and Singularity writer, 35 mankind will colonize the universe at maximum speed allowed by the laws of physics, 9 merger of man and machine, 188 quote, 164 resources of the solar system, mankind will use significant percentage of, 9 rocks, reorganization of, x Singularity by 2045, 200 Singularity by a steady merger of man and machines, 23 The Singularity is Near, 3, 207 Singularity will probably be utopian, 179 Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, 179 ultimate laptop computer operations per second, 6 Kurzweilian Merger babysitters, earnings of, 134–35 dangers of, 21 human brains will provide starter software for a Singularity, 8–10 opportunities to correct mistakes, 22 property rights expectations, 190 rate of return expectations, 190 savings, cumulative effect on, 190 wealth expectations, 190 Kurzweilian scenario, 189 L landed aristocracy, 147 landowning nobility, 137 land resale value, 181–82 language processing skills, 64–65 laser rifle, 204 lawn mower, perfect, 24 Legg, Shane, 13 Lesbian feminists, 195 libertarian AI, 41 libertarian government, ideal, 41 libertarianism, 40–41 libertarian ultra-intelligent ruler, 40–41 life span, 180, 212 life span of products, 183 liquid nitrogen preserved body, 139. See also cryonics Long Term Capital Management, 185 long-term planning, 79 lottery tickets, IQ, 113 Louis XIV, King, 165, 167 Ludd, Ned, 131 Luddites, 131 Lumosity (brain fitness website), 113, 115 Lumosity games, 113–14 M Macbeth (Shakespeare), 21, 175 machine intelligence, ix, x, xv, xvii, 13, 21, 119 machine-learning software, xi Mafia, 217 maggot-free, 166 magic wands, 137 magnetic resonance imaging, 91 Malthus, Thomas, xv, 141 Malthusian emulation society, 149 Malthusian trap, 141–45 Mandarin, 8, 193 Manhattan Project, xii manic state, 93 mankind’s annihilation, 45 mankind’s short-term survival prospects, 199 Mao Zedong, 122 marginal costs of production, 168 marijuana, 105 market economy, 132 marriage decision, 83 marriage market, 194 Mars, 138 Martian land, 138 Marxist dictate, 41 “massive embryo selection,” 94—95 McCabe, Tom, 90, 163, 215 media content, 182 Medicare costs, 116 Medicare taxes, 157 memes, 80, 97 memory drugs, 108.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The five decades since then have seen paralyzing vicissitudes in advanced economies (let alone emerging markets): stagflation in the seventies; a US real estate bust leading to a savings and loan banking crisis in the eighties; a Scandinavian banking crisis in the early nineties; a European Exchange-Rate Mechanism currency crisis in 1992; the Japanese great stagnation and deflation since the nineties after the collapse of its real estate bubble; the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) despite two Nobel laureates at its helm in 1998; the internet boom and subsequent bust and corporate defaults of the early 2000s; the housing and credit boom-and-bust leading to the Global Financial Crisis beginning in 2007; the eurozone crisis of the early 2010s; and of course the COVID-19 crisis of 2020.

I spent the next two and a half years in Washington, first at the council with chair Yellen and then at the Treasury Department. I advised Treasury under secretary Tim Geithner and secretary Larry Summers on dealing with successive financial crises rooted in profligate debt. We watched crises rattle Russia, Pakistan, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Turkey, and Uruguay, and even advanced economies, when Long-Term Capital Management, the biggest US hedge fund, went belly-up in 1998 after the Russian economy suffered its first post-Soviet recession. It was quite an education. Once again, I found myself following events in Argentina. By 1991, Argentina pegged its exchange rate at one Argentine peso to one US dollar.

But it did not, and its restraint thrilled stockholders who hoped the good times would never stop. Events half a world away ended the festivities. A currency crisis in Asia and unexpected default by Russia roiled global markets. Capital dried up. Without the liquidity essential to keeping them afloat, highly leveraged hedge funds felt the squeeze. Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) led the pack with investments valued at nearly one hundred times its net worth, the equivalent of owning a $1 million home with a $990,000 mortgage. When financial assets lose value, hedge funds need to cover losses. In the case of LTCM it was devastating and contagious. Its failure exposed the entire US financial system to a crash and recession.


End the Fed by Ron Paul

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business cycle, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, tulip mania, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

Japan’s market has never adequately recovered from its 1990s slump because it prevented liquidation of bad debt held by the banks. Throughout the 1990s in the United States, the market was arguing for liquidation of debt and elimination of gross malinvestment. But our recessions, the Asian crisis, as well as the Russian crisis were papered over with more inflation. Even the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1999 was barely a blip on the economic radar screen. By the year 2000, the imbalances were more than could be contained. The massive injection of credit for Y2K softened the blow of the 2000 recession, but it was clear by then that the “Big One” was at our doorstep. And I suspect that Greenspan knew it.

Subsidized mortgage insurance produced great incentive for making subprime loans that would have otherwise been rejected. And if there was no Fed, the risk takers all would have thought much more about the consequences of their actions. Sarbanes-Oxley, a regulatory consequence of the Enron and Long-Term Capital Management failures that imposed massive new costs on American business, did nothing to prevent today’s crisis. Our problem today was not caused by lack of business and banking regulations. Many, including Greenspan, now argue that the major flaw in the system was the lack of adequate legislation to control “unbridled capitalism.”


pages: 244 words: 58,247

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: Get Wise, Get Wealthy...and Get on With Your Life by Alexander Green

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, behavioural economics, borderless world, buy and hold, buy low sell high, cognitive dissonance, diversification, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, endowment effect, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, financial independence, fixed income, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, hindsight bias, impulse control, index fund, interest rate swap, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, mental accounting, Michael Milken, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

He discovered the theory of relativity, won the Nobel Prize in physics, and made scientific advances in gravity, cosmology, radiation, theoretical physics, statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and unified field theory. Wouldn’t an investor be blessed to have an IQ like this? Perhaps not. Einstein lost his investment capital—including his Nobel Prize money—on bonds that defaulted. For all his genius, he was a failure at investing. Or take Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). LTCM was a hedge fund created in 1994 with the help of two Nobel Prize- winning economists. The fund incorporated a complex mathematical model designed to profit from inefficiencies in world bond prices. The brilliant folks in charge of the fund used a statistical model that they believed eliminated risk from the investment process.

(mutual fund research) DeMuth, Phil Earnings, share prices (relationship) Efficient market hypothesis (EMH) advocacy Efficient portfolio Emerging market stocks Emotional Intelligence (Goleman) Emotional quotient (EQ) European stocks Exchange-traded fund (ETF) advantages weighing expenses open-ended characteristic performance, cash drag portfolio ranking State Street Global Advisors initiation tax problems, avoidance WSJ/Morningstar study Expense ratio composition level Expert Political Judgment (Tetlock) Experts, knowledge Faugere, Christophe (money manager performance research) Fidelity Magellan Fund track record Financial advisor, requirement (absence) Financial freedom importance requirement step one Financial future, planning responsibility Financial goals, meeting Financial independence calculation proximity Financial markets, understanding (degree) Financial responsibility Fishing, truth Foreign markets diversification reasons risk Forsythe, Greg (emotions comment) (k) contribution disadvantage usage (b), usage Four Pillars of Investing, The (Bernstein) Future, prediction (problem) Global economy, U.S. proportion Gold movement returns shares inclusion, reasons proportion usage Graham, Benjamin investment advice investor problem Great Depression Greenspan, Alan (LTCM buyout) Growth portfolio Hand, Learned (tax management comments) Hedge fund ownership, eligibility High Expectations and False Dreams (Otar) High-grade bonds, investment High-grade corporate bonds, taxable income High-quality stocks, exposure High-yield bonds proportion stocks, correlation tax inefficiency usage Historical asset returns, understanding Historical averages, usage Historical data, examination Humility, wisdom (relationship) Index funds reliance Indexing, power Index mutual funds, WSJ/Morningstar study Individual Retirement Account (IRA) contribution usage percentage Inflation impact increase Inflation-adjusted Treasury bonds proportion usage Intelligent Asset Allocator, The (Bernstein) Investment advisors, usage (decision) aggressiveness, problem aims annual return automation compound timing confusion conservative approach, problem criticism decisions delegation, problems diversification argument expectations factors importance goals humility, impact knowledge mistakes objective philosophy pitfalls portfolio long-term value determination, factors usage principles understanding process, knowledge reality check risks, elimination seriousness stability/returns, relationship strategy problems, avoidance success system, steps Investors long-term financial requirement target taxes/expenses, reduction iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond Fund description holdings iShares Lehman TIPS Bond Fund description holdings Jensen, Michael (mutual fund manager analysis) Junk bonds, inclusion (criticism) Kaderlis, Billy/Akaisha (retirement example) Keogh, usage Large-cap stock, market capitalization Legg Mason Value Trust Lewis, Michael Life philosophy, presence Lifestyle, calculation Little Book of Common Sense Investing, The (Bogle) Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), crash Long-term core portfolio, short-term trading portfolio (separation) Long-term financial goals, meeting Long-term investment portfolio, personalization Long-term investment success Long-term portfolio, recommendation/ criticism Lynch, Peter investment advice market prediction Management fees Market capitalization declines outguessing, problem timing absence avoidance Market-impact cost Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF description holdings Markowitz, Harry Mental accounting Milken, Michael Miller, Bill Miller, Merton Millionaire Next Door (Stanley/Danko) Millionaires, characteristics Mind of the Market, The (Shermer) Modern portfolio theory (MPT) advocacy Money investment management managers, performance stocks division truth Mutual funds advantage Bogle research costs, shareholder absorption industry, size managers, benchmark underperformance principle stock trading behavior types Net asset value (NAV), divergence Net worth, result No-load bond funds, usage No-load index funds, usage Overseas markets, earnings growth Oxford Club Communique, Hulbert Financial Digest ranking Pacific Rim stocks Peer pressure, perspective Perma-bears recommendations Personal risk tolerance, assessment Phantom income, taxation Philosophy:Who Needs It (Rand) Portfolio annual return balance blend breakdown goals implementation market timer, impact net return, concern rebalancing process setup strategy tax management test tracking process volatility, reduction Precious metals index, assembly mining stocks Prediction, difficulty Pre-tax returns, post-tax returns (contrast) Private pension plans, disappearance Prosperity, stock market creation Raskob, Jacob Real estate investment trusts (REITs) proportion tax inefficiency usage Rebalancing emotions, avoidance process timing usage usefulness Recessions, predictability Redemptions, impact Retirement goals/plan steps Retirement Confidence Survey Rich, SEC definition Risk elimination level, acceptability Sacrifices, making Samuelson, Paul Savings amount importance priority proportion spending, balance Securities, pricing efficiency Self-interested parties, impact Share price, fluctuation Sharpe, William Shawky, Hany A.


pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

They could then raise more capital to make more loans for which they could misleadingly record more profit. Eisman published a damning report on the sector in 1997, causing his desired ‘shitstorm’. He was vindicated the following year when, in a nervous market following the collapse of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund, many of the first generation of subprime lenders went bust. The lesson of this episode was that with some curiosity and application, it was possible to identify looming disaster in the subprime market. It had taken Vinny Daniel six months to review all the pools of loans being sold.

., 75 Japan, 2, 82, 230–31, 234–5, 240–41 Jennings, Andrew, 220, 224 Jerome, Saint, 35 Jersey, 89, 94–5, 158 job costing, 43 Johnson Matthey Bank, 91, 128 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 63 joint stock companies, 41 Joint Stock Companies Act 1844: 47 1856: 50 Jones, Lewis Davies, 54, 55, 56 Jowell, Tessa, 196 junk bonds, 85 Kanebo, 240 Kapital, Das (Marx), 3 Kattner, Markus, 225 Keating, Charles, 85–6, 91 Kellaway, Lucy, 275 Kershaw, Sue, 199 Kgosana, Moses, 250 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 237 King, Mervyn, 273 Kirby, Paul, 208 Klynveld Kraayenhof, 235 Klynveld, Piet, ix KMG, 235 Knievel, Robert Craig ‘Evel’, 182 Koch Industries, 171 Kohl, Marius, 168, 174–7 KPMG, ix–x, 2, 10, 11, 48, 97, 116–19, 141–2, 149–50, 256–9, 264–7, 276 and Barnier proposals, 255 and Bradford & Bingley, 141–2, 149 and Brexit, 203, 204 and British Aerospace/BAE Systems, 213 Canary Wharf base, 256 Chelsea Flower Show, 200 in China, 244, 245, 251–2 and Civil Service Live conference, 201 Claridges conference (2007), 122 and Co-operative Bank, 142, 149, 150 and Comroad, 240 and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 121 and Countrywide Financial Corporation, 48, 118, 257 ‘Cutting Through Complexity’, 11–12 Data & Analytics (D&A), 272 and defence, 188, 189, 200, 202, 216, 217, 265 establishment of (1987), 235 and European Central Bank, 10 and Federal National Mortgage Association (‘Fannie Mae’), 118–19, 257 and FIFA, 220–28 and Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 145 and Financial Reporting Council, 144, 209 and General Electric, 5–6 governments, advice to, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192–3, 197–9, 202–6, 249 and GPT, 216, 217 and HBOS, 141, 142–3, 149, 150, 257 and Hinkley Point, 204–6 and Hollinger, 154–5 and Hong Kong protests (2014), 251–2 and House of Lords committee (2010), 146 and HS2, 197–9 and HSBC, 229–30 and Imperial Tobacco, 202, 266–7 in India, 249 integrated reporting, 18 key performance indicators, 12 and Lockheed Martin, 202, 265 and Miller Energy, 261 and Ministry of Defence, 188, 189, 202, 216, 217, 265 and National Health Service (NHS), 192–3, 202, 266 and New Century Financial Corporation, 48, 116–18, 257 No. 20, Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, ix–x, x, 277–8 ‘One Firm’ philosophy, 275 and ‘patent box’ tax breaks, 180 Performance Club 1999 trips, 160 and Petrofac, 218 and private finance initiative (PFI), 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 249 and Privy Purse, 68 revolving door, 206, 207, 208 and Saudi British Joint Business Council, 218 Scott London Rolex scandal (2013), 15 and securitization, 121, 122 and Siemens, 240 in South Africa, 249–50 and subprime mortgages, 10, 48, 116–19 and sustainable development, 200 and tax avoidance, 154–5, 157, 158, 159–62, 180–81, 182, 186 thought leadership, 12 and thrifts, 87 and Tier One, 257 and Wachovia, 257 and Xerox, 109–10 Kreuger, Ivar, 57 Kubena, Mike, 237 Labour Party, 66, 94, 114, 178, 179, 184–92, 194, 201, 209, 230 Lake Michigan, 73 Land, Nick, 144, 182 Lang, Ian, 95 Last Supper, The (Leonardo da Vinci), 33 Lateran Council, Third (1179), 24 Law Commission, 93 Lawson, Nigel, 146 Lay, Kenneth, 99–100, 104, 107, 108 Leary, Simon, 191 Lehman Brothers, 12, 13, 92, 119, 131–3, 138, 144, 145, 148–9 Leigh, Edward, 189 Lend-Lease programme, 60 Leonardo da Vinci, 33 Levin, Carl, 159, 161 Levitt, Arthur, 96–8, 104 Lewis, Leigh, 207 Lewis, Michael, 112, 118 Liber Abaci (Fibonacci), 21–2 Liberal party, 50, 52 Liechtenstein, 220 limited liability, 50, 52, 91–5, 114 Lincoln Savings and Loan, 85–7 Linklaters, 140 Little, Royal, 61 Liverpool, Merseyside, 49 LJM, 104–5 Lloyds Bank, 140 Lockheed Martin, 202, 212, 265 London, England Big Bang (1986), 156 Canary Wharf, 256 Chelsea Flower Show, 200 Claridges, 122 Gordon Riots (1780), 38 Imperial College, 197 ‘light touch’ regulation, 114, 131, 209 Medici Bank, 26, 30 Olympic Games (2012), 196 Price Waterhouse, 54 Royal London Hospital, 190 School of Economics, 197 St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, 190 Tate Modern, 16 Long Term Capital Management, 113 Louis XI, king of France, 31 low-balling, 79, 91 Lowe, Robert, 50 Luce, Edward, 17 Lucerne, Switzerland, 220 Luthiger, Fredy, 222, 223, 227 Luxembourg, 165–77, 179, 180, 181, 182, 245, 267–71, 278 LuxLeaks, 169–77, 179, 181, 245, 268, 269, 278 Lybrand, Ross Bros & Montgomery, 87 Lybrand, William, 56 Lynch, Loretta, 219, 223 Lyons, 31 MacGregor, John, 128 Mair, John, 42, 53 Management Consultancies Association, 190 Mandelson, Peter, 95, 207 Mapping the Market, 193 mark-to-market, 99–102, 113, 123, 124, 129–31 mark-to-model, 124–5, 126, 127, 131 mark-to-myth, 124, 131 Marlborough, Duke of, see Churchill, John Martin, William, 122–3 Marwick, James, ix, 48–9, 56, 62, 119, 158, 217, 233, 277 Marx, Karl, 3 Masters Tournament, 104 Masters, Adrian, 191 matches, 57 Mauritius, 158 Maxwell, Robert, 66, 87–8, 91 May, George, 73, 78, 82, 277 May, Theresa, 203 McConnell, Jack, 207 McCreevy, Charles, 164 McDonald’s, 170 McFall, John, 207 McKenna, Francine, 145, 274 McKinsey, 17, 74–7, 79, 81, 99, 108, 183, 191, 226, 263 McKinsey, James, 74–7 McLean, Bethany, 101 Measelle, Richard, 103 Medici family, 16, 26–32, 36 Cosimo, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31 Giovanni, 26 Lorenzo, 28, 29, 30 Medvedev, Dmitry, 17 Melbourne, Victoria, 48 mergers and acquisitions, 11, 54, 59–69, 71, 87 Merrill Lynch, 121 Mesopotamia, 1 Messezentrum conference centre, Zurich, 228 Metcalf, Lee, 80 Metz, France, 172, 173, 176 Mexico, 229 Michael, Bill, 149–50 Microsoft, 271 Milburn, Alan, 184, 191, 194, 207 Mill, John Stuart, 50 Miller Energy, 261 Ministry of Defence, UK, 188–90, 202, 212, 215–19, 265 Missal, Michael, 115, 116–17 Missouri, United States, 74 Mitchell, Andrew, 206, 208 Mitchell, Austin, 94, 230 Mitchell, Roger, 48, 56 Model T Ford, 71 Modern Times, 71 Monde, Le, 169 monetarism, 84 money laundering, 229–31 Montagu, Nicholas, 207 Monty Python, 15–16 Moore, Paul, 141 Morgan, Henry, 39 Morgan, John Pierpont, 54–5 Morgan Stanley, 119, 148 Morse, Amyas, 206 mortgage-backed securities (MBS), 120–21 Moselle, France, 171 Mossack Fonseca, 247 Mouget, Didier, 170, 171, 173 Mumbai, Maharashtra, 242 Munger, Charlie, 18, 135, 147 Myners, Paul, 146 Nally, Dennis, 5, 148 Nassau, Bahamas, 222 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 76 National Audit Office, 187, 189, 206 National Crime Agency (NCA), 272 National Health Service (NHS), 183–4, 187, 190, 191–5, 266 National Westminster Bank (NatWest), 136 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 4, 234, 251 Neoplatonism, 28 Netherlands ABN Amro, 138 Ballast Nedam, 218–19 Klynveld Kraayenhof, 235 Royal Ahold, 238–9 Spanish (1556–1714), 36 taxation, 163, 164–5 New Century Financial Corporation, 48, 115–18, 257 New Delhi, India, 245, 249 New Labour, 114, 184–92, 194, 209 New York, United States, 57 beer business, 54 Britnell’s ‘Reform Revolution’ speech (2011), 192–3 County Law Association, 153 Deloitte compensation case (2009), 239 FIFA indictment (2015), 219, 223 Harris’ advisory services speech (2014), 264 Issuers’ and Investors’ Summit on CDOs/Credit Derivatives (2006), 121 Levitt’s ‘Numbers Game’ speech (1998), 96, 98 Marwick & Mitchell, 48 Price Waterhouse, 54 Stock Exchange, 55, 115, 234 Wall Street, 54, 69, 96, 101, 120–21 New York Times, 118, 236 New Zealand, 256 Newton, Isaac, 22 Nicholson, Kevin, 178, 182 Nieuwe Instructie (Christoffels), 36 Nike, 163 No. 20, Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, ix–x, x, 277–8 Noncomformism, 42 Norte del Valle Cartel, 229 Northern Rock, 125–9, 142–3, 148 Norway, 72 nuclear power, 204–6 ‘Numbers Game’ speech (1998), 96, 98 O’Donnell, Augustine ‘Gus’, 207 O’Rourke, Feargal, 164, 165 off-balance-sheet financing, 101, 102, 104, 106 Office of Tax Simplification, 179 oil crisis (1973), 84 oil-for-food programme, 225, 240 Olympic Games (2012), 196 Olympus, 241 One Hundred Group, 254 OPIS (Offshore Portfolio Investment Strategy), 159, 162 Oppenheimer & Co., 112–13 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 170, 181, 214 Osborne, George, 149, 182, 248 Oscars, 16 Overend & Gurney, 51, 126 Oxford University, 181, 184 Oxley, Michael, 114, 122 de Pacioli, Luca Bartolomeo, 32–6, 34, 100, 124 Page, Stephen, 272 Pain, Jon, 208 Palin, Michael, 15–16 Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, 82 Panama Papers scandal (2016), 247 Panorama, 169, 220 Paradise Papers scandal (2017), 7, 247 Parmalat, 239, 243 Parrett, William, 148 partners, 8 Pearson, 169, 270 Pearson, Ian, 207 Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., 48, 60, 63, 64, 79, 82, 233, 235 Peat, Michael, 68 Peat, William Barclay, ix, 48, 49, 68, 233, 277 Penn Central Transport Company, 64, 79 pension funds, 67 Pepsi, 166 Pergamon, 66 Perrin, Edouard, 168, 169, 171–2, 173, 174, 175 Persson, Mats, 208 Perugia University, 32 Pessoa, Fernando, 1 Peston, Robert, 197 Peterborough hospital, Cambridgeshire, 191 Petits secrets des grandes enterprises, Les, 169 Petrofac, 218 Pfizer, 163 Piot, Wim, 173, 181, 182 Pisa, Italy, 21 place value’ system, 21 political donations, 98 Ponzi schemes, 89 ‘pooling-of-interest’ accounting, 61–2, 63, 67, 96 post-balance sheet events, 72 Powell, Ian, 128, 201–2 Poynter, Kieran, 148, 150 premiums, 45 Presbyterianism, 42 Price, Samuel Lowell, 49 Price Waterhouse & Co., 49, 53–6, 57, 65, 67, 72, 73, 78–9, 82 and conflicts of interest, 73, 277 consultancy, 78–9, 81, 82 Coopers & Lybrand, merger with (1998), 49, 95 in Germany, 233 and Great Crash (1929), 57 in India, 233 international co-ordinating company, 234 and limited liability partnerships, 94 Palo Alto technology centre, 82 and private finance initiative (PFI), 185 in Russia, 236 and tax avoidance, 164 and tax code (1954), 153–4 and United States Steel, 55, 62, 233 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 2, 5, 6, 49, 95, 97 and American International Group, 134–5, 144, 145, 148 and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, 230–31 and Barclays, 6 Booz & Co. acquisition (2013), 263–4 and Brexit, 203 and British Home Stores (BHS), 260 Building Public Trust Awards, 256 ‘Building Relationships, Creating Value’, 12 and Cattles plc., 142 cyber-security, 272–3 establishment of (1998), 49, 95 and Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 145 and Financial Reporting Council, 142, 144, 209, 210 global operations, 235–6 and Goldman Sachs, 134–5, 148 and Google, 271 and GPT, 217, 218 and Heineken, 246 and Hong Kong protests (2014), 251–2 in India, 242 integrated reporting, 18 and Kanebo, 240 and Labour Party, 201 and National Health Service (NHS), 192, 194, 200 and Northern Rock, 126, 127–9, 142–3, 148 and Olympic Games (2012), 196 presentation (2017), 16 and private finance initiative (PFI), 187, 188–91, 196, 249 profits, 5 revolving door, 207, 208 and RSM Tenon, 210, 261 in Russia, 236–8 and Saudi British Joint Business Council, 218 and securitization, 121, 122, 129 and tax avoidance, 157, 165–79, 180, 182, 237, 246, 267–71, 278 thought leadership, 12 total tax contribution survey, 179 and Tyco, 109 in Ukraine, 238 and Vodafone, 165–6 Prince of Wales’s charity, 181 principal/agent problem, 13 Prior, Nick, 190 Privatbank, 238 Private Eye, 169, 180, 215, 255 private finance initiative (PFI), 185–91, 196, 203, 249 Privy Council, 94 Privy Purse, 68 production-line system, 71 productivity growth, 262–3 professional scepticism, 112, 130, 214, 224 professional services, 11, 72, 150, 183, 204–5, 251, 275, 279 Professional Standards Group, 105–7 Project Braveheart, 106 Project Nahanni, 102 Protestant work ethic, 3 Protestantism, 3, 42, 43 Prudential, 157 Public Accounts Committee, 281 Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), 144–5, 242–3, 253, 261, 274 Puerto Rico, 163 Putin, Vladimir, 17, 237 Qatar, 228 Quakers, 42, 49 Railway Regulation Act (1844), 45 railways United Kingdom, 44–7, 49, 115 United States, 51, 52, 53, 70, 73 Rake, Michael, 144, 149, 150, 162, 181, 257 Raptors, 105 Rayonier, 59 Reagan, Ronald, 80, 84, 154, 184 Reckoning, The (Soll), 27 Redpath, Leopold, 46 regulation, UK, 13, 127, 209–10, 213–14, 259 and Brexit, 273 deregulation (1980s), 95 and financial crisis (2007–8), 127–8, 137–45 Financial Conduct Authority, 140, 149, 281 Financial Reporting Council, 138, 142, 144, 149, 182, 209–10, 213–14, 259, 261 Financial Services Authority, 127, 128, 137, 138, 140 ‘light touch’, 114, 131, 209–10 Railway Regulation Act (1844), 45 self-regulation, 88, 90 regulation, US, 91, 260 Bush administration (2001–2009), 114, 145, 253 Celler–Kefauver Act (1950), 59, 61 competition on price, 79–80 deregulation (1980s), 84–5, 95, 112 derivatives, 122 and Enron, 99 and Lincoln Savings and Loan, 85–7 mark to market, 99 numbers-game era (1990s), 110 Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board, 242–3, 253, 260 Roosevelt, Theodore administration (1901–9), 56–7 Sarbanes–Oxley Act (2002), 114, 122 self-regulation, 61 Trump administration (2017–), 273, 274 and Westec collapse (1966), 63 see also Securities and Exchange Commission Renaissance, 3, 16, 22, 24–37 Renjen, Punit, 275 ‘Repo 105’ technique, 131–3, 149 revolving door, 206–8, 272 Ripley, William Zebina, 57 Robson, Steve, 144, 207 Rockefeller, John Davison, 53, 71 Rolex, 15, 215 Rolls-Royce, 213 Roman numerals, 22 Rome, ancient, 24 Rome, Italy, 25, 27 Roosevelt, Franklin, 58 Roosevelt, Theodore, 56 de Roover, Raymond, 27 Rowland, Roland ‘Tiny’, 66 Royal African Company, 37 Royal Ahold, 238–9 Royal Bank of Scotland, 47, 90, 136–40, 142, 157, 241, 259 Royal London Hospital, 190 RSM Tenon, 210, 261 Russian Federation, 17, 236–8 Ryan, Tim, 134, 148 Saltwater Slavery (Smallwood), 37 Samek, Steve, 103 SANGCOM, 214–19 Sansepolcro, 32 Sarbanes, Paul, 114, 122 Sarbanes–Oxley Act (2002), 114, 122 Sassetti, Francesco, 16, 29, 30, 31, 41 Satyam, 242 Saudi Arabia, 212–19, 221 Saudi British Joint Business Council, 218 Saunders, Stuart, 64 Save South Africa, 250 savings-and-loan mutuals, 84–7, 91, 99 Sberbank, 237 Scarlett, John, 207, 272 Schlich, William, 149 Schumpeter, Joseph, 3 scientific management, 71, 76 Scotland, ix, 42, 47–9, 70, 224 Scuola di Rialto, Venice, 32 Second World War (1939–45), 59, 60, 77, 234 Secret Intelligence Service, 207, 272 Securities Act (1933), 58 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 281 and consulting, 80, 104 and Enron, 99, 104, 108 and Hollinger, 154 Levitt’s ‘Numbers Game’ speech (1998), 96, 98, 104 and Lincoln Savings and Loan, 85, 86 and Penn Central Transport Company, 64 and ‘pooling-of-interest’ accounting, 61, 62 and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), 144 PwC India fined (2011), 242 and Xerox, 109–10 securitization, 101–2, 116, 119–23, 125, 129–31, 133–40, 148, 265 Seidler, Lee, 68–9, 79 self-regulation, 6, 61, 88 Serious Fraud Office, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219 Sexton, Richard, 129, 268, 278 shadow banking system, 115 Shanghai, China, 17 Shaxson, Nicholas, 247 Sheraton, 59 Sherlock, Neil, 208 short selling, 112, 115, 116 Siemens, 240 Sikka, Prem, 94 Silicon Valley, California, 82 Simec International Ltd, 214, 215 Sinaloa Cartel, 229 Sinclair, Upton, 14 Singapore, 163 Sino-Forest, 244 Skilling, Jeff, 99–100, 101, 105, 108 Skinner, Paul, 208 Slater, James, 65 slave trade, 4, 37 Smallwood, Stephanie, 37 Smallwood, Trevor, 158 Smartest Guys in the Room, The (McLean and Elkind), 101 Smith, Adam, 13 Smith, Jacqui, 207 Snell, Charles, 40 Social Justice Commission, 184 Soll, Jacob, 27 Sombart, Werner, 3–4, 22 SOS (Short Option Strategy), 159, 162 South Africa, 213, 223–4, 249–50 South Sea Company, 39–41, 42, 44 Soviet Union (1922–91), 236 Spacek, Leonard, 62, 77–8 Spain, 36, 39, 241 special investment vehicles, 115 Spinwatch, 201 Sproul, David, 256, 258 St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, 190 St Louis, Missouri, 56 Standard & Poor’s, 149 Standard Chartered Bank, 230, 231 Starbucks, 178 steam engine, 43 Stein, Jeffrey, 161 Stephenson, George, 44 Stevens, Mark, 82–3 Stevenson, James, 1st Baron Stevenson, 141 Stiglitz, Joseph, 114 stock market, 68, 69, 92, 96 ‘Go-Go’ years (1960s), 62, 65 and Great Crash (1929), 57, 58 and J.

, 248 UK Uncut, 166 Ukraine, 238 United Kingdom, 2, 6, 39–41, 42–52, 55–6, 65–9 Bank of England, 38, 91, 126, 140, 273 Banking Act (1879), 51 Barlow Clowes collapse (1988), 89–90, 136, 209 Blair ministries (1997–2007), 114, 157, 179, 184–92, 194, 209, 213 Brexit, 195, 203–4, 273 British Home Stores collapse (2015–16), 260–61 Bubble Act (1720), 44 Cabinet Office, 200, 201 Cameron ministries (2010–16), 149, 182, 192, 194, 195, 203 chartered accountancy, 14, 16, 45, 47–8, 49, 53, 67 City of Glasgow Bank collapse (1878), 51, 147 Companies Acts, 51, 52, 58, 66, 93 credit crisis (1772), 43 Davey committee (1894), 52 Department for Business, 201 Department for Exiting the EU, 204 Department of Health, 188, 191, 192 Financial Conduct Authority, 140, 149, 281 financial crisis (2007–8), see under financial crisis Financial Reporting Council, 138, 142, 144, 149, 182, 209–10, 213–14, 259, 261 Financial Services Authority, 127, 128, 137, 138, 140 First World War (1914–18), 71 GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), 272 Gordon Riots (1780), 38 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), 179, 182 HBOS bailout (2008), x, 140–41, 142–3, 149, 257 Home Office, 201 HS2, 197–9, 266 Income Tax Act (1842), 46 Industrial Revolution, 18, 42–7 Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), 49, 52, 93, 210 IAS39 rules, 123, 125, 127, 147 Johnson Matthey collapse (1984), 91, 128 Joint Stock Companies Acts (1844, 1856), 47, 50 ‘light touch’ regulation, 114, 131, 209 limited liability, 92–5 May ministries (2016–), 203 Maxwell publishing empire, 66, 87–8, 91 mergers and acquisitions, 65–9 Ministry of Defence, 188–90, 202, 212, 215–19 National Audit Office, 187, 189, 206 National Crime Agency (NCA), 272 National Health Service (NHS), 183–4, 187, 190, 191–5, 266 Northern Rock collapse (2007), 125–9, 142–3, 148 Overend & Gurney collapse (1866), 51, 126 Paradise Papers scandal (2017), 7 private finance initiative (PFI), 185–91, 196, 203, 249 Public Accounts Committee, 281 railways, 44–7, 49, 115 Railway Regulation Act (1844), 45 regulation, see under regulation Royal Bank of Scotland bailout (2008), 47, 136–40, 142, 241 Saudi Arabia, relations with, 212–19 Secret Intelligence Service, 207, 272 Serious Fraud Office, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219 South Sea Company, 39–41, 42, 44 Tate, 16 taxation, 7, 46, 67, 94, 153, 155–9, 163–6, 177–82, 203, 247–8 Thatcher ministries (1979–90), 84, 184 Treasury, 39, 68, 146, 179, 180, 189, 201, 203 War of the Spanish Succession (1707–13), 38 Wilson ministry, first (1964–70), 66, 68 United Nations, 225, 245 United States, 2, 4, 52–8, 59–65, 66–9 American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, 61 American International Group bailout (2008), 133–5, 144, 145, 148 antitrust laws, 59, 61, 75 Bear Stearns bailout (2008), 139, 145 Big Bang (1986), 156 Big Four, 2, 6, 9, 10 Bush administration (2001–2009), 98, 114, 145, 253 Celler–Kefauver Act (1950), 59, 61 certified public accountants, 53 Civil Rights Movement, 64 class-action lawsuit law (1966), 64 Congress, 56, 57, 58, 68, 73, 79–80, 98, 145 consultancy, 70–83 Department of Justice, 144, 161, 223 Eisenhower administration (1953–61), 76 Enron scandal (2001), see under Enron Federal National Mortgage Association (‘Fannie Mae’), 118–19, 145, 257 Federal Reserve, 122, 133 Federal Trade Commission, 79 FIFA indictment (2015), 219, 223 financial crisis (1873), 53 financial crisis (2007–8), see under financial crisis Founding Fathers, 53 Gilded Age (c. 1870–1900), 48 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 60 ‘Go-Go’ years (1960s), 59, 62, 65 Great Crash and Depression (1929–39), 14, 57–8, 59–60, 66, 73, 75, 80, 118 Internal Revenue Code (1954), 154 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 159, 160 International Accounting Standards, 123 Ivy League, 68 Johnson administration (1963–9), 63 Lehman Brothers collapse (2008), 12, 13, 92, 131–3, 138, 145, 148–9 limited liability partnerships, 91–2 Long Term Capital Management collapse (1998), 113 mergers and acquisitions, 59–62, 71 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 76 Navy, 77 New Century Financial Corporation collapse (2007), 115–18, 257 Penn Central Transport Company collapse (1970), 64 presidential election (2000), 98 Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board (PCAOB), 144–5, 242–3, 253, 261, 274 railroads, 51, 52, 53, 70, 73 Reagan administration (1981–9), 80, 84, 154, 184 Roosevelt, Franklin administration (1933–45), 58 Roosevelt, Theodore administration (1901–9), 56–7 Sarbanes–Oxley Act (2002), 114, 122 savings-and-loan mutuals, 84–7, 91, 99 Securities Act (1933), 58 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), see under Securities and Exchange Commission Sunbeam collapse (2001), 97 Tax Reform Act (1986), 154 taxation, 67, 153–5, 159–63, 178 Trump administration (2017–), 17, 161, 273, 274 Vietnam War (1955–75), 63 Wall Street, 54, 69, 96, 101, 120–21 Washington Mutual collapse (2008), 145 Watergate Scandal (1972–4), 212 Westec collapse (1966), 63 World Congress of Accountants (1904), 56 WorldCom scandal (2002), 6, 10, 109, 110, 130, 209, 264, 274 United States Steel Corporation, 55, 62, 233 universal automatic computer (UNIVAC), 77–8 University of Chicago, 75, 84 University of Pennsylvania, 77 Unleashing the Department Store (Bower), 75 usury, 24, 26 Utopia, Limited, 52 Valcke, Jérôme, 225 value-added tax (VAT), 7, 179, 247 Vandemeulebroeke, Marc, 172, 173 Varley, Steve, 16, 200, 256, 258 Vatican, 25 Veihmeyer, John, 250 Venice, Republic of (697–1797), 18, 21, 24, 26, 32–6 Victoria, queen of the United Kingdom, 47 Vietnam, 102 Vietnam War (1955–75), 63 Vincent, Janice, 86 Virgil, 33 Virley, Simon, 205, 206, 207 Vodafone, 165–6 W.


pages: 354 words: 26,550

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems by Irene Aldridge

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, automated trading system, backtesting, Black Swan, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, diversification, equity premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, pneumatic tube, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, tail risk, trade route, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

Bervas (2006) further suggests the distinction between the trading liquidity risk and the balance sheet liquidity risk, the latter being the inability to finance the shortfall in the balance sheet either through liquidation or borrowing. In mild cases, liquidity risk can result in minor price slippages due to the delay in trade execution and can cause collapses of market systems in its extreme. For example, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998 can be attributed to the firm’s inability to promptly offload its holdings. The credit crisis of 2008 was another vivid example of liquidity risk; as the credit crisis spread, seemingly high-quality debt instruments such as high-grade CDOs lost most of their value when the markets for these securities vanished.

Lumsdaine, 1998. “Macroeconomic News and Bond Market Volatility.” Journal of Financial Economics 47, 315–337. Jorion, Philippe, 1986. “Bayes-Stein Estimation for Portfolio Analysis.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 21, 279–292. Jorion, Philippe, 2000. “Risk Management Lessons from Long-Term Capital Management.” European Financial Management 6, Issue 3, 277–300. Kahneman, D. and A. Tversky, 1979. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47, 263–291. Kan, R. and C. Zhang, 1999. “Two-Pass Tests of Asset Pricing Models with Useless Factors.” Journal of Finance 54, 203–235.

., 162 “Liquid instrument,” 3 Liquidity: aggregate size of limit orders, 62 financial market suitability, 37–38, 41 inventory trading and, 133–134, 139–143 Liquidity arbitrage, 195–196 Liquidity pools (ECNs), 12 Liquidity risk, 252, 254 hedging and, 270 measuring of, 262–264 stop losses and, 266 334 Liquidity traders, inventory trading and, 131, 132 Liu, H., 133 Ljung-Box test, 95–97 Llorente, Guillermo, 196 Lo, Andrew, 59, 67, 83–84, 196, 274 Löflund, A., 180 Log returns, 92–94 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 263 Lorenz curves, 228–229 Love, R., 162, 178 Lower partial moments (LPMs), 56 Low-latency trading, 24 Lunde, A., 121 Lyons, Richard K., 129, 150–151, 160–161, 197 MacKinlay, A. Craig, 67, 83–84, 169, 196 Macroeconomic news, event arbitrage, 174–175 Madhavan, Ananth N., 67, 157, 295 Mahdavi, M., 55 Maier, S., 130 Maintenance stage, of automated system development, 234, 236 Makarov, I., 59 Malamut, R., 274, 275, 277, 281, 292–293, 298 Management fees, 32 Margin call close order, 70 Market-aggressiveness selection, 274, 275–276 Market breadth, 62 Market depth, 62, 133 Market efficiency: predictability and, 78–79 profit opportunities and, 75–78 testing for, 79–89 MarketFactory, 25 Market impact costs, 290–293 Market microstructure trading, 4, 127–128 Market microstructure trading, information models, 129, 145–164 asymmetric information measures, 146–148 INDEX bid-ask spreads, 149–157 order aggressiveness, 157–160 order flow, 160–163 Market microstructure trading, inventory models, 127–143 liquidity provision, 133–134, 139–143 order types, 130–131 overview, 129–130 price adjustments, 127–128 profitable market making problems, 134–139 trader types, 131–133 Market-neutral arbitrage, 192–195 Market orders, versus limit orders, 61–63 Market participants, 24–26 Market resilience, inventory trading, 133 Market risk, 252, 253 hedging and, 269–270 measuring of, 254–260 stop losses and, 266 Markov switching models, 110–111 Markowitz, Harry, 202, 209, 213, 214, 295 Mark to market, risk measurement and, 263 Martell, Terrence, 158–159 Martingale hypothesis, market efficiency tests based on, 86–88 MatLab, 25 Maximum drawdown, 50–51 McQueen, Grant V., 179 Mean absolute deviation (MAD), 220–221 Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), 221 Mean-reversion.


pages: 350 words: 109,220

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, break the buck, business cycle, central bank independence, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, debt deflation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, price stability, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, too big to fail

Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup were assigned to see if the industry could band together to run what Geithner called “a liquidation consortium” to sell off Lehman in pieces. Their mission was to do essentially what had happened back in 1998 when the New York Fed had summoned the heads of Wall Street firms to prevent an untidy collapse of a hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management. That episode demonstrated how one large and leveraged institution, in this case a hedge fund that had recruited Nobel Prize-winning economists to hone its strategy, could threaten the entire financial system. But back then the Fed managed to cajole Wall Street firms into paying the tab; this time the problems were bigger and more widespread.

Geithner wasn’t on anyone’s short list in 2003 when the New York Fed was looking for a successor to retiring William McDonough. The New York Fed’s search committee first considered more likely candidates: Peter Fisher, a former top New York Fed staffer who had coordinated the rescue of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund, and then done a stint at the U.S. Treasury in the early George W. Bush years; Stanley Fischer, the former MIT professor who had been Bernanke’s adviser and had gone to the World Bank and the number two job at the International Monetary Fund; and John Taylor, a Stanford economist whose expertise in monetary policy earned him an international reputation.

Before Bear Stearns, the Fed was doing what central banks have done for generations: lending money for a few days, sometimes a few weeks, to solid commercial banks that couldn’t raise cash quickly on their own. The Fed lent readily, but only to banks, after the 1987 stock market crash and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It lent nothing in 1998 when it rallied Wall Street to rescue hedge fund giant Long Term Capital Management. That nearly sacrosanct principle was violated in March 2008 when the Fed lent billions not to a bank that it supervised but to Bear Stearns, a brokerage house that had never been required to play by the Fed’s rules about how much it borrowed or how it managed its business. And Bear Stearns wasn’t a one-shot deal: the Fed said other Wall Street securities firms and investment banks could drink from the Fed’s trough, too.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

In academia, this culminated in the award of five Nobel prizes to financial economists: three in 1990 (Harry Markowitz and two others building on his work), and two more in 1997, for Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. In financial markets, the culmination of the idea that uncertainty can be neutered came with the emergence of hedge funds claiming to do just that. Merton and Scholes practised what they preached and were senior managers of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. LTCM made huge profits, but its approach ignored the possibility of black swans. When one came along in the shape of a major default and devaluation by the Russian government, LTCM went bust. That was 1998 – just a year after Merton and Scholes had won the Nobel Prize. Alas, regarding their blindness to the problems of orthodox thinking about uncertainty, most financial economists and bankers are serial offenders.

Subsequent research – published in the leading UK medical journal the Lancet after rejection by several economics journals – revealed a 41 per cent rise in male death rates between 1991 and 1994, immediately following the shock privatization programmes in Russia, Kazakhstan and the Baltic states.27 In 1994 the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association was asked to consider introducing a code of conduct. One Committee member joked, ‘Sure, we’ll have a code – its first rule will be “Don’t predict interest rates!”’ Everyone laughed, and there was no further discussion of the matter.28 In 1998 the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management collapsed, threatening to destabilize the global banking system as it went down. Until the end, LTCM economists blamed their downfall on sabotage by rivals, and refused to accept that their bell-curve thinking was fundamentally flawed. Again, after the financial crisis Nobel laureate macroeconomist Tom Sargent, who had not once warned about imminent problems in the financial sector, asserted, ‘it is just wrong to say that this financial crisis caught modern macroeconomists by surprise’.29 David Miles, a macroeconomist who served on the Bank of England panel setting UK interest rates, took the opposite view, insisting that the crisis was inevitably a surprise, with no more clues in advance than the number on a winning lottery ticket: ‘Any criticism of economics that rests on its failure to predict the crisis is no more plausible than the idea that statistical theory needs to be rewritten because mathematicians have a poor record at predicting winning lottery ticket numbers.’30 And so it goes on.

objection, 107, 119–20 Friedman, Milton, 4–5, 56, 69, 84, 88, 126, 189 awarded Nobel Prize, 132 and business responsibility, 2, 152 debate with Coase at Director’s house, 50, 132 as dominant Chicago thinker, 50, 132 on fairness and justice, 60 flawed arguments of, 132–3 influence on modern economics, 131–2 and monetarism, 87, 132, 232 at Mont Pèlerin, 5, 132 rejects need for realistic assumptions, 132–3 Sheraton Hall address (December 1967), 132 ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’ (essay, 1953), 132–3 ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’ (article, 1970), 2, 152 Frost, Gerald, Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty (2002), 7* Galbraith, John Kenneth, 242–3 game theory assumptions of ‘rational behaviour’, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 Axelrod’s law of the instrument, 41 backward induction procedure, 36–7, 38 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 focus on consequences alone, 43 as form of zombie science, 41 and human awareness, 21–3, 24–32 and interdependence, 23 limitations of, 32, 33–4, 37–40, 41–3 minimax solution, 22 multiplicity problem, 33–4, 35–7, 38 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 the Nash program, 25 and nature of trust, 28–31, 41 the Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 real world as problem for, 21–2, 24–5, 29, 31–2, 37–8, 39–40, 41–3 rise of in economics, 40–41 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138–9 and spectrum auctions, 39–40 theory of repeated games, 29–30, 35 tit-for-tat, 30–31 and trust, 29, 30–31, 32, 41 uses of, 23–4, 34, 38–9 view of humanity as non-cooperative/distrustful, 18, 21–2, 25–32, 36–8, 41–3 Von Neumann as father of, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 zero-sum games, 21–2 Gates, Bill, 221–2 Geithner, Tim, 105 gender, 127–8, 130–31, 133, 156 General Electric, 159 General Motors (GM), 215–16 George, Prince of Cambridge, 98 Glass–Steagall Act, repeal of, 194 globalization, 215, 220 Goldman Sachs, 182, 184, 192 Google, 105 Gore, Al, 39 Great Reform Act (1832), 120 greed, 1–2, 196, 197, 204, 229, 238 Greenspan, Alan, 57, 203 Gruber, Jonathan, 245 Haifa, Israel, 158, 161 Harper, ‘Baldy’, 7 Harsanyi, John, 34–5, 40 Harvard Business Review, 153 Hayek, Friedrich and Arrow’s framework, 78–9 economics as all of life, 8 and Antony Fisher, 6–7 influence on Thatcher, 6, 7 and Keynesian economics, 5–6 and legal frameworks, 7* at LSE, 4 at Mont Pèlerin, 4, 5, 6, 15 and Olson’s analysis, 104 and public choice theory, 89 rejection of incentive schemes, 156 ‘spontaneous order’ idea, 30 The Road to Serfdom (1944), 4, 5, 6, 78–9, 94 healthcare, 91–2, 93, 178, 230, 236 hedge funds, 201, 219, 243–4 Heilbroner, Robert, The Worldly Philosophers, 252 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 98, 107, 243–4 Helmsley, Leona, 105 hero myths, 221–3, 224 Hewlett-Packard, 159 hippie countercultural, 100 Hoffman, Abbie, Steal This Book, 100 Holmström, Bengt, 229–30 homo economicus, 9, 10, 12, 140, 156–7 and Gary Becker, 126, 129, 133, 136 and behaviour of real people, 15, 136, 144–5, 171, 172, 173, 250–51 and behavioural economics, 170, 171, 172, 255 long shadow cast by, 248 and Nudge economists, 13, 172, 173, 174–5, 177 Hooke, Robert, 223 housing market, 128–9, 196, 240–41 separate doors for poor people, 243 Hume, David, 111 Huxley, Thomas, 114 IBM, 181, 222 identity, 32, 165–6, 168, 180 Illinois, state of, 46–7 immigration, 125, 146 Impossibility Theorem, 72, 73–4, 75, 89, 97 Arrow’s assumptions, 80, 81, 82 and Duncan Black, 77–8 and free marketeers, 78–9, 82 as misunderstood and misrepresented, 76–7, 79–82 ‘paradox of voting’, 75–7 as readily solved, 76–7, 79–80 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 incentives adverse effect on autonomy, 164, 165–6, 168, 169–70, 180 authority figure–autonomy contradiction, 180 and behavioural economics, 171, 175, 176–7 cash and non-cash gifts, 161–2 context and culture, 175–6 contrast with rewards and punishments, 176–7 ‘crowding in’, 176 crowding out of prior motives, 160–61, 162–3, 164, 165–6, 171, 176 impact of economists’ ideas, 156–7, 178–80 and intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 and moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 morally wrong/corrupting, 168–9 origins in behaviourism, 154 and orthodox theory of motivation, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 168–70, 178–9 payments to blood donors, 162–3, 164, 169, 176 as pervasive in modern era, 155–6 respectful use of, 175, 177–8 successful, 159–60 as tools of control/power, 155–7, 158–60, 161, 164, 167, 178 Indecent Proposal (film, 1993), 168 India, 123, 175 individualism, 82, 117 and Becker, 134, 135–8 see also freedom, individual Industrial Revolution, 223 inequality and access to lifeboats, 150–51 and climate change, 207–9 correlation with low social mobility, 227–8, 243 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 and economic imperialism, 145–7, 148, 151, 207 and efficiency wages, 237–8 entrenched self-deluding justifications for, 242–3 and executive pay, 215–16, 219, 224, 228–30, 234, 238 as falling in 1940–80 period, 215, 216 Great Gatsby Curve, 227–8, 243 hero myths, 221–3, 224 increases in as self-perpetuating, 227–8, 230–31, 243 as increasing since 1970s, 2–3, 215–16, 220–21 and lower growth levels, 239 mainstream political consensus on, 216, 217, 218, 219–21 marginal productivity theory, 223–4, 228 new doctrine on taxation since 1970s, 232–5 and Pareto, 217, 218–19, 220 poverty as waste of productive capacity, 238–9 public attitudes to, 221, 226–8 rises in as not inevitable, 220, 221, 242 role of luck downplayed, 222, 224–6, 243 scale-invariant nature of, 219, 220 ‘socialism for the rich’, 230 Thatcher’s praise of, 216 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233–5, 239 trickle-down economics, 232–3 US and European attitudes to, 226–7 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 innovation, 222–3, 242 Inside Job (documentary, 2010), 88 Institute of Economic Affairs, 7–8, 15, 162–3 intellectual property law, 57, 68, 236 Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go, 148 Jensen, Michael, 229 Journal of Law and Economics, 49 justice, 1, 55, 57–62, 125, 137 Kahn, Herman, 18, 33 Kahneman, Daniel, 170–72, 173, 179, 202–3, 212, 226 Kennedy, President John, 139–40 Keynes, John Maynard, 11, 21, 162, 186, 204 and Buchanan’s ideology, 87 dentistry comparison, 258–9, 261 on economics as moral science, 252–3 Friedman’s challenge to orthodoxy of, 132 Hayek’s view of, 5–6 massive influence of, 3–4, 5–6 on power of economic ideas, 15 and probability, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 190, 210 vision of the ideal economist, 20 General Theory (1936), 15, 188–9 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 128 Khrushchev, Nikita, 139–40, 181 Kilburn Grammar School, 48 Kildall, Gary, 222 Kissinger, Henry, 184 Knight, Frank, 185–6, 212 Krugman, Paul, 248 Kubrick, Stanley, 35*, 139 labour child labour, 124, 146 and efficiency wages, 237–8 labour-intensive services, 90, 92–3 lumpenproletariat, 237 Olson’s hostility to unions, 104 Adam Smith’s ‘division of labour’ concept, 128 Laffer, Arthur, 232–3, 234 Lancet (medical journal), 257 Larkin, Philip, 67 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 Lazear, Edward, ‘Economic Imperialism’, 246 legal system, 7* and blame for accidents, 55, 60–61 and Chicago School, 49, 50–52, 55 and Coase Theorem, 47, 49, 50–55, 63–6 criminal responsibility, 111, 137, 152 economic imperialist view of, 137 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 transaction costs, 51–3, 54–5, 61, 62, 63–4, 68 Lehmann Brothers, 194 Lexecon, 58, 68 Linda Problem, 202–3 LineStanding.com, 123 Little Zheng, 123, 124 Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 234–5, 236 lobbying, 7, 8, 88, 115, 123, 125, 146, 230, 231, 238 loft-insulation schemes, 172–3 logic, mathematical, 74–5 The Logic of Life (Tim Harford, 2008), 130 London School of Economics (LSE), 4, 48 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 201, 257 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 89, 94 Mafia, 30 malaria treatments, 125, 149 management science, 153–4, 155 Mandelbrot, Benoît, 195, 196, 201 Mankiw, Greg, 11 marginal productivity theory, 223–4 Markowitz, Harry, 196–7, 201, 213 Marx, Karl, 11, 101, 102, 104, 111, 223 lumpenproletariat, 237 mathematics, 9–10, 17–18, 19, 21–4, 26, 247, 248, 255, 259 of 2007 financial crash, 194, 195–6 and Ken Arrow, 71, 72, 73–5, 76–7, 82–3, 97 axioms (abstract assumptions), 198 fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201, 219 and orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 214 Ramsey Rule on discounting, 208–9, 212 and Savage, 189–90, 193, 197, 198, 199, 205 and Schelling, 139 Sen’s framework on voting systems, 80–81 standard deviation, 182, 192, 194 and stock market statistics, 190–91, 195–6 use of for military ends, 71–2 maximizing behaviour and Becker, 129–31, 133–4, 147 and catastrophe, 211 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 61, 63–9 economic imperialism, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 147, 148–9 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 profit-maximizing firms, 228 see also wealth-maximization principle; welfare maximization McCluskey, Kirsty, 194 McNamara, Robert, 138 median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 Merton, Robert, 201 Meucci, Antonio, 222 microeconomics, 9, 232, 259 Microsoft, 222 Miles, David, 258 Mill, John Stuart, 102, 111, 243 minimum wage, national, 96 mobility, economic and social correlation with inequality, 226–8, 243 as low in UK, 227 as low in USA, 226–7 US–Europe comparisons, 226–7 Modern Times (Chaplin film, 1936), 154 modernism, 67 Moivre, Abraham de, 193 monetarism, 87, 89, 132, 232 monopolies and cartels, 101, 102, 103–4 public sector, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Mont Pèlerin Society, 3–9, 13, 15, 132 Morgenstern, Oskar, 20–22, 24–5, 28, 35, 124, 129, 189, 190 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 91, 92–3 Murphy, Kevin, 229 Mussolini, Benito, 216, 219 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 Nash, John, 17–18, 22–3, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 awarded Nobel Prize, 34–5, 38, 39, 40 mental health problems, 25, 26, 34 National Health Service, 106, 162 ‘neoliberalism’, avoidance of term, 3* Neumann, John von ambition to make economics a science, 20–21, 24–5, 26, 35, 125, 151, 189 as Cold War warrior, 20, 26, 138 and expansion of scope of economics, 124–5 as father of game theory, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 final illness and death of, 19, 34, 35, 43–4 genius of, 19–20 as inspiration for Dr Strangelove, 19 and Nash’s equilibrium, 22–3, 25, 38* simplistic view of humanity, 28 theory of decision-making, 189, 190, 203 neuroscience, 14 New Deal, US, 4, 194, 231 Newton, Isaac, 223 Newtonian mechanics, 21, 24–5 Nixon, Richard, 56, 184, 200 NORAD, Colorado Springs, 181 nuclear weapons, 18–19, 20, 22, 27, 181 and Ellsberg, 200 and game theory, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), 35, 138 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138, 139 Nudge economists, 13, 171–5, 177–8, 179, 180, 251 Oaten, Mark, 121 Obama, Barack, 110, 121, 157, 172, 180 Olson, Mancur, 103, 108, 109, 119–20, 122 The Logic of Collective Action (1965), 103–4 On the Waterfront (Kazan film, 1954), 165 online invisibility, 100* organs, human, trade in, 65, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 42–3 Osborne, George, 233–4 Packard, David, 159 Paine, Tom, 243 Pareto, Vilfredo 80/20 rule’ 218 and inequality, 217, 218–19, 220 life and background of, 216–17 Pareto efficiency, 217–18, 256* Paul the octopus (World Cup predictor, 2010), 133 pensions, workplace, 172, 174 physics envy, 9, 20–21, 41, 116, 175–6, 212, 247 Piketty, Thomas, 234, 235 plastic shopping bag tax, 159–60 Plato’s Republic, 100–101, 122 political scientists and Duncan Black, 78, 95–6 Black’s median voter theorem, 95–6 Buchanan’s ideology, 84–5 crises of the 1970s, 85–6 influence of Arrow, 72, 81–2, 83 see also public choice theory; social choice theory Posner, Richard, 54, 56–63, 137 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 ‘The Economics of the Baby Shortage’ (1978), 61 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 price-fixing, 101, 102, 103–4 Princeton University, 17, 19–20 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 prisons, cell upgrades in, 123 privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 probability, 182–4 and Keynes, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 210 Linda Problem, 202–3 modern ideas of, 184–5 Ramsey’s personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 and Savage, 190, 193, 197, 198, 199, 203, 205 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 see also risk and uncertainty Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 productivity Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and efficiency wages, 237–8 improvement in labour-intensive services, 92–3 labour input, 92 protectionism, 246, 255 psychology availability heuristic, 226 behaviourism, 154–8, 237 and behavioural economics, 12, 170–71 cognitive dissonance, 113–14 and financial incentives, 156–7, 158–60, 163–4, 171 framing effects, 170–71, 259 of free-riding, 113–14, 115 intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 irrational behaviour, 12, 15, 171 learning of social behaviour, 163–4 moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 motivated beliefs, 227 ‘self-command’ strategies, 140 view of in game theory, 26–31 view of in public choice theory, 85–6 and welfare maximization, 149 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 public choice theory as consensus view, 84–5 and crises of the 1970s, 85–6 foolish voter assumption, 86–8 ‘paradox of voter turnout’, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16 partial/self-contradictory application of, 86, 87–9 ‘political overload’ argument, 85, 86–7 ‘public bad, private good’ mantra, 93–4, 97 and resistance to tax rises, 94, 241 self-fulfilling prophecies, 95–7 and selfishness, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 as time-bomb waiting to explode, 85 public expenditure in 1970s and ’80s, 89 Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and Keynesian economics, 4 and public choice theory, 85–8, 89, 241 and tax rises, 241–2 public-sector monopolies, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 queue-jumping, 123, 124 QWERTY layout, 42 racial discrimination, 126–7, 133, 136, 140 Ramsey, Frank, 186–8, 189, 190, 205, 208 Ramsey Rule, 208–9, 212 RAND Corporation, 17, 41, 103, 138, 139 and Ken Arrow, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 and behaviourism, 154 and Cold War military strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 70, 73, 75–6, 141, 200, 213 and Ellsberg, 182–4, 187, 197–8, 200 and Russell’s Chicken, 33 Santa Monica offices of, 18 self-image as defender of freedom, 78 rational behaviour assumptions in game theory, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 axioms (abstract mathematical assumptions), 198 Becker’s version of, 128–9, 135, 140, 151 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173, 174–5 distinction between values and tastes, 136–8 economic imperialist view of, 135, 136–8, 140, 151 and free-riding theory, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 115–16 and orthodox decision theory, 198, 199 public choice theory relates selfishness to, 86 term as scientific-sounding cover, 12 see also homo economicus Reader’s Digest, 5, 6 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 87–8, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233 regulators, 1–2 Chicago view of, 40 Reinhart, Carmen, 258 religion, decline of in modern societies, 15, 185 renewable energy, 116 rent-seeking, 230, 238 ‘right to recline’, 63–4 risk and uncertainty bell curve distribution, 191–4, 195, 196–7, 201, 203–4, 257 catastrophes, 181–2, 191, 192, 201, 203–4, 211–12 delusions of quantitative ‘risk management’, 196, 213 Ellsberg’s experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200 errors in conventional thinking about, 191–2, 193–4, 195–7, 204–5, 213 financial orthodoxy on risk, 196–7, 201–2 and First World War, 185 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 hasard and fortuit, 185* ‘making sense’ of through stories, 202–3 ‘measurable’ and ‘unmeasurable’ distinction, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 210–11, 212–13 measurement in numerical terms, 181–4, 187, 189, 190–94, 196–7, 201–2, 203–5, 212–13 orthodox decision theory, 183–4, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 201–2, 203–5, 211, 212–14 our contemporary orthodoxy, 189–91 personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 pure uncertainty, 182–3, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 197, 198–9, 210, 211, 212, 214, 251 redefined as ‘volatility’, 197, 213 the Savage orthodoxy, 190–91, 197, 198–200, 203, 205 scenario planning as crucial, 251 Taleb’s black swans, 192, 194, 201, 203–4 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 urge to actuarial alchemy, 190–91, 197, 201 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 see also probability Robertson, Dennis, 13–14 Robinson, Joan, 260 Rodrik, Dani, 255, 260–61 Rogoff, Ken, 258 Rothko, Mark, 4–5 Rumsfeld, Donald, 232–3 Russell, Bertrand, 33–4, 74, 97, 186, 188 Ryanair, 106 Sachs, Jeffrey, 257 Santa Monica, California, 18 Sargent, Tom, 257–8 Savage, Leonard ‘Jimmie’, 189–90, 193, 203, 205scale-invariance, 194, 195–6, 201, 219 Scandinavian countries, 103, 149 Schelling, Thomas, 35* on access to lifeboats, 150–51 awarded Nobel Prize, 138–9 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 138, 139–40 and economic imperialism, 141–5 and game theory, 138–9 and Washington–Moscow hotline, 139–40 work on value of human life, 141–5, 207 ‘The Intimate Contest for Self-command’ (essay, 1980), 140, 145 ‘The Life You Save May be Your Own’ (essay, 1968), 142–5, 207 Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 172 Schmidt, Eric, 105 Scholes, Myron, 201 Schwarzman, Stephen, 235 Second World War, 3, 189, 210 selfishness, 41–3, 178–9 and Becker, 129–30 and defence of inequality, 242–3 as free marketeers’ starting point, 10–12, 13–14, 41, 86, 178–9 and game theory, 18 and public choice theory, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 Selten, Reinhard, 34–5, 36, 38, 40 Sen, Amartya, 29, 80–81 service sector, 90–93, 94 Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure, 169 Shaw, George Bernard, 101 Shiller, Robert, 247 Simon, Herbert, 223 Skinner, Burrhus, 154–5, 158 Smith, Adam, 101, 111, 122 The Wealth of Nations (1776), 10–11, 188–9 snowflakes, 195 social choice theory, 72 and Ken Arrow, 71–83, 89, 95, 97, 124–5, 129 and Duncan Black, 78, 95 and free marketeers, 79, 82 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 social media, 100* solar panels, 116 Solow, Bob, 163, 223 Sorites paradox, 117–18, 119 sovereign fantasy, 116–17 Soviet Union, 20, 22, 70, 73, 82, 101, 104, 167, 237 spectrum auctions, 39–40, 47, 49 Stalin, Joseph, 70, 73, 101 the state anti-government attitudes in USA, 83–5 antitrust regulation, 56–8 dismissal of almost any role for, 94, 135, 235–6, 241 duty over full employment, 5 economic imperialist arguments for ‘small government’, 135 increased economic role from 1940s, 3–4, 5 interventions over ‘inefficient’ outcomes, 53 and monetarism, 87, 89 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 3, 4, 5 and privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 public-sector monopolies, 48–50, 93–4 replacing of with markets, 79 vital role of, 236 statistical lives, 141–5, 207 Stern, Nick, 206, 209–10 Stigler, George, 50, 51, 56, 69, 88 De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum (with Becker, 1977), 135–6 Stiglitz, Joseph, 237 stock markets ‘Black Monday’ (1987), 192 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 193–4, 201 Strittmatter, Father, 43–4 Summers, Larry, 10, 14 Sunstein, Cass, 173 Nudge (with Richard Thaler, 2008), 171–2, 175 Taleb, Nassim, 192 Tarski, Alfred, 74–5 taxation and Baumol’s cost disease, 94 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 as good thing, 231, 241–2, 243 Laffer curve, 232–3, 234 new doctrine of since 1970s, 232–4 property rights as interdependent with, 235–6 public resistance to tax rises, 94, 239, 241–2 and public spending, 241–2 revenue-maximizing top tax rate, 233–4, 235 tax avoidance and evasion, 99, 105–6, 112–13, 175, 215 ‘tax revolt’ campaigns (1970s USA), 87 ‘tax as theft’ culture, 235–6 top-rate cuts and inequality, 231, 233–5, 239 whines from the super-rich, 234–5, 243 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 153–4, 155, 167, 178, 237 Thaler, Richard, 13 Nudge (with Cass Sunstein, 2008), 171–2, 175 Thatcher, Margaret, 2, 88, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and Hayek, 6, 7 and inequality, 216, 227 privatization programme, 93–4 and top-rate tax cuts, 231 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944), 20, 21, 25, 189 Titanic, sinking of (1912), 150 Titmuss, Richard, The Gift Relationship, 162–3 tobacco-industry lobbyists, 8 totalitarian regimes, 4, 82, 167–8, 216, 219 see also Soviet Union trade union movement, 104 Tragedy of the Commons, 27 Truman, Harry, 20, 237 Trump, Donald, 233 Tucker, Albert, 26–7 Tversky, Amos, 170–72, 173, 202–3, 212, 226 Twitter, 100* Uber, 257 uncertainty see risk and uncertainty The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford, 2005), 130 unemployment and Coase Theorem, 45–7, 64 during Great Depression, 3–4 and Keynesian economics, 4, 5 United Nations, 96 universities auctioning of places, 124, 149–50 incentivization as pervasive, 156 Vietnam War, 56, 198, 200, 249 Villari, Pasquale, 30 Vinci, Leonardo da, 186 Viniar, David, 182, 192 Volkswagen scandal (2016), 2, 151–2 Vonnegut, Kurt, 243–4 voting systems, 72–4, 77, 80, 97 Arrow’s ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’, 81, 82 Arrow’s ‘Universal Domain’, 81, 82 and free marketeers, 79 ‘hanging chads’ in Florida (2000), 121 recount process in UK, 121 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 Waldfogel, Joel, 161* Wanniski, Jude, 232 Watertown Arsenal, Massachusetts, 153–4 Watson Jr, Thomas J., 181 wealth-maximization principle, 57–63 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 63–9 as core principle of current economics, 253 created markets, 65–7 extension of scope of, 124–5 and justice, 55, 57–62, 137 and knee space on planes, 63–4 practical problems with negotiations, 62–3 and values more important than efficiency, 64–5, 66–7 welfare maximization, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 148–9, 176 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173 and vulnerable/powerless people, 146–7, 150 welfare state, 4, 162 Wilson, Charlie, 215 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 186, 188 Wolfenschiessen (Swiss village), 158, 166–7 Woolf, Virginia, 67 World Bank, 96 World Cup football tournament (2010), 133 World Health Organization, 207 Yale Saturday Evening Pest, 4–5 Yellen, Janet, 237 THE BEGINNING Let the conversation begin … Follow the Penguin twitter.com/penguinukbooks Keep up-to-date with all our stories youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Like ‘Penguin Books’ on facebook.com/penguinbooks Listen to Penguin at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover more stories like this at penguin.co.uk ALLEN LANE UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com First published 2019 Copyright © Jonathan Aldred, 2019 The moral right of the author has been asserted Jacket photograph © Getty Images ISBN: 978-0-241-32544-5 This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.


The Global Money Markets by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann, Moorad Choudhry

asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, Dutch auction, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, paper trading, Right to Buy, short selling, stocks for the long run, time value of money, value at risk, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Another spike in the spread is in the fall of 1998. On August 17, Russia devalued its currency, the rouble, and halted payments on its debt obligations. As a result, bond prices fell across-the-board in markets around the world. In the ensuing weeks, reports surfaced that a very large hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, had sustained multibillion dollar losses. On September 23, the hedge fund received an infusion of $3.65 billion in capital from a consortium of investment banks. The rescue was brokered by the Federal Reserve. During this time, investors fled emerging markets’ equity and debt, liquidity in corporate bonds dried up, and money poured into Treasuries.

See also Effective federal funds rate Federal Home Loan Bank System (FHL Bank System), 46, 57–59 discount notes, 58–59 floater, issuance, 104 Federal Home Loan Banks, 58 inverse floater, issuance, 103 Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), 45, 53–57, 154–155, 197 CMOs, 162 dealer group, 53 discount notes, 53 Reference Bills, 54–57 auctions, 54 Federal Housing Authority (FHA), 155, 202 Federal Housing Finance Board, 58 Federal Land Bank Associations, 59 Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), 45, 47–53, 154–155, 197 Benchmark Bills, 47–53 CMOs, 162 discount notes, 47 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), 91 Federal Reserve, 219. See also New York Federal Reserve Bulletin (2001), 93 data series, 93 discontinuation. See Bankers acceptances Open Market Committee, 42 regulations, stipulations, 85 rescue. See Long-Term Capital Management Statistical Release H.15, 35 tightening cycle, 42 320 Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 53 data collection, 68–69 Federal Reserve Banks, 28, 90 Federal Reserve Board, time deposits data series, 86 FGIC, 181 Finance companies, 2 Financial asset, 85 Financial information vendors, 69 Financial institutions, 2–4, 150, 161, 256, 258 debt obligations, 85 Financial market culture, differences, 3 Financial/global crises, 36 Financing rate, 113 First Chicago, 102 First Chicago NBD Corp., 102 First lien.

Treasury bills setting, 223 London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE), 215, 217, 266–267 Long cash, 2 Long futures, 210 position, 210 Long Term Credit Bank, 305 Long-dated assets, 280 Long-dated forward contracts, 232 Longer-dated swaps, 254 Longer-term coupon Treasuries, 33 Long-Term Capital Management, Federal Reserve rescue, 38 Long-term debt, 280 Long-term forward contracts, 232 Long-term liabilities, 280 Long-term loans, 59 Long-term security, 161 Lopez, Jose A., 33 Loss-absorbing characteristics, 299 Maas, Bernard, 76 Macroeconomic climate, settling, 38 Maintenance margin, 211 requirements, 212 Make/take delivery, 28 Makovec, Ian, 81 Malvey, Paul F., 27 Management bills.


pages: 459 words: 118,959

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff by Christine S. Richard

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Blythe Masters, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, electricity market, family office, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, glass ceiling, Greenspan put, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, money market fund, moral hazard, old-boy network, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, statistical model, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, white flight, zero-sum game

MBIA’s guarantee of hundreds of millions of dollars of hospital bonds had been a miscalculation, and it came back to bite the bond insurer at the worst possible time. Russia had recently defaulted on more than $30 billion of debt and severed the ruble’s link to the U.S. dollar. Asia’s year-old currency crisis was morphing into political and social chaos in Indonesia and Malaysia. Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund run by a team of Nobel Prize-winning mathematicians, was unraveling and threatening to take the financial system with it. Almost immediately after the AHERF bankruptcy filing, MBIA sought to reassure investors by stating that it had $75 million of reserves that would be adequate to absorb the loss.

The attorney answered his own question: Investors might start liquidating MBIA-insured debt, and pension plans and retirees could lose huge amounts of money on bonds they thought were triple-A rated. The financial markets, only recently recovered from the upheaval caused by the failure of Long Term Capital Management, could be thrown into turmoil again. They were silent for a few minutes, looking out over the tranquil waterway that winds through Admiral’s Cove and to the nature reserve beyond. “You’re going to go down in the history books,” another of the lawyers suggested. “You’ll be as well known as Lee Harvey Oswald.

Kozlowski, Dennis Kravec, Tamara Kreyssig, Erika Kroll, Zolfo, Cooper Kucinich, Dennis Kynikos Associates LaCrosse Financial Products Laing, Jonathan Lane, Mark Lankler Siffert & Wohl LLP Larkin, Richard Las Colinas business park (Texas) bonds Lay, Ken Lazard Frères & Company Leach, Brian Lebenthal, James Lebenthal & Company Lee, Kewsong Lehman Brothers ARS and bankruptcy of Capital Asset Research Management and CDOs and mortgage crisis and rescue proposals for bond insurers and LeMay, David Leno, Jay Leonard, Sean Leucadia National Corporation Pershing Square, investment in Levenstein, Laura Levy, Leon LexisNexis Lippman, Greg liquidity support, defined Loeb, Dan Long, Christopher Long Beach Mortgage Long Term Capital Management “long-term stand-by purchase commitment,” Farmer Mac’s Lopp, Jim Loreley Purchasing Companies Louisiana State University Lowenstein, Roger Luminent Mortgage Capital Lynch, Peter Lyss, Greg Madison, William A. Mad Money Madoff, Bernie Maher brothers Maher Terminals Mahoney, Chris Malakoff, Michael Malvey, Jack Mantello, Frank Marcu, Aaron advice to Ackman re NYS attorney general’s office background of Margin of Safety: Risk Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor (Klarman) Markopolos, Harry mark-to-market ACA Capital and Ambac and Gotham Partners / Ackman and MBIA and Pershing Square / Ackman and Marshall Club Martin Act Mason, Joe Massie, Jerry Masters, Blythe Mattress Discounters Maxwell House Coffee Mayer, Rafael MBIA AHERF bankruptcy/ reinsurance Ambac and annual reports ARS and Barron’s and Buffett comments on Buffett rumor business described Capital Asset Research Management “Caulis Negris” (“Black Hole”) deal CDOs and CDSs and Channel Reinsurance Congress and downgraded Fitch Ratings and future of GICs and Gotham Partners / Ackman and Grady County (Oklahoma) bonds and Hurricane Katrina and Is MBIA Triple-A?


pages: 403 words: 119,206

Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, stocks for the long run, the market place, transaction costs

Because there is no date-certain when the mispricing will resolve itself, the arb is forced to abandon his strategy. In this way, the behavioralists claim, the arbitrage mechanism breaks down, allowing inefficient market pricing to persist. A high-profile example cited by the behavioralists as a failure of arbitrage can be found in the stunning collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998. LTCM was a “hedge fund” designed to take advantage, on a massive scale, of worldwide mispricings between securities. The term “hedge fund” is derived from the notion that such funds both buy and sell short securities, theoretically insulating, or “hedging,” themselves from general market moves.

Electric Boat Electronic Data Systems (EDS) emerging growth stocks Emerson Corporation Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA; 1974) employee stock purchase plans England, central banks of Enterprise Fund Erie Railroad excess-profit taxes exchange rates Fairchild Camera Fairmont Foods Fall, Albert Fama, Eugene Farley, John M. (archbishop of New York) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Federal Reserve System; anti-inflationary policy of; and bull market of 1920s; and bull market of 1990s; and collapse of Long Term Capital Management; computer models of crashes devised by; and crash of 1929; and crash of 1987; creation of; European central banks and; during Great Depression; Greenspan appointed chairman of; Hoover and; margin requirements of; “October Massacre” precipitated by; Open Market Investment Committee; in postwar era; and silver crisis of 1980; Volker appointed chairman of; during World War I Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Fenner & Beane Fidelity; Capital Fund; Magellan Fund; Trend Fund Financial Analysts Journal First National Bank of Chicago First National City Bank First Pennsylvania Bank Fischer, Irving Fischer, Lawrence Fisher Body Fisk, Jim fixed-income securities; see also bonds Forbes magazine Ford Motor Company Fortune magazine 401(k) plans France, Bank of Frick, Henry Clay Friedman, Milton Friend, Irwin Fulbright, J.

Lawson, Thomas Lazard Frères Lee, Robert E. Leland, Hayne Leland, John leveraging Levine, Dennis Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Liberty Bonds Life magazine Lincoln Trust Lipper, Arthur, & Company Little, Jacob Livermore, Jesse loads, mutual fund Loeb, Gerald London School of Economics Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund Lorie, James Los Angeles City College Louisville & Nashville Railroad Lynch, Edmund Lynch, Peter Magazine of Wall Street MaGee, John Mammoth Oil Management Science magazine Manhattan Fund margin investing; Federal Reserve requirements for market efficiency; see also efficient market theory “market makers,” Markowitz, Harry Martin, William McChesney Massachusetts General Hospital Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Mates, Fred May Day reforms McCabe, Thomas McDonald, David McKinley, William McLean, John Means, Gardiner C.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

Bubble bounces back,’ New York Observer, Sept. 7, 2011. 4 See an interesting discussion by Steven Malliaris and Hongjun Yan of the Yale School of Management: ‘Nickels versus black swans: reputation, trading strategies and asset prices,’ March 2009. Document available online via www.ssrn.com. Also see Reuters, ‘Nickels and black swans,’ May 26, 2009. 5 ‘Many unhappy returns,’ The Economist, Aug. 20, 2011. 6 Roger Lowenstein, ‘Long-Term Capital Management: it’s a short-term memory,’ New York Times, Sept. 6, 2008. See also ‘The story of Long-Term Capital Management,’ Canadian Investment Review, Winter 1999, accessible via www.investmentreview.com. 7 Alternative payment models could be envisaged. See e.g. Larry Harris, ‘Pay the rating agencies according to results,’ Financial Times, June 3, 2010. 8 Rupert Neate, ‘Ratings agencies suffer “conflict of interest”, says former Moody’s boss,’ Guardian, Aug. 22, 2011. 9 Gillian Tett, ‘Rating agencies in a bind as pressures mount,’ Financial Times, Dec. 16, 2010. 10 ‘One non-default Greek rating enough for ECB – report,’ Reuters, July 5, 2011. 11 Financial Stability Board, ‘Principles for reducing reliance on CRA ratings,’ Oct, 2010. 12 Andrew Ross Sorkin, ‘Revolving door at S.E.C. is hurdle to crisis cleanup,’ New York Times, Aug. 1, 2011. 13 George Packer, ‘A dirty business,’ New Yorker, June 27, 2011. 14 Project on Government Oversight, ‘Revolving regulators: SEC faces ethical challenges with revolving door,’ May 2011, www.pogo.org. 15 Arthur Levitt, Take on the Street (Random House, 2002), p. 236. 16 Jean Eaglesham and Victoria McGrane, ‘Budget rift at CFTC pulls plug on alarm,’ Wall Street Journal, Feb. 25, 2011. 17 Sewell Chan and Eric Dash, ‘Financial crisis inquiry wrestles with setbacks,’ New York Times, April 5, 2010. 18 Chan and Dash, ‘Financial crisis inquiry wrestles with setbacks.’ 19 John King, ‘Starr investigation costs just shy of $30 million,’ CNN, April 1, 1998. 20 ‘NASA puts cost of shuttle inquiry, cleanup at $400 million,’ Los Angeles Times, Sept. 12, 2003. 21 IMF, ‘Fiscal implications of the global economic and financial crisis,’ June 2009. 22 Andrew Haldane, ‘The $100 billion question,’ Bank of England, March 2010. 23 See www.planetponzi.com. 24 Transcribed from YouTube video, ‘2010-11-09 Greenspan Admission,’ or enter: www.youtube.com/watch?

The overall, average result, however, conceals the danger lurking at the fringes. Poorly designed performance fees, or even well-designed fee structures applied by idiots, can cause immense harm by encouraging high-risk, high-reward strategies which may be directly contrary to investors’ interests. The poster-child for irresponsible risk-taking was Long-Term Capital Management, which failed in 1998 under a senior management too impressed by its own academic excellence. Unfortunately, the real world is no respecter of academic reputations. The firm took on too much debt and bet the proceeds with too little thought for what might happen if things didn’t turn out as expected.


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

If this example strikes you as partisan, you might prefer to consider the super-intelligent Kremlinites who thought it was a good idea for the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan but instead helped to hasten the demise of their own empire. Or, forgetting about war, consider the two Nobel-prize-winning economists who helped to found the riskfree hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management but were unable to anticipate the downturns in the East Asian and then Russian economies that led to the fund's collapse in 1998 after it incurred a loss of $4 billion, or the brilliant systems dynamics theoretical structure developed for complicated technology design environments by Jay Forrester at the MIT Sloan School of Management that was then applied to urban systems, where it has generally failed; or the distributed cognitive network of bankers and corporate investors that gave mortgages to millions of people who might not be able to pay them back because, after all, housing prices could never go down!

., 101, 173 Kondratieff waves, 79ff, 192 Koniggriitz, Battle of, 75, 76 Krishna, 119 Kurzweil, Ro, 8, 18,68 Kyoto Protocol, 67, 109, 111, 193 Land mines, 150 Las Vegas, 152 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 89 Leopold, Ao, 181 Libertarian approach to human enhancement,21ff 220 Index Lindblom, c., 93 Long-Term Capital Management,92 "Long waves" of innovation, 79££ Maginot Line, 135 Malaria, 47££, 53 Malaysia, 139 Maoism, 31, 121 Marlboro Man, 135 Marne, Battle of, 76 Marxism, 110, 114, 121, 172 Marx, K., 64, 70, 173 Maslow, A., 33 McKibben,~.,21, 101 McKinsey & Company, 49 McNeill, ]. R., 80 Medical Journal of Australia, 122 Memory-enhancing pharmaceuticals, 113 Mexico, 125, 133 Microsoft, 173 Millenarian utopianism, 120 Modafinil, 24 Moltke, H. von, 75, 105, 106 Money, 80, 81 Moravec, H., 8, 18 Mumford, L., 33, 36, 45 Mutually assured destruction, in cyberspace, 140 Nanotechnology, 8, 80, 178 National Institute of Health, 89 National Science Foundation, 8, 89,90 Natural Born Cyborgs, 9 Nature, as sacred, 100ff Nature's Metropolis, 115 Nazi Germany, 22, 31,121,131 Needle gun, 75 Negligible senescence, engineered,82 Neoconservatives, 91, 110 Neuropharmaceuticals, 3, 18, 24,88,95 New Atlantis, 18 New Jerusalem, 11, 77, 78 New Scientist, 122, 124 Newton, I., 101, 173, 179 Nitrogen cycle, 10, 110, 192 Noble, D., 18 Notice-and-comment rulemaking, 165 Nuclear power, 174ff Nuclear winter, 67, 78 Occupational health and safety, 52 Office of Naval Research, 89 Olympic Games, 3, 4 Oppenheimer,].


pages: 295 words: 66,824

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

They can short-sell, buy on margin, use various other sorts of leverage, or engage in complicated arbitrage (the near simultaneous buying and selling of the same stock, bond, commodity, or anything else, in order to profit from tiny price discrepancies). They’re called “hedge funds” because many of them try to minimize the risks of wealthy investors. Others fail to hedge their bets at all. A prime example of the latter is the collapse in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, two of whose founding partners, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, were the aforementioned Nobel prize winners who, together with Fischer Black, derived the celebrated formula for pricing options. Despite the presence of such seminal thinkers on the board of LTCM, the debacle roiled the world’s financial markets and, had not emergency measures been enacted, might have seriously damaged them.

Petersburg paradox ultimatum games WorldCom board game Gans, Herbert Gates, Bill geometric mean illustrated by IPO purchases/sales rate of return “ghosts,” investors Gilder, George Gilovich, Thomas Godel, Kurt Goethe golden ratio Goodman, Nelson gossip Gould, Steven Jay Graham, Benjamin Greek mathematics Greenspan, Alan impact on stock and bond markets on irrational exuberance of investors growth investing vs. value investing growth stocks Grubman, Jack guessing games guilt and despair over market losses Hart, Sergiu “head and shoulders” pattern hedge funds herd-like nature, of stock market Hill, Ted How Nature Works (Bak) How We Know What Isn’t So (Gilovich) “The Imp in the Bottle” (Stevenson) In Search of Excellence (Peters) incompleteness theorem of mathematical logic index funds Efficient market theorists investing in as safe investment inflationary universe hypothesis Innumeracy (Paulos) insider trading attraction of stock manipulation by unexplained price movements and Institutional Investor insurance company example, expected value insurance put options interest rates, market predictability and internal rate of return Internet diameter (or interconnectedness) of “flocking effect,” as network of associations investment clubs investment strategies. see also predictability, of stock market based on Parrondo’s paradox contrarian investing dogs of the Dow fundamental analysis. see fundamental analysis momentum investing secrecy and value investing. see value investing investments. see also margin investments confirmation bias and considering utility of dollars invested vs. dollars themselves counter-intuitive emotions dictating guilt and despair over losses ignoring uniformity of positive ratings protective measures randomness vs. predictability and rumors and safe windfall money and investors. see also traders behavior as nonlinear systems beliefs of impact Efficient Market Hypothesis “blow up” and becoming “ghosts,” buying/selling puts on S&P common knowledge and gauging investors as important as gauging investments irrational exuberance/irrational despair online trading and price oscillation created by investor reactions to each other self description in bear and bull markets short-term IPOs alternative rates of return from as a pyramid scheme Salomon Smith Barney benefitting illegally from stock market in 1990s and strategy for buying and selling Jegadeesh, Narsimhan Jeong, Hawoong Judgment Under Uncertainty (Tversky, Kahneman, and Slovic) Kahneman, Daniel Keynes, John Maynard Kolmogorov, A. N. Kozlowski, Dennis Kraus, Karl Krauthammer, Charles Kudlow, Larry Lakonishok, Josef Landsburg, Steven Lay, Ken LeBaron, Blake Lefevre, Edwin Leibweber, David linguistics, power law and Lo, Andrew logistic curve lognormal distribution Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) losing through winning loss aversion lotteries present value and as tax on stupidity Lynch, Peter MacKinlay, Craig mad money Malkiel, Burton management, manipulating stock prices Mandelbrot, Benoit margin calls margin investments buying on the margin as investment type margin calls selling on the margin market makers decimalization and World Class Options Market Maker (WCOMM) Markowitz, Harry mathematics, generally Greek movies and plays about outguessing the average guess risk and stock markets and Mathews, Eddie “maximization of expected value” principle mean value. see also expected value arithmetic mean deviation from the mean geometric mean regression to the mean using interchangeably with expected value media celebrities and crisis mentality and impact on market volatility median rate of return Merrill Lynch Merton, Robert mnemonic rules momentum investing money, categorizing into mental accounts Morgenson, Gretchen Motley Fool contrarian investment strategy PEG ratio and moving averages complications with evidence supporting example of generating buy-sell rules from getting the big picture with irrelevant in efficient market phlegmatic nature of mu (m) multifractal forgeries mutual funds expert picks and hedge funds index funds politically incorrect rationale for socially regressive funds mutual knowledge, contrasted with common knowledge Nash equilibrium Nash, John Neff, John negatively correlated stocks as basis of mutual fund selection as basis of stock selection stock portfolios and networks Internet as example of price movements and six degrees of separation and A New Kind of Science (Wolfram) Newcomb, Simon Newcombe, William Newcombe’s paradox Niederhoffer, Victor Nigrini, Mark nominal value A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street (Lo and MacKinlay) nonlinear systems billiards example “butterfly effect” or sensitive dependence of chaos theory and fractals and investor behavior and normal distribution Nozick, Robert numbers anchoring effect Benford’s Law and Fibonacci numbers and off-shore entities, Enron Once Upon a Number (Paulos) online chatrooms online trading optimal portfolio balancing with risk-free portfolio Markowitz efficient frontier of options. see stock options Ormerod, Paul O’Shaughnessy, James P/B (price-to-book) ratio P/E ratio interpreting measuring future earnings expectations PEG variation on stock valuation and P/S (price to sales) ratio paradoxes Efficient Market Hypothesis and examples of Newcombe’s paradox Parrondo’s paradox St.


pages: 267 words: 71,123

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Nor was the savings and loan mess the only signal that deregulation was more dangerous than its advocates let on. In the early 1990s there were major problems at big commercial banks, Citi in particular, because they had overextended themselves in lending to commercial real estate developers. In 1998, with much of the emerging world in financial crisis, the failure of a single hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, froze financial markets in much the same way that the failure of Lehman Brothers would freeze markets a decade later. An ad hoc rescue cobbled together by Federal Reserve officials averted disaster in 1998, but the event should have served as a warning, an object lesson in the dangers of out-of-control finance.

., 200 liberals, 89 liquidationists, 204–5 liquidity, 33 euro and, 182–84, 185 returns vs., 57 liquidity traps, 135–36, 137, 138, 143, 144 in depression of 2008–, 32–34, 38, 51, 136, 155, 163 money supply and, 152, 155 unemployment and, 33, 51, 152 Lizza, Ryan, 125 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) failure, 69 Lucas, Robert, 91–92, 102, 107 Lucas project, 102, 103 macroeconomics, 91–92, 227, 231 “dark age” of, 92 “freshwater,” 101–3, 110–11 “real business cycle” theory in, 103 “saltwater,” 101, 103–4 magneto trouble, Keynes’s analogy of, 22, 23, 35–36 Mankiw, N.


pages: 250 words: 64,011

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day by John H. Johnson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, Black Swan, business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, obamacare, p-value, PageRank, pattern recognition, publication bias, QR code, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, statistical model, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons, Yogi Berra

As a Bloomberg Business headline noted, “Hedge Funds Trail Stocks for Fifth Year with 7.4% Return.”32 This may be a classic case of cherry picking, however, as looking at other time periods produces very different results—including a Wall Street Journal article that noted, “Over the past 15 years, [hedge funds’] returns have beaten the overall stock market.”33 And, to be fair, outperforming the S&P 500 (a constantly changing list of approximately 500 stocks) in terms of nominal returns may not be the goal of all hedge funds, as Berger and others have noted. Rather, the ultimate objective is often to provide the best risk-adjusted returns—a measure that factors in the risk that was taken in order to achieve the returns. Although sometimes, the predictions are off. In one classic example, hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) “lost $4.4 billion of its $4.7 billion in capital” in less than one year, in part due to spreads that didn’t converge as predicted.34 Regardless of their performance, hedge funds sometimes get a bad rap because of the salaries that some hedge fund managers earn. Institutional Investor’s Alpha publishes an annual “rich list” in which it estimates the earnings of the top managers.

Rob Copeland and Gregory Zuckerman, “How Individual Investors Can Invest Like a Hedge Fund,” Wall Street Journal website, August 3, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-individual-investors-can-invest-like-a-hedge-fund-1407106285. 34. Stephanie Yang, “The Epic Story of How a ’Genius’ Hedge Fund Almost Caused a Global Financial Meltdown,” July 10, 2014, Business Insider website, http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fall-of-long-term-capital-management-2014-7#ixzz3kjpsJKfl. 35. Stephen Taub, “The 2015 Rich List: The Highest Earning Hedge Fund Managers of the Past Year,” Institutional Investor’s Alpha website, May 5, 2015, http://www.institutionalinvestorsalpha.com/Article/3450284/The-2015-Rich-List-The-Highest-Earning-Hedge-Fund-Managers-of-the-Past-Year.html. 36.


The Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk by William J. Bernstein

asset allocation, backtesting, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, p-value, passive investing, prediction markets, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, the scientific method, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

In practice, however, both variance and semivariance yield very similar results,and variance/standard deviation is still an excellent measure of risk. In fact, simple variance/SD has the additional advantage of giving you two chances of catching excessive volatility. In the recent notorious case of Long Term Capital Management, the firm did not develop a significantly negative semivariance until shortly before bankruptcy. Simple calculation of the plain-vanilla SD/variance of monthly returns would have warned of trouble years before the ottoman hit the fan. There are nearly as many definitions of risk as there are finance academics.

.): of small-company stocks, 101, 102, 148–149 theoretical advantage of, 95–96 Inflation, and real return, 80, 168 Institutional investors: evaluation of, 123–124 market-impact costs and, 86–90, 91–92, 96 pension funds, 103 persistence of investment performance, 90 small investors versus, 59–61 (See also Benchmarking; Mutual funds) Intelligent Investor, The (Graham), 106, 176–177 International diversification: case against, 72 correlation and, 46–53, 72–73 with small stocks, 74–75 sovereign risk and, 72 Inverse correlation, 31, 37 Investment climate, 124–127 Investment Company Institute, 103 Investment fraud, 4 Investment newsletters, 104–105 January effect, 92–94 Japanese bonds, 152 Japanese stocks, 19, 20, 25, 38, 39, 40, 48, 55, 56, 57, 59, 160 Jensen, Michael, 86 Jorion, Phillipe, 49–50 Keynes, John Maynard, 18 Lakonishok, Josef, 120 Large-company stocks, 13 indexing advantage with, 96, 97–98 small-company stocks versus, 53–55, 75 Law of diminishing returns, 76 Lehman Long Bond Index, 162 Local return, 133 Long Term Capital Management, 7 Mackay, Charles, 178 Malkiel, Burton, 101–102, 109, 175 Market capitalization, 13 Market efficiency, 85–110 expenses of funds and, 90–92, 96, 146 indexing and, 94–101 investment newsletters and, 104–105 January effect, 92–94 market-impact costs and, 88–90, 91–92, 96 and persistence of investment performance, 85–88 random walk and, 101, 106–108 rebalancing and, 108–109 survivorship bias and, 101–102 taxes and, 102–103 Market-impact costs: extent of, 91, 92, 96 illustration of, 88–90 Market multiple (See P/E ratio) Market risk premium, 121, 122 Market timing, 104–105, 160 Market valuation, 111–115, 163–164, 174 Markowitz, Harry, 64–65, 71, 177–178 Maximum-return portfolios, 69 Mean reversion, 70, 107, 109 Mean-variance analysis, 44–45, 64–71, 181–182 Mean-variance optimizers (MVOs), 64–71, 181–182 Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Mackay), 178 Miller, Paul, 115 Minimum-variance portfolios, 65–69 Momentum investing, 101, 108, 109, 123 Money managers (See Institutional investors; Mutual funds) Money market, standard deviation of annual returns, 6 Morgan-Stanley Capital Indexes, 19–20, 133, 149 Index Morningstar: long-term returns, 21 Principia database, 61, 96–97, 101–102, 120, 163–164, 177 standard deviation and, 6, 19 MSCI World Index, 162 Multiple (See P/E ratio) Multiple-asset portfolios, 29–40 coin toss and, 36 correlation in, 36–40 diversification and, 31–36 simple portfolios versus, 31–36 Multiple change, 24 Mutual funds: asset-allocation, 162–164 bond, 151–152 exchange traded (ETFs), 149–151 expenses of, 90–92, 96, 146 hedging, 135 indexing with, 145–151, 174 standard deviation and, 6 supermarkets, 148 turnover of, 130–131 Vanguard Group, 97–100, 146–148, 149, 150, 152, 156, 161–163 MVOPlus, 65–71, 181–182 National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (NAREIT), 21 Negative correlation, 31, 37 New era of investing: components of, 124–127 Glassman-Hassett model and, 127–132 New Finance: the Case Against Efficient Markets (Haugen), 119, 176 Newsletters, investment, 104–105 Nonsystematic risk, 12–13 Normal distribution, 7 Oakmark Fund, 88–90 Optimal asset allocation, 63–83 asset-allocation funds in, 162–164 asset classes in, 76–78 calculation of, 64–71 conventionality and, 78–79 203 Optimal asset allocation (Cont.): correlation coefficients, 71–74 international diversification with small stocks, 74–75 risk tolerance and, 79–80, 143 three-step approach to, 75–83 Out of sample, 87 Overbalancing, 138 Overconfidence, 139–140 P/B ratio (See Book value) P/E ratio: data on ranges of, 113, 114 earnings yield as reverse of, 119 in new era of investing, 124 in value investing, 112, 119–120 Pacific Rim stocks, 19, 20, 21, 25, 55–59, 147, 156 Pension funds, 103 (See also Institutional investors) Perfectly reasonable price (PRP), 127–128 Performance measurement: alpha in, 89–90, 98 three-factor model in, 123–124 (See also Benchmarking) Perold, Andre, 141 Persistence of performance, 85–88 Peters, Tom, 118 Piscataqua Research, 103 Policy allocation, 59 Portfolio insurance, 141 Portfolio Selection (Markowitz), 177–178 Precious metals stocks, 19–20, 21, 48, 55, 57, 59 Price, Michael, 162 Professional investors (See Institutional investors) Prudent man test, 60 Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Malkiel), 101–102, 175 Random walk theory, 106–108, 119 positive autocorrelation and, 106–108 204 Index Random walk theory (Cont.): random walk defined, 106 rebalancing and, 109 Raskob, John J., 16–17 Real estate investment trusts (REITs), 38, 40, 100, 145 defined, 19 index fund, 148 returns on, 19, 21, 25 Real return, 26, 80, 168, 170 Rebalancing: frequency of, 108–109 importance of, 32–33, 35–36, 59, 63, 174 and mean-variance optimizer (MVO), 65 overbalancing in, 138 random walk theory and, 109 rebalancing bonus, 74, 159–160 of tax-sheltered accounts, 159–160 of taxable accounts, 160–161 Recency effects, 47–48, 52, 53, 58–59, 140–141 Regression analysis, 89–90 Reinvestment risk, 23 Representativeness, 118 Research expenses, 92, 95 Residual return, 98 Retirement, 165–172 asset allocation for, 153–154 duration risk and, 165–167 shortfall risk and, 167–172 (See also Tax-sheltered accounts) Return: annualized, 2–3, 5 average, 2–3 coin toss and, 1–5 company size and, 116–117 correlation between risk and, 21 dividend discount method, 23–24, 26, 127–132 efficient frontier and, 55–58 expected investment, 26 historical, problems with, 21–27 Return (Cont.): impact of diversification on, 31–36, 63 market, 168 real, 26, 80, 168, 170 return and risk plot, 31–36, 41–45 risk and high, 18 uncorrelated, 29–31 variation in, 116–117 Risk: common stock, 1–5 correlation between return and, 21 currency, 132–137 duration, 165–167 efficient frontier and, 55–58 excess, 12–13 high returns and, 18 impact of diversification on, 31–36, 63 nonsystematic, 12–13 reinvestment, 23 return and risk plot, 31–36, 41–45 shortfall, 167–172 sovereign, 72 systematic, 13 (See also Standard deviation) Risk aversion myopia, 141–142 Risk dilution, 45–46 Risk-free investments, 10, 15, 152 Risk-free rate, 121 Risk time horizon, 130, 131, 143–144, 167 Risk tolerance, 79–80, 143 Roth IRA, 172 Rukeyser, Lou, 174 Rule of 72, 27 Sanborn, Robert, 88–90 Securities Act of 1933, 92–93 Security Analysis (Graham and Dodd), 93, 118, 125, 176 Selling forward, 132–133 Semivariance, 7 Sharpe, William, 141 Shortfall risk, 167–172 Siegel, Jeremy, 19, 136 Index Simple portfolios, 31–36 Sinquefield, Rex, 148 Small-cap premium, 53, 121, 122 Small-company stocks, 13–16, 25 correlation with large-company stocks, 53–55 efficient frontier and, 55–59 indexing, 101, 102, 148–149 international diversification with, 74–75 January effect and, 92–94 large-company stocks versus, 53–55, 75 “lottery ticket” premium and, 127 tracking error of, 75 Small investors, institutional investors versus, 59–61 Solnik, Bruno, 72 Sovereign risk, 72 S&P 500, 13, 38, 39, 55 as benchmark, 60, 78, 79, 80, 86, 88–89, 145 efficient frontier, 56–57 Spiders (SPDRS), 149 Spot rate, 135 Spread, 91, 92, 93, 96 Standard deviation, 5–8 defined, 6, 63 limitations of, 7 of manager returns, 96 in mean-variance analysis, 65 Standard error (SE), 87 Standard normal cumulative distribution function, 7 Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation (Ibbotson Associates), 9–10, 41–42, 178 Stocks for the Long Run (Siegel), 19, 136 Strategic asset allocation, 58–59 Survivorship bias, 101–102 Systematic risk, 13 t distribution function, 87 Tax-sheltered accounts: asset allocation for, 153–154 rebalancing, 108–109, 159–160 (See also Retirement accounts) 205 Taxable accounts: asset allocation for, 153–154 rebalancing, 160–161 Taxes: in asset allocation strategy, 145 capital gains capture, 102, 108 foreign tax credits, 161 market efficiency and, 102–103 Technological change: historical, impact of, 125 in new era of investing, 125 Templeton, John, 164 Thaler, Richard, 131, 142 Three-factor model (Fama and French), 120–124 Time horizon, 130, 131, 143–144, 167 Tracking error: defined, 75 determining tolerance for, 83, 145 of small-company stocks, 75 of various equity mixes, 79 Treasury bills: 1926–1998, 10–11 returns on, 25–26 as risk-free investments, 10, 15, 152 Treasury bonds: 1926–1998, 11–13, 42–45 ladders, 152 Treasury Inflation Protected Security (TIPS), 80, 131–132, 172 Treasury notes, 11 Turnover, 95, 102, 130–131, 145 Tweedy, Browne, 148–149, 162, 176 Utility functions, 7 Value averaging, 155–159 Value Averaging (Edleson), 176 Value index funds, 145 Value investing, 77, 111–124 defined, 118 growth investing versus, 117, 118–120 measures used in, 112–114 studies on, 115–118 three-factor model of, 120–124 Value premium, 121–123 206 Index VanEck Gold Fund, 21 Vanguard Group, 97–100, 146–148, 149, 150, 152, 156, 161–163 Variance, 7, 108–109 mean-variance analysis, 44–45, 64–71, 181–182 minimum-variance portfolios, 65–69 Variance drag, 69 Walz, Daniel T., 169 Websites, 178–180 Wilkinson, David, 56, 57, 181–182 Williams, John Burr, 127 Wilshire Associates, 120, 147, 162 World Equity Benchmark Securities (WEBS), 149–151 z values, 87 Zero correlation, 31 About the Author William Bernstein, Ph.D, M.D., is a practicing neurologist in Oregon.


pages: 305 words: 69,216

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression by Richard A. Posner

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, equity premium, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, very high income

There had been many other warnings as well, especially after Bear Stearns' collapse in March 2008, and, almost a year earlier, after two mortgage hedge funds operated by Bear Sterns and three by the French bank BNP Paribas collapsed. The biggest warning sign of all had appeared much earlier—when Long-Term Capital Management faltered in 1998, was taken over by its creditors in a deal arranged by the Federal Reserve, and then expired. LTCM was a highly leveraged hedge fund that as a result of heavy trading in derivatives (securities based on other securities, such as futures contracts, options, and swaps) was entwined with other financial firms all over the world, just like Lehman Brothers.

Greenspan's tremendous prestige gave him a largely free hand, which he did not use, to choke off the housing bubble by raising interest rates and to rein in risky lending by exercising more assertively the control that the Federal Reserve has over commercial banks. He thought he could avoid political controversy by waiting for bubbles to form and pop and cleaning up afterward by lowering interest rates. He was the prisoner of past successes— the strategy had worked when Long-Term Capital Management collapsed in 1998, when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, and when the stock market dipped as a result of the 9/11 attacks. But each flood of money into the economy set the stage for the next bubble, while at the same time lulling the business community into believing that the Federal Reserve would always assure a soft landing from a burst bubble by a timely reduction in interest rates.


pages: 363 words: 28,546

Portfolio Design: A Modern Approach to Asset Allocation by R. Marston

asset allocation, Bob Litterman, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carried interest, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, German hyperinflation, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, inventory management, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, passive investing, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

But when Russia defaulted on its bonds, there was a reassessment of risk worldwide. Spreads on bonds widened sharply both in the emerging bond markets and in the high-yield U.S. bond market (for so-called junk bonds). The most dramatic effect of this reassessment of risks was the collapse of Long-term Capital Management, which had to be rescued by the major investment banks in September 1998. The Argentine crisis began as early as 2000 when the long-established peg to the U.S. dollar began to be seriously questioned. In the early 1990s, the Argentine government had established a currency board to permanently fix the peso to the dollar.15 Argentine inflation, which had soared more than 1000 percent in the late 1980s, almost completely disappeared with this peg.

The market simply did not believe that Italy could satisfy all of the conditions for the union, and therefore a huge interest rate premium was required to induce investors to buy Italian bonds.6 In particular, there was skepticism that the Italian government could bring its fiscal deficit down from more than 9 percent of GDP in 1995 to 3 percent of GDP as required by the Treaty. Some hedge funds, notably Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), believed otherwise. These funds trusted that Italy would do whatever was necessary to qualify for the union by the end of 1997. So these funds bought Italian bonds. To hedge their positions and ensure market neutrality, they simultaneously borrowed and sold short German bonds (or equivalent derivatives).

Kenessey, Allan Heston, and Robert Summers, 1975, A System of International Comparisons of Gross Product and Purchasing Power. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Lerner, Josh, 2007, “Yale University Investments Office: August 2006,” HBS Case Study 9-807-073, revised May 8, 2007. Lowenstein, Roger, 2000, When Genius Failed: the Rise and Fall of Long-term Capital Management, Random House. Malkiel, Burton G., and Atanu Saha, 2004, “Hedge Funds: Risk and Return,” working paper. Malkiel, Burton G., and Atanu Saha, 2005, “Hedge Funds: Risk and Return,” Financial Analyst Journal, (November/December), 80–88. Markowitz, Harry, 1952, “Portfolio Selection,” Journal of Finance (March), pp. 77–91.


pages: 272 words: 19,172

Hedge Fund Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Edward Thorp, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Flash crash, global macro, hindsight bias, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jones Act, legacy carrier, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, oil shock, pattern recognition, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, systematic trading, technology bubble, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

See also Financial bubble of 2005–2007 Insurance Auto Auctions (IAAI) Intrinsic value Investment misconceptions Investors, pleasing James, Bill Jones, Paul Tudor Kassouf, Sheen Kellogg, Peter Kelly criterion Key3Media Keynes, John Maynard Kimmell, Emmanuel Klein, Joel Kovner, Bruce LEAPS Ledley, Charlie Lehman Brothers Lewis, Michael Liquidity vs. solvency The Little Book That Beats the Market (Greenblatt) Long, Simon Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) Long-term cycles LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) Macro outlook Madoff, Bernard Mai, Jamie Brazilian interest-rate trade investment strategy pillars subprime mortgages/bonds Manager selection Manalapan Oracle Capital Management Market behavior Marriott Mean reversion Measurement Specialties Merger arbitrage Micron Technology Milken, Michael Mistakes, learning from Mobius, Mark Monthly returns Mortgage-backed securities (MBSs).

One reason I like macro so much is because I am a small fish swimming in a sea of real money. Fundamentals matter. I am not playing a game against people like me. That would be a zero-sum, difficult game. Does there have to be an identifiable reason for every trade? Not necessarily. For example, before the 1998 financial crisis began, I didn’t even know who LTCM was. Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was the most famous hedge fund failure in history. (Madoff may have been even more prominent, but his operation was a Ponzi scheme rather than a hedge fund. Madoff simply made up performance results and never did any trading.) In its first four years of operation, LTCM generated steady profits, quadrupling the starting net asset value.

See also Greenblatt, Joel Graham, Ben Grantham, Jeremy Great Depression Greenblatt, Joel on education reform Magic Formula Value and Special Situation Investing course Value Investors Club Halcyon Investments Hand, Eddie Hedge funds Banyan Equity Management (see also Benedict, Larry) Baring Asset Management BlueCrest (see Platt, Michael) Bridgewater (see Dalio, Ray) Denali Asset Management (see Ramsey, Scott) Gotham Capital (see also Greenblatt, Joel) LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) Manalapan Oracle Capital Management (see also Vidich, Joe) Nevsky Fund (see also Taylor, Martin) Omni Global Fund (see Clark, Steve) Princeton Newport Partners (PNP) (see Thorp, Edward) Ridgeline Partners High-conviction trades Hockett, Ben Horizon Lines Host Marriott House, Gerry Housing bubble.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

As a conservative, risk-averse investor, I had intentionally placed all of our securities in Bear Stearns cash accounts that were fully owned by our fund. I knew that borrowing money and investing on margin can be catastrophic since a brokerage firm can then take control of the assets in a margin account and sell them at the worst possible moment. This is effectively what had happened years earlier to Long-Term Capital Management. I had been maniacally focused on avoiding such risks, acutely aware that I needed to protect our assets, and I didn’t have a single cent of leverage or debt—either personally or in the fund. Bear Stearns was simply our custodian, which meant that our cash accounts were theoretically not vulnerable at all.

Morgan, 6–7, 30 Jacobs, Ian, 182 Jain, Ajit, 61, 176 Jobs, Steve, 131 Journey to the Ants (Hölldobler and Wilson), 104 JPMorgan Chase, 87, 126, 128, 172 K-Swiss, 145 Kahneman, Daniel, 102, 136 Keough, Don, 178 Klarman, Seth, 106, 112 Lasker, Edward, 129–30 Latticework Club, 124, 194 LeDoux, Joseph, 102 Lehman Brothers, 16, 87–9, 91 letter writing campaign, 61–3, 65, 73 letters to shareholders, 91, 93, 149–50, 153. See also annual reports Li Lu, 73, 125–6, 176 Libet, Benjamin, 102 Lichter, John, 59 London Mining PLC, 97–8, 149 Long-Term Capital Management, 86 Lowenstein, Roger, 19, 30, 63, 116, 142 Made in America (Walton), 142 Malone, John, 130 management, rule for talking to, 139–40 Marcus Aurelius, 96 Marinoff, Lou, 192 Marks, Howard, 64 mastermind groups, 52–4, 124, 193–4 mentoring. See modeling habits of successful people Merrill Lynch, 17 Mihaljevic, John, 106, 124, 177, 184 Miller, Bill, 104, 122 mirror neurons, 115 mirroring, 39–40, 74, 113, 115.


pages: 244 words: 79,044

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager by Lars Kroijer

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, family office, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Long Term Capital Management, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, NetJets, new economy, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Hedge funds, it seemed, were very different. I attended classes by Robert Merton, who had just won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in options. Merton was already famous for developing the Black–Scholes–Merton option-pricing formula and was getting even more attention for the phenomenal returns of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) where he was a partner. I knew him well enough to go to his office and ask him about hedge funds. The meeting was inconsequential, as he could only vouch for LTCM, and they were not hiring at the time. LTCM collapsed soon afterwards with multi-billion dollar losses (described in Lowenstein’s excellent book When Genius Failed) and Merton was widely derided as the public face of the failed hedge fund, even though his day-to-day involvement had been limited.

Index Abramovich, Roman Absolute Returns for Kids (ARK) added value, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Africa poverty alleviation projects Aker Yards, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th alpha and beta, 2nd, 3rd AP Fondet arbitrage, merger 2nd asset-stripping assets under management (AUM), 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th background checking bank bailouts 2008–09 Bank of Ireland Bear Stearns Berkeley Square, 2nd, 3rd Berkshire Hathaway Bezos, Jeff Black-Scholes-Merton option-pricing formula Blair, Tony Bloomberg, 2nd bonds corporate, 2nd government, 2nd, 3rd zero-coupon bonuses, 2nd, 3rd British Airways Buffett, Warren Bure burn-out Busson, Arpad capital gross invested, 2nd, 3rd regulatory seed, 2nd capital asset pricing model (CAPM) cascade effect, 2nd cash deposits, 2nd insurance The Children’s Investment Fund Management (TCI) churning Collery, Peter compensation structures, 2nd, 3rd, 4th see also bonuses competitive edge, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Conti, Massimo, 2nd corporate bonds, 2nd correlation, market, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th country indices Credit Suisse, 2nd, 3rd Cuccia, Enrico Dagens Industry debt crises (2011) debt investments derivative trading discounted fees, 2nd discounts to net asset value diversification, 2nd, 3rd, 4th dividends, 2nd early investors edge, competitive, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th efficient market frontier Enskilda Baken entertainment events entrepreneurship, 2nd equity redistribution Eurohedge, 2nd, 3rd European Fund Manager of the Year Award event assessment, 2nd exchange traded funds (ETFs), 2nd, 3rd, 4th expenses firm, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th fund-related, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th family life, 2nd fees see incentive fees; management fees; performance fees Fidelity Financial Times firm costs, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Ford, Tom Fresenius FSA (Financial Services Authority), 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th fundamental value analysis funds of funds, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th futures gearing, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th Gentry, Baker, 2nd, 3rd Goldman Sachs, 2nd government bonds, 2nd, 3rd gross invested capital, 2nd, 3rd Gross, Julian Grosvenor Square HBK Investments, 2nd, 3rd headhunting health, 2nd hedge funds collapse of, 2nd expenses see expenses fees see incentive fees; management fees; performance fees industry growth, 2nd, 3rd mid-cap/large-cap bias nature of operational planning opportunities for young managers ownership structures partnership break-ups short-term performance staff recruitment, 2nd starting up top managers value generated by Henkel herd mentality, 2nd Hohn, Chris holding company discounts incentive fees, 2nd, 3rd, 4th index funds, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th insurance, cash deposit insurance sector, 2nd interviews investor activism Italian finance JP Morgan Keynes, John Maynard Korenvaes, Harlen, 2nd Lage, Alberto, 2nd, 3rd large-cap bias Lazard Frères, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Lebowitz, Larry leverage, 2nd Liechtenstein, Max liquidity London bombings (7 July 2005) long run, 2nd, 3rd long securities Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) Lyle, Dennis Macpherson, Elle managed accounts management fees, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th discounted, 2nd funds of funds, 2nd mutual funds tracker funds Mannesmann market capitalisation, 2nd, 3rd market correlation, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th market exposure, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th market neutrality, 2nd mean variance optimisation Mediobanca merger arbitrage, 2nd Merrill Lynch Merton, Robert mid-cap bias Montgomerie, Colin Morgan Stanley, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th TMT (telecom, media and technology) conferences Morland, Sam, 2nd, 3rd MSCI World index, 2nd, 3rd mutual funds NatWest Nelson, Jake net asset-value (NAV), 2nd Nokia Norden O’Callaghan, Brian, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th Och, Dan oil tanker companies oilrig sector, 2nd options trading out-of-the-money put options ownership structure partnership break-ups pension funds, 2nd performance fees, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Perry, Richard personal networks Philips, David portfolio theory poverty alleviation prime brokerage private jet companies Ramsay, Gordon Rattner, Steve recruitment, 2nd redemption notices regulatory capital returns, 2nd rights issues risk, 2nd, 3rd risk profile, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th Rohatyn, Felix Ronaldo Rosemary Asset Management Rothschild, Mayer Royal Bank of Scotland Rubenstein, David rump (stub) trades salaries see compensation structures Samson, Peter SAS airline SC Fundamental seed capital, 2nd shipping companies short securities short-term performance six-stigma events Smith Capital Partners, 2nd softing special situations stakeholders Standard & Poor’s 500 index, 2nd, 3rd, 4th standard deviation, 2nd, 3rd, 4th star managers Start-up of the Year awards Stern, Dan stub trades Superfos Svantesson, Lennart talent introduction groups tax, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Telefonica Moviles time horizon for investments, 2nd, 3rd Torm Totti, David tracker funds trade commission trade sourcing trade theses US market value investing Vanguard index fund, 2nd VIX index, 2nd Vodafone warrants, 2nd, 3rd Westbank Wien, Byron Wilson, Susan world indices, 2nd zero-coupon bonds Zilli, Aldo PEARSON EDUCATION LIMITED Edinburgh Gate Harlow CM20 2JE Tel: +44 (0)1279 623623 Fax: +44 (0)1279 431059 Website: www.pearson.com/uk First published in Great Britain in 2010 Second edition 2012 Electronic edition published 2012 © Pearson Education Limited 2012 (print) © Pearson Education Limited 2012 (electronic) The right of Lars Kroijer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

But as the sedating effects of the AAA credit rating showed during the mortgage crisis, lulling people into a state of complacency is not. *** AS LO DESCRIBES his megafund idea to me, a head pokes around the door to ask if he wants to grab some lunch. The head belongs to Robert Merton, one of the people who enabled the derivatives market to explode and a former director of Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund whose geniuses failed in 1998. But when you meet Merton, the thing that comes across most strongly is that he is a car nut. His conversation is peppered with analogies from the automobile industry. Discussing the adjustable-rate mortgage, whose interest rate jumps up and down and exposes home owners to the risk of sudden leaps in their payments, he compares it to “General Motors developing the one-door car because it suits the car firm.”

., 32 Keys, Benjamin, 48 Kharroubi, Enisse, 79 Kickstarter, 172 King, Stephen, 99 Klein, David, 182 Krugman, Paul, xv Lahoud, Sal, 166 Lang, Luke, 153, 161–162 Laplanche, Renaud, 179, 184, 188, 190, 193–194, 196–197 Latency, 53 Law of large numbers, 17 Layering, 57 Left-digit bias, 46 Lehman Brothers, x, 44, 65 Lending direct, 84 marketplace, 184 payday, 200 relationship-based, 11, 151, 206–208 secured, xiv, 76 unsecured, 206 See also Loans; Peer-to-peer lending Lending Club, 172, 179–180, 182–184, 187, 189, 194–195, 197 Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci), 19 Lerner, Josh, 59 Lethal pandemic, risk-modeling for demographic profile, 230 exceedance-probability curve, 231–232, 232 figure 3 historical data, 228–229 infectiousness and virulence, 229–230 location of outbreak, 230–231 Leverage, 51, 70–71, 80, 186, 188 Leverage ratio, 76–77 Lewis, Michael, 57 Liber Abaci or Book of Calculation (Fibonacci), 19 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 41 Liebman, Jeffrey, 98 Life expectancy government reaction to, 128–129 projections of, 124–127, 126 figure 2 ratio of young to older people, 127–128 Life-insurance policies, 142 Life-settlements industry, 142–143 Life table, 20 Limited liability, 212 Liquidity, 12–14, 39, 185–186 List, John, 109 The Little Book of Behavioral Investing (Montier), 156 Lo, Andrew, 113–115, 117–123 Loans low-documentation, 48–49 secured, 76 small business, 181, 216 student, 164, 166–167, 169–171, 182 syndicated, 41 Victory Loans, 28 See also Lending; Peer-to-Peer lending Logistic regression, 201 London, early fire insurance in, 16–17 London, Great Fire of, 16 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 41 Long-Term Capital Management, 123 Longevity, betting on, 143–144 Loss aversion, 136 Lotteries, 212, 213 Low-documentation loans, 48–49 Lumni, 165, 168, 175 Lustgarten, Anders, 111 Lynn, Jeff, 160–161 Mack, John, 180 Mahwah, New Jersey, 52, 53 Marginal borrowers assessment of, 216–217 behavioral finance and, 208–214 industrialization of credit, 206 microfinance and, 203 savings schemes, 209–214 small businesses, 215–219 unsecured lending to, 206 Wonga, 203, 205, 208 Marginal borrowers (continued) ZestFinance, 199, 202, 205–206 Maritime piracy, solutions to, 151–152 Maritime trade, role of in history of finance, 3, 7–8, 14, 17, 23 Market makers, 15–16, 55 MarketInvoice, 195, 207, 217–218 Marketplace lending, 184 Markowitz, Harry, 118 Massachusetts, use of inflation-protected bonds in, 26 Massachusetts, use of social-impact bonds in, 98 Matching engine, 52 Maturity transformation, 12–13, 187–188, 193 McKinsey & Company, ix, 42 Mercator Advisory Group, 203 Merrill, Charles, 28 Merrill, Douglas, 199, 201 Merrill Lynch, 28 Merton, Robert, 31, 113–114, 123–124, 129–132, 142, 145 Mian, Atif, 204 Michigan, University of, financial survey by, 134–135 Microfinance, 203 Micropayment model, 217 Microwave technology, 53 The Million Adventure, 213–214 Minsky, Hyman, 42 Minsky moment, 42 Mississippi scheme, 36 Mitchell, Justin, 166–167 Momentum Ignition, 57 Monaco, modeling risk of earthquake in, 227 Money, history of, 4–5 Money illusion, 73–74 Money laundering, 192 Money-market funds, 43, 44 Monkeys, Yale University study of loss aversion with, 136 Montier, James, 156–157 Moody, John, 24 Moody’s, 24, 235 Moore’s law, 114 Morgan Stanley, 188 Mortgage-backed securities, 49, 233 Mortgage credit by ZIP code, study of, 204 Mortgage debt, role of in 2007–2008 crisis, 69–70 Mortgage products, unsound, 36–37 Mortgage securitization, 47 Multisystemic therapy, 96 Munnell, Alicia, 129 Naked credit-default swaps, 143 Nature Biotechnology, on drug-development megafunds, 118 “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility” (Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny), 42 Network effects, 181 New York, skyscraper craze in, 74–75 New York City, prisoner-rehabilitation program in, 108 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 31, 52, 53, 61, 64 New York Times, Merrill Lynch ad in, 28 Noncorrelated assets, 122 Nonprofits, growth of in United States, 105–106 Northern Rock, x NYMEX, 60 NYSE Euronext, 52 NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), 31, 52, 53, 61, 64 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), 128, 147 Oldfield, Sean, 67–68, 80–84 OnDeck, 216–218 One Service, 94–95, 105, 112 Operating expense ratio, 188–189 Options, 15, 124 Order-to-trade ratios, 63 Oregon, interest in income-share agreements, 172, 176 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 128, 147 Overtrading, 24 Packard, Norman, 60 Pandit, Vikram, 184 Park, Sun Young, 233 Partnership mortgage, 81 Pasion, 11 Pave, 166–168, 173, 175, 182 Payday lending Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, survey on, 200 information on applicants, acquisition of, 202 underwriting of, 201 PayPal, 219 Peak child, 127 Peak risk, 228 Peer-to-peer lending advantages of, 187–189 auction system, 195 big investors in, 183 borrowers, assessment of, 197 in Britain, 181 commercial mortgages, 181 CommonBond, 182, 184, 197 consumer credit, 181 diversification, 196 explained, 180 Funding Circle, 181–182, 189, 197 investors in, 195 Lending Club, 179–180, 182–184, 187, 189, 194–195, 197 network effects, 181 ordinary savers and, 184 Prosper, 181, 187, 195 RateSetter, 181, 187, 196 Relendex, 181 risk management, 195–197 securitization, 183–184, 196 Peer-to-peer lending (continued) small business loans, 181 SoFi, 184 student loans, 182 Zopa, 181, 187, 188, 195 Pensions, cost of, 125–126 Perry, Rick, 142–143 Peterborough, England, social-impact bond pilot in, 90–92, 94–95, 104–105, 112 Petri, Tom, 172 Pharmaceuticals, decline of investment in, 114–115 Piracy Reporting Centre, International Maritime Bureau, 151 Polese, Kim, 210 Poor, Henry Varnum, 24 “Portfolio Selection” (Markowitz), 118 Prediction Company, 60–61 Preferred shares, 25 Prepaid cards, 203 Present value of cash flows, 19 Prime borrowers, 197 Prince, Chuck, 50–51, 62 Principal-agent problem, 8 Prisoner rehabilitation programs, 90–91, 94–95, 98, 108, 112 Private-equity firms, 69, 85, 91, 105, 107 Projection bias, 72–73 Property banking crises and, xiv, 69 banking mistakes involving, 75–80 behavioral biases and, 72–75 dangerous characteristics of, 70–72 fresh thinking, need for, xvii, 80 investors’ systematic errors in, 74–75 perception of as safe investment, 76, 80 Prosper, 181, 187, 195 Provisioning funds, 187 Put options, 9, 82 Quants, 19, 63, 113 QuickBooks, 218 Quote stuffing, 57 Raffray, André-François, 144 Railways, affect of on finance, 23–25 Randomized control trials (RCTs), 101 Raphoen, Christoffel, 15–16 Raphoen, Jan, 15–16 RateSetter, 181, 187, 196 RCTs (randomized control trials), 101 Ready for Zero, 210–211 Rectangularization, 125, 126 figure 2 Regulation NMS, 61 Reinhart, Carmen, 35 Reinsurance, 224 Relendex, 181 Rentes viagères, 20 Repurchase “repo” transactions, 15, 185 Research-backed obligations, 119 Reserve Primary Fund, 44 Retirement, funding for anchoring effect, 137–138 annuities, 139 auto-enrollment in pension schemes, 135 auto-escalation, 135–136 conventional funding, 127–128 decumulation, 138–139 government reaction to increased longevity, 128–129 home equity, 139–140 life expectancy, projections of, 124–127, 126 figure 2 life insurance policies, cash-surrender value of, 142 personal retirement savings, 128–129, 132–133 replacement rate, 125 reverse mortgage, 140–142 savings cues, experiment with, 137 SmartNest, 129–131 Reverse mortgages, 140–142 Risk-adjusted returns, 118 Risk appetite, 116 Risk assessment, 24, 45, 77–78, 208 Risk aversion, 116, 215 Risk-based capital, 77 Risk-based pricing model, 176 Risk management, 55, 117–118, 123, 195–197 Risk Management Solutions, 222 Risk sharing, 8, 82 Risk-transfer instrument, 226 Risk weights, 77–78 Rogoff, Kenneth, 35 “The Role of Government in Education” (Friedman), 165 Roman Empire business corporation in, 7 financial crisis in, 36 forerunners of banks in, 11 maritime insurance in, 8 Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), 209–210 Roulette wheel, use of in experiment on anchoring, 138 Royal Bank of Scotland, 186 Rubio, Marco, 172 Russia, mortgage market in, 67 S-curve, in diffusion of innovations, 45 Salmon, Felix, 155 Samurai bonds, 27 Satsuma Rebellion (1877), 27 Sauter, George, 58 Save to Win, 214 Savings-and-loan crisis in US (1990s), 30 Savings cues, experiment with, 137 Scared Straight social program, 101 Scholes, Myron, 31, 123–124 Science, Technology, and Industry Scoreboard of OECD, 147 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 54, 56, 57, 58, 64 Securities markets, 14 Securitization, xi, 20, 37–38, 117–122, 183–184, 196, 236 Seedrs, 160–161 Sellaband, 159 Shared equity, 80–84 Shared-equity mortgage, 84 Shepard, Chris, xii–xiii Shiller, Robert, xv–xvi, 242 Shleifer, Andrei, 42, 44 Short termism, 58 SIBs.


pages: 289 words: 77,532

The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders by Kate Kelly

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alan Greenspan, Bakken shale, bank run, Bear Stearns, business cycle, commodity super cycle, Credit Default Swap, diversification, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, index fund, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, oil-for-food scandal, paper trading, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, the market place

He never quite managed to make it work, though, so with one unpaid tuition bill standing in the way of getting his degree, he joined the army, where he finally earned enough to pay UT. Arriving on Citi’s bond and commodities trading floor in 1997, Ruggles was immediately smitten. He loved the high-octane ambiance and the camaraderie. Plus, he witnessed some major market meltdowns right up close. He was there for the Russian currency crisis of August 1998 and the Long-Term Capital Management hedge-fund bailout a month later, periods when the traders sprang into action and hundreds of millions, even billions, were lost in a single day. It seemed to Ruggles that the market was a living organism in itself, with moments of complacency, fear, and sadness, just like people had. When crisis was stirring, “you could almost sniff it out,” he says of those wild days on the floor at Citi.

That Jon Corzine could preside over such a grand failure seemed shocking. He had run Goldman Sachs and the state of New Jersey. His brains and knack for persuasion had served him in scenarios with much higher stakes. In 1998, he had collaborated with Goldman’s rivals on Wall Street to construct a bailout package for the failing hedge-fund Long-Term Capital Management that saved the stock markets from a potentially devastating disruption, and his ability to convince his fellow partners of the need for more permanent bank funding had cemented Goldman’s plans for an initial public offering, which would be held in 1999. (That IPO, which had been accompanied by his ouster from the firm, also made Corzine $400 million.)


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Merton, was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1997 for devising this model (along with Myron Scholes; Fisher Black, the other co-author of the original Black-Scholes model, had died earlier).3 The investment company Robert C. Merton co-founded to put the model into practice, Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), went bankrupt with losses of $4.6 billion in 2000, in a kind of trial run for the later financial crisis. It is hard not to see some strange echo of the Oedipal story in this, especially as his father Robert K. is rumoured to have invested in LTCM. How did the options pricing model of Merton fils alter financial reality in its own image, ultimately helping to bring about his catastrophic financial downfall?

., 189 Korzybski, Alfred, 89 Kranton, Rachel, 93 Krugman, Paul, 75, 209 Labour Party, 158, 191 Laibson, David, 86 Lancet, The (journal), 77 Lange, Oskar, 182–83, 190 Laspeyres index, 144n3 Lerner, A., 182 L’Etranger (Camus), 87 liberalisation, 38, 68–69, 196 licenses, 59 life expectancy, 145 living standards, 143–47, 172, 194 loans, 109, 147, 158 lobbying, 29, 64–65, 69, 149 logic, 33, 47, 89–91 London School of Economics, 17 London Underground, 62–63 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 23 Lucas, Robert, 75 Lucas Critique, 103 lump of labour fallacy, 78 machine learning (ML), 12–13, 137, 141, 160–61, 187 MacKenzie, Donald, 23–24, 26 macroeconomics: agglomeration and, 127, 132, 202, 207; aggregate behaviour and, 3, 40, 42, 71–72, 100–102, 106, 113, 122–23, 141, 176–77, 201–2; criticism of, 17; empirical work and, 74, 100; forecasting and, 3, 12, 36–37, 76, 101–2, 112; globalisation and, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–94, 196, 213; Great Depression and, 17; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, 13, 101, 113, 151; inflation and, 12–13, 17, 36, 73, 113; innovation and, 37, 71, 102; Keynes and, 73, 75, 151, 191; Keynesian, 151; markets as a process and, 37–45; models and, 21 (see also models); outsider context and, 12, 100–3, 112–14; politics and, 76; progress and, 151; public responsibilities and, 17, 21, 31, 36–37, 71–76, 85–86; separation protocol and, 124; statistics and, 101–2, 113, 131; twenty-first-century policy and, 191 Malthus, Thomas, 48 Mandel, Michael, 96–97 Mankiw, Greg, 86 manufacturing, 105, 149–50, 172, 178, 195–98 marginal costs, 128, 174, 200, 208 Marglin, Steve, 16, 193 Market Abuse Regulation (MAR), 27n5 Markets, State and People (Coyle), 114, 212 Marshall, Alfred, 132 Marshall Aid, 190 Marx, Karl, 48 McFadden, Daniel, 59 Merton, Robert C., 23–24, 28 Merton, Robert K., 22–23 #metoo, 9 microeconomics, 2, 12, 37, 58, 92, 101, 110–11, 121, 209 microfoundations, 90 Microsoft, 133, 170, 173 Millenium Bug, 155 models: abstract mathematics and, 2; ad hoc, 89–92, 94, 150; agents and, 21, 81, 102, 109, 118, 179, 209; assumptions in, 21–22, 35, 46–47, 62–63, 90–94, 119, 137, 154, 177, 209; behavioural, 22, 35, 47, 63, 88, 92–93, 119, 136, 154; Black-Scholes-Merton, 23–25, 28; business, 139, 165, 197; causality and, 2, 94–95, 102; changing economies and, 168, 176–77, 179–80; complexity and, 2, 49, 94, 102, 106, 179–80; counterfactuals and, 97–98, 158, 161, 198, 208; forecasting and, 17, 74, 101–2, 113; frictions and, 22, 113, 136, 154, 182; Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and, 31, 101, 113; inflation and, 30, 113; influence of, 23; Korzybski on, 89; moral issues and, 129; Nash equilibrium and, 90–91; objective of, 89–90; outsider context and, 55, 88–103, 106, 109, 113; over-fitting, 95; platform, 197; progress and, 139, 151–52, 154, 159–61; rationality and, 21–22, 31, 35, 45–48, 62, 71, 88–103, 117–18; reality building by, 23; Scott on, 63; transaction costs and, 168; twenty-first-century policy and, 185–86, 189, 191, 197, 209 Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), 75, 102 monetarism, 16, 71, 73, 75 monopolies, 20, 29, 42 Monti, Mario, 67–69 Mont Pèlerin Society, 31, 191, 193–94 Moore’s Law, 170, 184 moral issues: Atkinson and, 129; causality and, 96; Cook and, 150; ethics, 4, 34, 39, 100, 105, 115, 119–24; fairness, 43, 45–46, 166; models and, 129; outsider context and, 96, 106–8; progress and, 148, 150; rationality and, 117; Sandel on, 34, 39, 43, 107, 119; Stern and, 148 MySpace, 205 Nash equilibrium, 90–91 National Health Service (NHS), 44–45, 77 “Nature and Significance of Economic Science, The” (Robbins), 121 neoliberalism, 3, 15, 193–94 network effects: competition and, 202, 205; economies of scale and, 127, 174, 177, 185, 199–201, 209; fixed costs and, 174, 177, 179, 185–86, 200; indirect, 174; twenty-first-century policy and, 185, 199–202, 205, 209; progress and, 141 New Deal, 193 New Public Management, 33, 106–7, 119, 187 New York Times, 19 Nobel Prize, 21, 23, 35, 44, 47, 59, 63, 92, 109, 140, 209 Nordhaus, William, 170 normative economics: decision making and, 110, 114, 120; Friedman and, 104, 121; Gelman and, 108; policy implications and, 125–26; positive economics and, 10, 104, 108, 114, 120–21, 125, 146; progress and, 146; welfare and, 114, 120, 134 nuclear arms race, 190 Obama, Barack, 75 Occupy movement, 19, 131 Office for Budget Responsibility, 66 Office for National Statistics, 171 OPEC, 192 OpenTable, 142, 175, 200 opportunity cost, 56, 58, 80, 156 optimisation, 48, 118, 188 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 130, 132, 164, 190 Ormerod, Paul, 106 Oscar awards, 108 Ostrom, Elinor, 63–64 outsider context: behavioural economics and, 88, 92–93, 100, 103–9; causality and, 94–96, 99–105; competition and, 98, 105; consumers and, 92, 96, 98, 100–102, 105, 108–9; decision making and, 93; Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and, 87–88, 101, 110, 112–14; growth and, 12, 97, 101n1, 111; interventions and, 87, 94, 104, 106; macroeconomics and, 12, 100–103, 112–14; methodology for, 88–103; models and, 55, 88–103, 106, 109, 113; politics and, 106, 110; regulation and, 109; technology and, 103; welfare and, 105–7, 114 outsourcing, 139, 195–97 Oxfam, 95–96 Packard, Vance, 109 Papademos, Lucas, 67 Pareto criterion, 121–23, 126–27, 129 patents, 140 pensions, 18, 37, 60, 65, 146 Perez, Carlotta, 189 performativity, 11, 23, 30, 211 Peste, La (Camus), 108 Petty, William, 148 Phillips machine, 135–37, 151, 192 Pigou, A.


pages: 250 words: 79,360

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson

Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, butterfly effect, carbon tax, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Emanuel Derman, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, hindcast, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, implied volatility, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kim Stanley Robinson, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, negative emissions, paperclip maximiser, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, random walk, risk tolerance, selection bias, self-driving car, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Great Resignation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trolley problem, value at risk, volatility smile, Y2K

Hedge funds exploit these kinds of mathematical tricks to make large bets on specific financial forecasts, arranging the hedging such that some uncertain outcomes are in theory less important to the outcome and reducing sensitivity of the portfolio to these possible variations. In the early 1990s, a fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) picked up quite a lot of free lunches betting on such things as the likely convergence of price of two different but related holdings, while being delta-hedged against upward or downward movement of the market. Their internal risk management systems were based on assumptions that the observed properties of randomness in the markets over the previous period would more or less continue to hold in future.

.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life, Free Press, 2012 Frydman, Roman, and Michael Goldberg, Beyond Mechanical Markets, Princeton University Press, 2011 Haldane, Andrew, ‘The Dog and the Frisbee’, speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 31 August 2012 Lowenstein, Roger, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management, Fourth Estate, 2002 MacKenzie, Donald, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets, MIT Press (Inside Technology Series), 2008 March, James, Lee Sproull and Michal Tamuz, ‘Learning from Samples of One or Fewer’, Organization Science, 2(1), 1991 Rebonato, Riccardo, Volatility and Correlation, John Wiley, 1999 Stiglitz, Joseph, ‘Where Modern Macroeconomics Went Wrong’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 34, 2018 Taleb, Nassim, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House, 2007 Wilmott, Paul, and David Orrell, The Money Formula: Dodgy Finance, Pseudo Science, and How Mathematicians Took Over the Markets, Wiley, 2017 ——, and Emanuel Derman, ‘The Financial Modelers’ Manifesto’, https://wilmott.com/financialmodelers-manifesto/, 2009 Chapter 8: The Atmosphere is Complicated Allen, Myles, Mustafa Babiker, Yang Chen, et al., ‘IPCC SR15: Summary for Policymakers’, in IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5C, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018 Anderson, Kevin, ‘Duality in Climate Science’, Nature Geoscience, 8(12), 2015 Beck, Silke, and Martin Mahony, ‘The Politics of Anticipation: The IPCC and the Negative Emissions Technologies Experience’, Global Sustainability, 1, 2018 Burke, Marshall, Solomon Hsiang and Edward Miguel, ‘Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production’, Nature, 527(7577), 2015 Edwards, Paul, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, MIT Press, 2010 Hänsel, Martin C., Moritz A.


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Unlike the case of Palm and 3Com, both versions of the stock were widely traded and easy to borrow, so what prevented the smart money from assuring that the shares traded at their appropriate ratio of 1.5? Strangely, nothing! And crucially, unlike the Palm example, which was sure to end in a few months, the Royal Dutch Shell price disparity could and did last for decades.‡ Therein lies the risk. Some smart traders, such as the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), did execute the smart trade, selling the expensive Royal Dutch shares short and buying the cheap Shell shares. But the story does not have a happy ending. In August 1998, because of a financial crisis in Asia and a default on Russian bonds, LTCM and other hedge funds started to lose money and needed to reduce some of their positions, including their Royal Dutch Shell trade.

Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/22/business/lessons-from-a-hurricane-it-pays-not-to-gouge.html. Lott, John R. 1998. More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lowenstein, Roger. 2000. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House. ———. 2001. “Exuberance Is Rational.” New York Times Magazine, February 11. Available at: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20010211 mag-econ.html. Machlup, Fritz. 1946. “Marginal Analysis and Empirical Research.” American Economic Review 36, no. 4: 519–54.

., 332 libertarian paternalism, 322, 323–25 “Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron” (Sunstein and Thaler), 323–25 Lichtenstein, Sarah, 36, 48 life, value of, see value of a life life-cycle hypothesis, 95–96, 97, 98, 106, 164 “Life You Save May Be Your Own, The” (Schelling), 12–13, 14 limits of arbitrage, 249, 288, 349 Lintner, John, 166, 226, 229 Liquid Assets (Ashenfelter), 68 List, The, 10, 20–21, 24, 25, 31, 33, 36, 39, 43, 58, 68, 303, 347 List, John, 354 lives, statistical vs. identified, 13 loans, for automobiles, 121–23 Loewenstein, George, 88, 111, 176, 180–81, 362 in Behavioral Economics Roundtable, 181 effort project of, 199–201 paternalism and, 323 London, 248 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 249, 251 loss aversion, 33–34, 52, 58–59, 154, 261 dividends and, 166 of managers, 187–89, 190 myopic, 195, 198 Lott, John, 265–66 Lovallo, Dan, 186, 187 Lowenstein, Roger, xv–xvi, 12 LSV Asset Management, 228 Lucas, Robert, 159 Luck, Andrew, 289 MacArthur Foundation, 184 Machiguenga people, 364 Machlup, Fritz, 45 macroeconomics: behavioral, 349–52 rational expectations in, 209 Macy’s, 62, 63 Madrian, Brigitte, 315–17 Magliozzi, Ray, 32 Magliozzi, Tom, 32–33 Major League Baseball, 282 “make it easy” mantra, 337–38, 339–40 Malkiel, Burton, 242 managers: growth, 214–15 gut instinct and, 293 loss aversion of, 187–89, 190 risk aversion of, 190–91 value, 214–15 mandated choice, 328–29 marginal, definition of, 27 marginal analysis, 44 marginal propensity to consume (MPC), 94–95, 98 markets, in equilibrium, 44, 131, 150, 207 Markowitz, Harry, 208 marshmallow experiment, 100–101, 102n, 178, 314 Marwell, Gerald, 145 Mas, Alexandre, 372 Massey, Cade, 194, 278–79, 282, 289 Matthew effect, 296n McCoy, Mike, 281–82 McDonald’s, 312 McIntosh, Donald, 103 mean reversion, 222–23 Mechanical Turk (Amazon), 127 Meckling, William, 41, 105 Mehra, Raj, 191 mental accounting, 54, 55, 98, 115, 116, 118, 257 bargains and rip-offs, 57–63 budgeting, 74–79 and equity premium puzzle, 198 on game show, 296–301, 297 getting behind in, 80–84 house money effect, 81–82, 83–84, 193n of savings, 310 sunk costs, 21, 52, 64–73 “two-pocket,” 81–82 Merton, Robert K., 296n “Methodology of Positive Economics, The” (Friedman), 45–46 Mian, Atif, 78 Miljoenenjacht, see Deal or No Deal Miller, Merton, 159, 167–68, 206, 208 annoyed at closed-end fund paper, 242–43, 244, 259 irrelevance theorem of, 164–65, 166–67 Nobel Prize won by, 164 Thaler’s appointment at University of Chicago, reaction to, 255, 256 Minnesota, 335 Mischel, Walter, 100–101, 102, 103, 178, 314 mispricing, 225 models: beta–delta, 110 of homo economicus, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 23–24, 180 imprecision of, 23–24 optimization-based, 5–6, 8, 27, 43, 207 Modigliani, Franco: consumption function of, 94, 95–96, 97, 98, 309 irrelevance theorem of, 164–65 Nobel Prize won by, 163–64 Moore, Michael, 122 More Guns, Less Crime (Lott), 265 Morgenstern, Oskar, 29 mortgage brokers, 77–78 mortgages, 7, 77–79, 252, 345 mugs, 153, 155, 263, 264–66, 264 Mullainathan, Sendhil, 58n, 183–84, 366 Mulligan, Casey, 321–22 Murray, Bill, 49–50 mutual fund portfolios, 84 mutual funds, 242 myopic loss aversion, 195, 198 Nagel, Rosemarie, 212 naïve agents, 110–11 Nalebuff, Barry, 170 narrow framing, 185–91 and effort project, 201 NASDAQ, 250, 252 Nash, John, 212 Nash equilibrium, 212, 213n, 367 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 35, 236, 244, 349 National Football League, 139n draft in, 11, 277–91, 281, 283, 285, 286 rookie salaries in, 283 salary cap in, 282–83 surplus value of players in, 285–86, 285, 286, 288 National Public Radio, 32, 305 naturally occurring experiments, 8 NESTA, 343 Net Asset Value (NAV) fund, 238–39, 241 Netherlands, 248, 296–301 neuro-economics, 177, 182 New Contrarian Investment Strategy, The (Dreman), 221–22 New Orleans Saints, 279 New York, 137 New Yorker, 90–91, 91, 92 New York Stock Exchange, 223, 226, 232, 248 New York Times, 292, 327, 328 New York Times Magazine, xv–xvi, 12 Next Restaurant, 138–39 NFL draft, 11, 277–91, 281, 283, 285, 286, 295 Nick (game show contestant), 304–5 Nielsen SoundScan, 135 Nixon, Richard, 363 Nobel, Alfred, 23n Nobel Prize, 23, 40, 207 no free lunch principle, 206, 207, 222, 225, 226n, 227, 230, 233–36, 234, 236, 251, 255 noise traders, 240–42, 247, 251 nomenclature, importance of, 328–29 Norman, Don, 326 normative theories, 25–27 “Note on the Measurement of Utility, A” (Samuelson), 89–94 no trade theorem, 217 Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein), 325–26, 330, 331–32, 333, 335, 345 nudges, nudging, 325–29, 359 number game, 211–14, 213 Obama, Barack, 22 occupations, dangerous, 14–15 Odean, Terry, 184 O’Donnell, Gus, 332–33 O’Donoghue, Ted, 110, 323 Odysseus, 99–100, 101 Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), 343–44 Office of Management and Budget, 343 offices, 270–76, 278 “one-click” interventions, 341–42 open-end funds, 238 opportunity costs, 17, 18, 57–58, 59, 73 of poor people, 58n optimal paternalism, 323 optimization, 5–6, 8, 27, 43, 161, 207, 365 Oreo experiment, 100–101, 102n, 178, 314 organizations, theory of, 105, 109 organs: donations of, 327–28 markets for, 130 Osborne, George, 331 Oullier, Olivier, 333 outside view, inside view vs., 186–87 overconfidence, 6, 52, 124, 355 and high trading volume in finance markets, 217–18 in NFL draft, 280, 295 overreaction: in financial markets, 219–20, 222–24, 225–29 generalized, 223–24 to sense of humor, 218, 219, 223 value stocks and, 225–29 Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Economics and the Law, 269 Palm and 3Com, 244–49, 246, 250, 348 paradigms, 167–68, 169–70 Pareto, Vilfredo, 93 parking tickets, 260 passions, 7, 88, 103 paternalism, 269, 322 dislike of term, 324 libertarian, 322, 323–25 path dependence, 298–300 “pay as you earn” system, 335 payment depreciation, 67 Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombing of, 232 P/E effect, 219–20, 222–23, 233, 235 pensions, 9, 198, 241, 320, 357–58 permanent income hypothesis, 95 Peter Principle, 293 pharmaceutical companies, 189–90 Pigou, Arthur, 88, 90 plane tickets, 138 planner-doer model, 104–10 Plott, Charlie, 40, 41, 48, 49, 148, 149, 177, 181 poker, 80, 81–82, 99 poor, 58n Posner, Richard, 259–61, 266 Post, Thierry, 296 poverty, decision making and, 371 Power, Samantha, 330 “Power of Suggestion, The” (Madrian and Shea), 315 practice, 50 predictable errors, 23–24 preferences: change in, 102–3 revealed, 86 well-defined, 48–49 pregnancy, teenage, 342 Prelec, Drazen, 179 Prescott, Edward, 191, 192 present bias (hyperbolic discounting), 91–92, 110, 227n and NFL draft, 280, 287 savings and, 314 presumed consent, in organ donations, 328–29 price controls, 363 price/earnings ratio (P/E), 219–20, 222–23, 233, 235 prices: buying vs. selling, 17, 18–19, 20, 21 rationality of, 206, 222, 230–33, 231, 237, 251–52 variability of stock, 230–33, 231, 367 price-to-rental ratios, 252 principal-agent model, 105–9, 291 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 143–44, 145, 301–5, 302 “Problem of Social Cost, The” (Coase), 263–64 profit maximization, 27, 30 promotional pricing strategy, 62n prompted choice (in organ donation), 327–29 prospect theory, 25–28, 295, 353 acceptance of, 38–39 and “as if” critique of behavioral economics, 46 and consumer choice, 55 and equity premium puzzle, 198 expected utility theory vs., 29 surveys used in experiments of, 38 psychological accounting, see mental accounting “Psychology and Economics Conference Handbook,” 163 “Psychology and Savings Policies” (Thaler), 310–13 Ptolemaic astronomy, 169–70 public goods, 144–45 Public Goods Game, 144–46 Punishment Game, 141–43, 146 Pythagorean theorem, 25–27 qualified default investment alternatives, 316 quantitative analysis, 293 Quarterly Journal of Economics, 197, 201 quasi-hyperbolic discounting, 91–92 quilt, 57, 59, 61, 65 Rabin, Matthew, 110, 181–83, 353 paternalism and, 323 racetracks, 80–81, 174–75 Radiolab, 305 randomized control trials (RCTs), 8, 338–43, 344, 371 in education, 353–54 Random Walk Down Walk Street, A (Malkiel), 242 rational expectations, 98, 191 in macroeconomics, 209 rational forecasts, 230–31 rationality: bounded, 23–24, 29, 162 Chicago debate on, 159–63, 167–68, 169, 170, 205 READY4K!


Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy J. Siegel

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fixed income, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Money creation, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, vertical integration

The first wave of the Asian crisis, discussed further in Chapter 10, sent the market down a record 554 points on October 27, 1997, and closed trading temporarily. But this did little to dent investors’ enthusiasm for stocks. The following year, the Russian government defaulted on its bonds, and Long-Term Capital Management, considered the world’s premier hedge fund, found itself entangled in speculative positions measured in the trillions of dollars that it could not trade. Markets temporarily seized up, and the Federal Reserve facilitated a rescue of the fund in order to resuscitate financial markets. These events sent the Dow Industrials down almost 2,000 points, but three quick Fed rate cuts sent the market soaring again.

See the CBOE Web site (www.cboe.com) for more details on its calculation. 282 PART 4 Stock Fluctuations in the Short Run FIGURE 16–4 The CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), 1986 to 2006 170 90 October 19, 1987 Stock Crash LTCM Hedge Fund Bailout and Russia Default Terrorist Attacks 80 70 Collapse of UAL Buyout Asian Currency Crisis Oct. ’02 Market Trough 60 50 40 30 Iraq Invades Kuwait Iraq Invasion Beginning of Gulf War 20 10 0 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 In the early and mid-1990s, the Volatility Index sank to between 10 and 20. But with the onset of the Asian crises in 1997, the VIX moved up to a 20 to 30 range. Spikes between 50 and 60 in the VIX occurred on three occasions: when the Dow fell 550 points during the attack on the Hong Kong dollar in October 1987; in August 1998 when Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was liquidated; and in the week following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In recent years, buying when the VIX is high and selling when it is low has proved to be a profitable strategy for the short term. But so has buying during market spills and selling during market peaks.

., 47, 48 374 Lakonishok, Josef, 295n, 304n, 308n Lampert, Eddie, 57 Lander, Joel, 113n Lane Bryant, 60i Large-cap stocks, small-cap stocks versus, 141–144, 142i LeBaron, Blake, 295n, 304n Legg Mason Value Trust, 348 Leroy, M., 65n Leverage, futures contracts and, 261 Liberty Acorn Fund, 346 Lichtenstein, S., 326n The Limited Stores, 156 Lintner, John, 140n Litzenberger, Robert, 145 Lo, Andrew, 304n, 327n Local risk, 169 London Stock Exchange, 188 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 88, 282 Long-term returns, 12–14, 13i Lorie, James, 45, 84 Lorillard, 60i “The Loser’s Game” (Ellis), 350 Losing trades, holding on to, 328–330 Loss aversion, 328–330 myopic, 332–333 Lowenstein, Roger, 77q, 86 Lynch, Peter, 207q, 251q, 268, 346, 348 Lyondell Chemical, 48 Ma Bell, 57, 58 MacCauley, Frederick, 291 Mackay, Charles, 324 MacKinlay, Craig, 327n Maddison, Angus, 181n Magellan Fund, 345–346, 348 Major Market Index, stock market crash of 1987 and, 273 Malkiel, Burton, 303, 345n, 348 Mamaysky, Harry, 304n Marathon Oil Company, 57 Market capitalization, ratio to GDP, 120 Index Market expectation, 239 Market movements: causes of, 223–226, 224i, 225i political parties and, 227–228, 228i–230i, 230 terrorist attacks and, 221–223, 222i, 226 uncertainty and, 226–227 war and, 225, 231–235 Market orders, 275 Market peaks, returns from, 27, 28i Market timers, 27 Market valuation, 110–120 book value and, 117 corporate profits and national income and, 115–116, 116i Fed model and, 113–115, 114i price-earnings ratio for, 110–112, 111i, 112i Tobin Q and, 117–119, 118i value relative to GDP and other ratios and, 119–120, 119i, 120i Market value, 117 ratio to dividend yield, 120, 120i ratio to GDP, 120, 120i ratio to price-earnings ratio, 120, 120i Market volatility, 14, 269–287 circuit breakers and, 276–277 distribution of large daily changes and, 283–284, 284i economics of, 285–286 historical trends of, 278–279, 279i, 280i, 281 implied, 281 nature of, 277–278 recent, low, 283 significance of, 286–287 stock market crash of 1987 and, 271–276 VIX and, 281–282, 282i Markowitz, Harry, 159n Marsh, Paul, 18, 19n, 20 Marshall, John, 65q Martingale, 292n Materials sector, in GICS, 53 Matsushita Electric Industrial, 176 Mayer, Martin, 165n, 274n McGraw-Hill Book Co., 59i, 61 The McGraw-Hill Companies, 37 McGraw, James H., 61 McKinley, William, 226–227 McNees, Stephen K., 216 McQuaid, Charles, 346 Mean aversion, 30 Mean reversion, of equity returns, 13 Mean-variance efficiency, 354 Measuring Business Cycles (Mitchell), 209 Melamed, Leo, 165, 251q, 274 Melville, Frank, 61 Melville Shoe Corp., 59i, 61 MENA (Middle East and North Africa), 179 Mental accounting, 329 Mercantile Exchange, 256 Merck, 59i, 177 Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, 45 Merton, Robert, 35n, 266n Metz, Michael, 86, 253 Meyers, Thomas A., 295–296 Michelin Group, 49 Microsoft, 38, 57n, 118, 144, 156, 158, 176i on Nasdaq, 44 Middle East: growing market share of, 178 oil reserves of, 178 Millennium Chemicals, 48 Miller, Bill, 348 Miller, G.


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Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

A customer that has never done structured leveraged proprietary trades before ... I am wallowing in a little glory right now. Yeah. In fact, I don't even have the desire to call my other clients and beat them up this afternoon." Hudson's boss, Jack Lavin, was cruder still: "I think my dick just fell of(" Transactions at Long-Term Capital Management were much more Culture and Prosperity { 237} sophisticated. Most investment funds simply buy portfolios of stocks and bonds. A hedge fund such as LTCM trades derivatives and arbitrages between similar securities in different markets. LTCM's partners included Robert Mertonn and Myron Scholes,n who won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for their contributions to financial economics.

Sophisticated investors can use derivative markets to insure their portfolios. By buying a put option at 10% below the current market price, you limit your maximum loss to 10%-the cost of the option is your insurance premium. After the Asian crisis and Russia's debt default in 1998, investors were particularly nervous. Long-Term Capital Management 10 sold insurance against large price changes-in either direction. In market jargon, they traded swaps and equity volatility. The $4 billion of assets that LTCM managed may seem a lot of money, but not in the context of all the share and bond markets of the world. With this capital base, LTCM held derivative contracts worth around $125 billion.

See labor; work Jobs, Steve, 119,120,122 Jones, Reg, 116 Kahneman, Dan, 220, 235 Kauffman, Stuart, 134 Kelly, Kevin, 336 Kendall, Maurice, 159 Keynes,John Maynard, 38, 164, 178-79,200, 246,267,324,333-34 on economics, 339 Khrushchev, Nikita, 105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 120, 126-27 Klein, Naomi, 280-81 knowledge economy, 207,266-74,320 Knudsen, Bill, 107 Krugman, Paul, 337 Kuhn, Thomas, 331,337 Kuznets, Simon, 38, 358 labor coordination failure, 128 and economic development, 57-58 as "market," 341 migrant, 305 motivation of, 88 and wage signals, 231-32 See also division oflabor; work laissez-faire, 201 land, 61, 77, 145 -people ratio, 57 settlers' claims, 59 See also property rights { 416} Latin America, 17, 61, 199,335 dependencytheor~284-85 leadership, 291 Lee, Fred, 111, 113 Lewis, Arthur, 278,280,359 liberalism, 335, 337, 344-45 redistributive market, 314-15 life insurance, 239-40 lighthouses, 185,248-49,250,253,341 lighting, 184-86 limited liability corporations, 69, 78-79 literacy, 52 living standards, 22-30,44-49,52 factors in, 28-30,37-41,304,354 and green revolution, 2 79 and happiness, 186-87, 286-87 and productivity, 45-49, 289-90 See also economic lives Lloyd's of London, 153, 154, 169, 245 loans, 165, 167 lobbying, 250-52, 274, 295, 346 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 236-37,245,246 Losee, 173 Lucas, Robert, 200, 356, 359 Luddites, 177, 178 Lysenkoism, 269 Macintyre, Alasdair, 133 macroeconomics, 200, 323-24, 327, 334, 336,356 management authority delegation by, 117, 124 as competitive advantage, 89 decisions by, 106-9 development of, 55,58 and economic rent, 297 GE success in, 115-16 power of, 77,342 professionalization of, 79, 342 Mankiw,Gregor~200,201,327,335 Mao Tse-tung, 66, 105-14, 121,214,215 map production, 271-72 marketeconom~9-21,55,87, 199-201, 340-55 assignment mechanisms, 93-104 convexity in, 180-81 disciplined pluralism as hallmark of, 18-19,21,56,120-24,345-46 effective function of, 319-20,341-42 emergence of, 56-69 factors in, 345-53 incentive compatibility in, 98-100, 151 income/wealth distribution, 320-22 money markets, 162-72 Pareto efficiency, 194, 202 rules of, 14-15, 82,313,319-20,351 self-interest in, 12-13, 17, 217, 343-44, 347 spontaneousorderin,20, 125-34 See also American business model; competitive markets; coordination; embedded market Index Marshall, Alfred, 178 Marshall, Barry, 273-74 Marx, Karl, 13, 77, 78 Marxism, 17, 21,325,355 mass production, 13, 88, 106 materialism.


Commodity Trading Advisors: Risk, Performance Analysis, and Selection by Greg N. Gregoriou, Vassilios Karavas, François-Serge Lhabitant, Fabrice Douglas Rouah

Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, compound rate of return, constrained optimization, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, discrete time, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, iterative process, linear programming, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, transaction costs, value at risk, zero-sum game

Hedge fund trading has been blamed for many financial distresses, including the 1992 European Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, the 1994 Mexican peso crisis, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 2000 bust in U.S. technology stock prices. A spectacular example of concerns about hedge funds can be found in the collapse and subsequent financial bailout of Long-Term Capital Management (e.g., Edwards 1999). The concerns about hedge fund and CTA trading extend beyond financial markets to other speculative markets, such as commodity futures markets. These concerns were nicely summarized in a meeting between farmers and executives of the Chicago Board of Trade, where farmers expressed the view that “the funds— managed commodity investment groups with significant financial and technological resources—may exert undue collective influence on market direction without regard to real world supply-demand or other economic factors” (Ross 1999, p. 3).

The mean-variance approach to the portfolio selection problem developed by Markowitz (1952) has been criticized often due to its utilization of variance as a measure of risk exposure when examining the nonnormal returns of CTAs. The value at risk (VaR) measure for financial risk has become accepted as a better measure for investment firms, large banks, and pension funds. As a result of the recurring frequency of down markets since the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in August 1998, VaR has played a paramount role as a risk management tool and is considered a mainstream technique to estimate a CTA’s exposure to market risk. 377 378 PROGRAM EVALUATION, SELECTION, AND RETURNS With the large acceptance of VaR and, specifically, the modified VaR as a relevant risk management tool, a more suitable portfolio performance measure for CTAs can be formulated in term of the modified Sharpe ratio.1 Using the traditional Sharpe ratio to rank CTAs will underestimate the tail risk and overestimate performance.

., Advances in Financial Economics, Vol. 1, pp. 81–98 Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Inc. Ederington, L. H., and J. H. Lee (2002) “Who Trades Futures and How? Evidence from the Heating Oil Futures Market.” Journal of Business, Vol. 75, No. 2, pp. 353–373. Edwards, F. R. (1999) “Hedge Funds and the Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 189–210. Edwards, F. R., and M. O. Caglayan. (2001) “Hedge Fund and Commodity Fund Investment Styles in Bull and Bear Markets.” Journal of Portfolio Management, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 97–108. Edwards, F. R., and J. Liew. (1999) “Hedge Funds versus Managed Futures as Asset Classes.”


pages: 76 words: 20,238

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

Let me list a few:• The savings and loan crisis of the early 1980s • The failure of Continental Illinois (then a major U.S. bank) in 1984 • The stock market crash of 1987—Black Monday, a 22.5 percent drop in one day • The bursting of the real estate bubble in the late 1980s • The Mexican financial crisis of 1994 • The Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 • The Long-Term Capital Management (a hedge fund) crisis of 1998 • The bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2001 In each case, it seemed initially that something really terrible was happening to the economy. When all was said and done, however, these events ended up looking like smaller problems. In most of these cases, we did patchwork rather than addressing the dilemmas of overleverage and excess risk at a more fundamental level.


pages: 345 words: 86,394

Frequently Asked Questions in Quantitative Finance by Paul Wilmott

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discrete time, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, fudge factor, implied volatility, incomplete markets, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, iterative process, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, martingale, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, urban planning, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Thus was born the structural approach to modelling risk of default, for if the option expired out of the money (i.e. assets had less value than the debt at maturity) then the firm would have to go bankrupt. Credit risk became big, huge, in the 1990s. Theory and practice progressed at rapid speed during this period, urged on by some significant credit-led events, such as the Long Term Capital Management mess. One of the principals of LTCM was Merton who had worked on credit risk two decades earlier. Now the subject really took off, not just along the lines proposed by Merton but also using the Poisson process as the model for the random arrival of an event, such as bankruptcy or default.

Margin hedging Often what causes banks, and other institutions, to suffer during volatile markets is not the change in the paper value of their assets but the requirement to suddenly come up with a large amount of cash to cover an unexpected margin call. Examples where margin has caused significant damage are Metallgesellschaft and Long Term Capital Management. Writing options is very risky. The downside of buying an option is just the initial premium, the upside may be unlimited. The upside of writing an option is limited, but the downside could be huge. For this reason, to cover the risk of default in the event of an unfavourable outcome, the clearing houses that register and settle options insist on the deposit of a margin by the writers of options.


pages: 332 words: 81,289

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Future Shock, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

However, the old behavioural trait of over-confidence appears to have struck, as the firm moved into other, less familiar markets. Luck versus skill is always hard to discern, even in those who have achieved extraordinary returns in the past. Other notable examples of just how difficult it is to exist: John Meriwether’s Long Term Capital Management, complete with two Nobel Prize winning economists, threatened to drag down the global financial system with it – the company had a $100 billion balance sheet when it got its view on Russia wrong and markets behaved out of line with expected, at least in their eyes, norms. Then there was Jeff Vinik, formerly of Fidelity, who made one of the largest market timing mistakes recorded on the largest mutual fund in the world, The Magellan Fund.

Winning the Loser’s Game, 2nd, 3rd emerging markets defining diversification benefits, 2nd economies MSCI Emerging Markets Index portfolio construction, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th product choices, 2nd, 3rd benchmarks return and risk characteristics, 2nd, 3rd future returns past returns rise in correlations between EMH (Efficient Market Hypothesis) emotional decision-making, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th emotional tolerance for losses Equitable Life equities efficient equity markets global developed markets diversification, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th fund costs product choices benchmarks and investment behaviour and the investment mix, 2nd, 3rd lump-sum investments in and market timing, 2nd, 3rd risk, 2nd, 3rd stock selection UK active funds equity markets developed diversifiers, 2nd risk, 2nd volatility of equity risk premium equity-oriented assets ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds), 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and DIY investors, 2nd, 3rd, 4th taxes and inflation-linked bonds providers, 2nd eye-openers for investors Fama, Eugene Fidelity, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th FinaMetrica, 2nd, 3rd financial advisers see advisers financial survival goals, 2nd and different levels of need five steps in defining general goals for individuals fixed income securities, 2nd Ford, Henry, 2nd FSA (Financial Services Authority) and commodity futures FTSE 100 Index, 2nd and structured products, 2nd FTSE All-Share Index, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th FTSE Index-Linked gilts fund management/managers average choosing costs, 2nd, 3rd performance, 2nd turnover on funds and UK investor behaviour see also active management/managers futures contracts gambling gilts, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and global equity markets index-linked global equities developed markets, risk and return diversification, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th fund costs product choices benchmarks global real estate see REITs (global real estate) goals see financial survival goals gold Graham, Benjamin, 2nd Halifax UK FTSE All Share Index Tracking Fund Hargreaves Lansdown hedge funds, 2nd, 3rd and leverage history of the financial industry home bias, 2nd product choices Homer, Sidney implementation, 2nd, 3rd DIY or advisers product choices, 2nd risk income and DIY investors index funds, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and DIY investors guidelines for selecting index-fund investing and portfolio construction trackers vs active investors, 2nd, 3rd tracking error index investors index-linked bonds, 2nd India inflation and bond yields inflation-linked investments portfolio construction and long-term investors and savers and structured products inflation-linked bonds, 2nd, 3rd information ratio insights Institute of Financial Planning insurance premiums and commodity futures intuitive decision-making investment behaviour, 2nd, 3rd emotional, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th see also behavioural finance investment horizon and portfolio choices investment period investment philosophy, 2nd and advisers establishing foundations of and market timing, 2nd, 3rd, 4th philosophy-free investing research evidence rules security selection see also active management/managers investment professionals trying to beat the market investment strategy see market timing investment trusts, 2nd private equity IRR (internal rate of return) and private equity ISAs and taxation iShares Kahneman, Daniel Keynes, J. M. Lehman Brothers, 2nd, 3rd leverage and private equity, 2nd lifecycle investing lifestyle options and financial goals lifestyle, risk-managed OEICs liquidity and private equity and risk bonds Long Term Capital Management long-term investors investment policy portfolio construction lucky runs lump-sum investments, 2nd Lynch, Peter, 2nd McDonalds Madoff fraud, 2nd Magellan Fund, 2nd Malkiel, Burton G. market capitalisation emerging markets market efficiency market returns market risk, 2nd equities, 2nd market timing, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and DIY investors winning points from market-based returns market-beating strategies see active management/managers markets falling trying and failing to beat the market, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Marshall, Ray maturity (interest rate) risk, 2nd Meriwether, John Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), 2nd money-weighted returns Morningstar, 2nd MPT (Modern Portfolio Theory) MSCI Emerging Markets Index MSCI World Index mutual funds, 2nd, 3rd MVO (means-variance optimisation) software Myners Report National Savings Certificates nest eggs noise and confusion reducing, 2nd Northern Rock Norway OEICs (open-ended investment companies), 2nd, 3rd, 4th lifestyle, risk-managed product choices off-menu assets, 2nd commodity futures gold hedge funds, 2nd, 3rd private equity, 2nd structured products, 2nd on-menu assets, 2nd, 3rd bonds commercial property defensive asset classes developed global equity markets emerging markets Return Engine asset classes smaller companies value equities online brokerage accounts, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th administration optimisation software passive investors, 2nd fund costs index lifestyle/risk-managed funds product choices passive index fund providers vs active investors, 2nd, 3rd Paulson, John pensions active funds, 2nd contribution rates investing for retirement, 2nd estimating how much to save misselling target date funds tax on performance active managers and performance over time short-term, 2nd see also risk and return philanthropic works philosophy-free investing Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo pitfalls for investors portfolio choices, 2nd financial capacity for losses financial need to take risk and gold risk profile/emotional tolerance for losses six Smarter portfolios summary matrix portfolio construction, 2nd, 3rd 90/10 portfolios approach to blended, 2nd bonds, 2nd, 3rd Defensive Mix diversification, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th global, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and DIY investors emerging markets, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th equity market diversifiers, 2nd growth-oriented Return Engine, 2nd long-term investors Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), 2nd non-GBP currency exposure, 2nd past and future events smaller and value companies, 2nd, 3rd see also asset mix portfolios and DIY investors implementation, 2nd, 3rd maintenance, 2nd obsessive monitoring of rebalancing, 2nd, 3rd smarter and the stockbroking model taking an income from in retirement see also asset mix private equity, 2nd probability problems product choices, 2nd building-block benchmark choices choosing your market benchmark/proxy exchange-traded funds (ETFs) global home bias index-fund investing investment trusts lifestyle/risk-managed OEICs, 2nd mapping funds to passive products target date funds unit trusts/OEICs, 2nd product engineering psychometric testing, 2nd, 3rd rational thinking, 2nd, 3rd avoiding irrational behaviour REITs (global real estate), 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th return and risk characteristics, 2nd residual risk retirement, investing for, 2nd estimating how much to save return capture Return Engine asset classes developed global equity markets performance portfolio construction, 2nd returns and the average investor bonds conventional inflation-linked commodity futures developed global equity markets emerging markets on equities, and industry costs estimating future gold hedge funds improving on investment policy returns market returns and market timing market-based money-weighted REITs (global real estate), 2nd return history of building blocks time-weighted value equities see also risk and return risk, 2nd, 3rd, 4th bonds, 2nd choices of asset classes currency risk defensive assets equity risk, 2nd, 3rd five key investment risk factors and global diversification handling and hazards limited choices market risk, 2nd and portfolio choices REITs, 2nd residual risk-free assets smaller companies value equities, 2nd risk profiling, 2nd, 3rd psychometric testing risk and return, 2nd bonds conventional inflation-linked commodity futures defensive assets developed global equity markets emerging markets gold hedge funds and portfolio construction private equity REITs, 2nd Return Engine asset classes, 2nd smaller companies, 2nd structured products value equities, 2nd, 3rd risk tolerance and portfolio choices, 2nd risk-managed OEICs ROF (rip off factor) Samsung Electronics saving for retirement versus smarter investing, 2nd school fees Schwab, Charles Schwed, Fred, 2nd securities selection of, 2nd and active managers transfers to online accounts Selftrade Sharpe, William, 2nd, 3rd Shiller, Robert Siegel, Laurence Sinquefield, Rex Sippdeal Sipps smaller companies portfolio construction, 2nd, 3rd product choices, 2nd, 3rd benchmarks return and risk characteristics, 2nd size risk, 2nd the small-cap premium, 2nd, 3rd Spain Standard Chartered Bank stock market crashes stockbroking model strategic asset allocation structural risk on bonds structured products, 2nd and dividends principal protection risk and return Swensen, David, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th on hedge funds on private equity tactical asset allocation see market timing Tanous, Peter target date funds taxes, 2nd, 3rd DIY investors, 2nd, 3rd, 4th personal allowances TER (total expense ratio) time-weighted returns Tobin, James Separation Theorem, 2nd ‘too good to be true’ investments, 2nd top-down approach total equity market total-expense ratios tracker funds see index funds tracking error fees and costs contributing to management experience effect on replication methods affecting size contributing to turnover contributing to Trump, Donald Tversky, Amos, 2nd unit trusts, 2nd, 3rd, 4th United Kingdom active funds, research on performance, 2nd equity funds and diversification industry costs of product choices underperforming the market FTSE 100 Index, 2nd, 3rd, 4th FTSE All-Share Index, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th FTSE Index-linked gilts gilts, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and global equity markets index-linked investor behaviour and portfolio construction, global diversification tax breaks United States behaviour of average investors CGM Focus Fund equity fund performance index tracker funds private equity research on active management Russell 1000 Index treasuries Wilshire 5000 university fees value companies, 2nd, 3rd dividends outperformance of growth stocks portfolio construction, 2nd, 3rd product choices, 2nd benchmarks return and risk characteristics, 2nd, 3rd past returns Vanguard, 2nd, 3rd research on UK actively managed funds, 2nd venture capital, 2nd Vinik, Jeff Vodafone volatility bonds equity markets wealth creation ‘get rich, slow’ process wealth-destroying behaviour, 2nd, 3rd zero-sum game and hedge funds and investment philosophy, 2nd ‘A book of investment wisdom and common sense for the ages.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Incidentally, the prize is not a real Nobel prize but a prize given by the Swedish central bank ‘in memory of Alfred Nobel’. As a matter of fact, several years ago the Nobel family even threatened to deny the prize the use of their ancestor’s name, as it had been mostly given to free-market economists of whom Alfred Nobel would not have approved, but that is another story. In 1998, a huge hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was on the verge of bankruptcy, following the Russian financial crisis. The fund was so large that its bankruptcy was expected to bring everyone else down with it. The US financial system avoided a collapse only because the Federal Reserve Board, the US central bank, twisted the arms of the dozen or so creditor banks to inject money into the company and become reluctant shareholders, gaining control over 90 per cent of the shares.

Index active economic citizenship xvi, xvii Administrative Behaviour (Simon) 173–4 Africa see Sub-Saharan Africa AIG 172–3 Air France 131 AOL 132–3 apartheid 214–16 Argentina education and growth 181 growth 73 hyperinflation 53–4 Austria geography 121 government direction 132 protectionism 70 balance of payments 97–100, 101 Baldursson, Fridrik 235 Bangladesh entrepreneurship 159–60 and microfinance 161–2, 163, 164 Bank of England 252 (second) Bank of the USA 68 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 262 bankruptcy law 227–8 Barad, Jill 154 Bard College 172 Bateman, Milford 162 Baugur 233 Baumol, William 250 Bebchuk, Lucian 154 behaviouralist school 173–4 Belgium ethnic division 122 income inequality 144, 146 manufacturing 70, 91 R&D funding 206 standard of living 109 Benin, entrepreneurship 159 Bennett, Alan 214 Besley, Tim 246 big government 221–2, 260–61 and growth 228–30 see also government direction; industrial policy BIS (Bank for International Settlements) 262 Black, Eugene 126 Blair, Tony 82, 143, 179 borderless world 39–40 bounded rationality theory 168, 170, 173–7, 250, 254 Brazilian inflation 55 Britain industrial dominance/decline 89–91 protectionism 69–70 British Academy 246–7 British Airways 131 brownfield investment 84 Brunei 258 Buffet, Warren 30, 239 Bukharin, Nikolai 139 Bunning, Senator Jim 8 Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) 121, 200 Bush, George W. 8, 158, 159, 174 Bush Sr, George 207 business sector see corporate sector Cameroon 116 capital mobility 59–60 nationality 74–5, 76–7 capitalism Golden Age of 142, 147, 243 models 253–4 capitalists, vs. workers 140–42 captains of industry 16 Carnegie, Andrew 15 Case, Steve 132–3 Cassano, Joe 172–3 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) 238 CDSs (credit default swaps) 238 CEO compensation see executive pay, in US Cerberus 77–8 Chavez, Hugo 68 chess, complexity of 175–6 child-labour regulation 2–3, 197 China business regulation 196 communes 216 economic officials 244 industrial predominance 89, 91, 93, 96 as planned economy 203–4 PPP income 107 protectionism and growth 63–4, 65 Chocolate mobile phone 129 Chrysler 77–8, 191 Chung, Ju-Yung 129 Churchill, Winston 253 climate factors 120–21 Clinton, Bill 143 cognitive psychology 173–4 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 238 collective entrepreneurship 165 communist system 200–204 Concorde project 130–31 conditions of trade 5 Confucianism 212–13 Congo (Democratic Republic) 116, 121 consumption smoothing 163 cooperatives 166 corporate sector importance 190–91 planning in 207–9 regulation effect 196–8 suspicion of 192–3 see also regulation; transnational corporations Cotton Factories Regulation Act 1819 2 credit default swaps (CDSs) 238 Crotty, Jim 236–8 culture issues 123, 212–13 Daimler-Benz 77–8 Darling, Alistair 172 de-industrialization 91 balance of payments 97–100, 101 causes 91–6 concerns 96–9 deflation, Japan 54 deliberation councils 134 Denmark cooperatives 166 protectionism 69 standard of living 104, 106, 232–3 deregulation see under regulation derivatives 239 Detroit car-makers 191–2 developing countries entrepreneurship and poverty 158–60 and free market policies 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 policy space 262–3 digital divide 39 dishwashers 34 distribution of income see downward redistribution of income; income irregularity; upward redistribution of income domestic service 32–3 double-dip recession xiii downward redistribution of income 142–3, 146–7 Dubai 235 Duménil, Gérard 236 East Asia economic officials 249–50 educational achievements 180–81 ethnic divisions 122–3 government direction 131–2 growth 42, 56, 243–4 industrial policy 125–36, 205 École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) 133 economic crises 247 Economic Policy Institute (EPI) 144, 150 economists alternative schools 248–51 as bureaucrats 242–3 collective imagination 247 and economic growth 243–5 role in economic crises 247–8 Ecuador 73 Edgerton, David 37 Edison, Thomas 15, 165, 166 education and enterprise 188–9 higher education effect 185–8 importance 178–9 knowledge economy 183–5 mechanization effect 184–5 outcome equality 217–18 and productivity 179–81 relevance 182–3 Elizabeth II, Queen 245–7 ENA (École Nationale d’Administration) 133 enlightened self-interest 255–6 entrepreneurship, and poverty 157–8 and collective institutions 165–7 as developing country feature 158–60 finance see microfinance environmental regulations 3 EPI (Economic Policy Institute) 144, 150 equality of opportunity 210–11, 256–7 and equality of outcome 217–20, 257 and markets 213–15 socio-economic environment 215–17 equality of outcome 217–20 ethnic divisions 122–3 executive pay and non-market forces 153–6 international comparisons 152–3 relative to workers’ pay 149–53, 257 US 148–9 fair trade, vs. free trade 6–7 Fannie Mae 8 Far Eastern Economic Review 196 Federal Reserve Board (US) 171, 172, 246 female occupational structure 35–6 Fiat 78 financial crisis (2008) xiii, 155–6, 171–2, 233–4, 254 financial derivatives 239, 254–5 financial markets deregulation 234–8, 259–60 effects 239–41 efficiency 231–2, 240–41 sector growth 237–9 Finland government direction 133 income inequality 144 industrial production 100 protectionism 69, 70 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Fischer, Stanley 54 Ford cars 191, 237 Ford, Henry 15, 200 foreign direct investment (FDI) 83–5 France and entrepreneurship 158 financial deregulation 236 government direction 132, 133–4, 135 indicative planning 204–5 protectionism 70 Frank, Robert H 151 Franklin, Benjamin 65–6, 67 Freddie Mac 8 free market boundaries 8–10 and developing countries 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 labour see under labour nineteenth-century rhetoric 140–43 as political definition 1–2 rationale xiii–xiv, 169–70 results xiv–xv, xvi–xvii system redesign 252, 263 see also markets; neo-liberalism free trade, vs. fair trade 6–7 Fried, Jesse 154 Friedman, Milton 1, 169, 214 Galbraith, John Kenneth 16, 245 Garicano, Luis 245 Gates, Bill 165, 166, 200 General Electric (GE) 17, 45, 86, 237 General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) 194, 237 General Motors (GM) 20, 22, 45, 80, 86, 154, 190–98 decline 193–6 financialization 237 pre-eminence 191–2 geographical factors 121 Germany blitzkrieg mobility 191 CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 emigration 69 hyperinflation 52–4 industrial policy 205 manufacturing 90 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 228–9 Ghana, entrepreneurship 159 Ghosn, Carlos 75–6, 78 globalization of management 75–6 and technological change 40 GM see General Motors GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation) 194, 237 Golden Age of Capitalism 142, 147, 243 Goldilocks economy 246 Goodwin, Sir Fred 156 Gosplan 145 government direction balance of results 134–6 and business information 132–4 failure examples 130–31 and market discipline 44–5, 129–30, 134 share ownership 21 success examples 125–6, 131–4 see also big government; industrial policy Grameen Bank 161–4 Grant, Ulysses 67 Great Depression 1929 24, 192, 236, 249, 252 greenfield investment 84 Greenspan, Alan 172, 246 Hamilton, Alexander 66–7, 69 Hayami, Masaru 54 Hennessy, Peter 246–7 higher education 185–8 Hirschman, Albert 249 History Boys (Bennett) 214 Hitler, Adolf 54 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 Honda 135 Hong Kong 71 household appliances 34–6, 37 HSBC 172 Human relations school 47 Hungary, hyperinflation 53–4 hyperinflation 52–4 see also inflation Hyundai Group 129, 244 Iceland financial crisis 232–4, 235 foreign debt 234 standard of living 104–5 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) 39 ILO (International Labour Organization) 32, 143–4 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration control 5, 23, 26–8, 30 income per capita income 104–11 see also downward redistribution of income; income inequality; upward redistribution of income income inequality 18, 72–3, 102, 104–5, 108, 110, 143–5, 147, 247–8, 253, 262 India 99, 121 indicative planning 205 indicative planning 204–6 Indonesia 234 industrial policy 84, 125–36, 199, 205, 242, 259, 261 see also government direction Industrial Revolution 70, 90, 243 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 inflation control 51–2 and growth 54–6, 60–61 hyperinflation 52–4 and stability 56–61 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 39 institutional quality 29–30, 112–13, 115, 117, 123–4, 165–7 interest rate control 5–6 international dollar 106–7 International Labour Organization (ILO) 32, 143–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 54–5, 57, 66, 72, 244, 262 SAPs 118 International Year of Microcredit 162 internet revolution 31–2 impact 36–7, 38, 39 and rationality 174 investment brownfield/greenfield 84 foreign direct investment 83–5 share 18–19 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ireland financial crisis 234–5 Italy cooperatives 166 emigrants to US 103 Jackson, Andrew 68 Japan business regulation 196 CEO remuneration 152–3 deflation 54 deliberation councils 134 government direction 133–4, 135, 259 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 131, 135, 242–5 industrial production 100 production system 47, 167 protectionism 62, 70 R&D funding 206 Jefferson, Thomas 67–8, 239 job security/insecurity 20, 58–61, 108–9, 111, 225–8, 247, 253, 259 Journal of Political Economy 34 Kaldor, Nicolas 249 Keynes, John Maynard 249 Kindleberger, Charles 249 knowledge economy 183–5 Kobe Steel 42–3, 46 Kong Tze (Confucius) 212 Korea traditional 211–13 see also North Korea; South Korea Koufax, Sandy 172 Kuwait 258 labour free market rewards 23–30 job security 58–60 in manufacturing 91–2 market flexibility 52 regulation 2–3 relative price 33, 34 Latin America 32–3, 55, 73, 112, 122, 140, 196–7, 211, 245, 262 Latvia 235 Lazonick, William 20 Lenin, Vladimir 138 Levin, Jerry 133 Lévy, Dominique 236 LG Group 129, 134 liberals neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73 nineteenth-century 140–42 limited liability 12–15, 21, 228, 239, 257 Lincoln, Abraham 37, 67 List, Friedrich 249 London School of Economics 245–6 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) 170–71 Luxemburg, standard of living 102, 104–5, 107, 109, 232–3, 258 macro-economic stability 51–61, 240, 259, 261 Madoff, Bernie 172 Malthus, Thomas 141 managerial capitalism 14–17 Mandelson, Lord (Peter) 82–3, 87 manufacturing industry comparative dynamism 96 employment changes 91–2 importance 88–101, 257–9 productivity rise 91–6, 184–5 relative prices 94–5 statistical changes 92–3 Mao Zedong 215–16 Marchionne, Sergio 78 markets and bounded rationality theory 168, 173–6, 177, 254 conditions of trade 5 and equality of opportunity 213–15 failure theories 250 financial see financial markets government direction 44–5, 125–36 government regulation 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 participation restrictions 4 price regulations 5–6 and self-interest 44–5 see also free market Marx, Karl 14, 198, 201, 208, 249 Marxism 80, 185, 201–3 mathematics 180, 182–3 MBSs (mortgage-backed securities) 238 medicine’s popularity 222–4 Merriwether, John 171 Merton, Robert 170–71 Michelin 75–6 microfinance critique 162 and development 160–62 Microsoft 135 Minsky, Hyman 249 Monaco 258 morality, as optical illusion 48–50 Morduch, Jonathan 162 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 238 motivation complexity 46–7 Mugabe, Robert 54 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 67 National Health Service (UK) 261 nationality of capital 74–87 natural resources 69, 115–16, 119–20, 121–2 neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73, 145 neo-classical school 250 see also free market Nestlé 76–7, 79 Netherlands CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 intellectual property rights 71 protectionism 71 welfare state and growth 228–9 New Public Management School 45 New York Times 37, 151 New York University 172 Nissan 75–6, 84, 135, 214 Nobel Peace Prize 162 Prize in economics 170, 171–2, 173, 208, 246 Nobel, Alfred 170 Nokia 135, 259–60 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 67 North Korea 211 Norway government direction 132, 133, 205 standard of living 104 welfare state and growth 222, 229 Obama, Barack 149 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 57, 159, 229 Oh, Won-Chul 244 Ohmae, Kenichi 39 Opel 191 Opium War 9 opportunities see equality of opportunity Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 57, 159, 229 organizational economy 208–9 outcomes equality 217–20 Palin, Sarah 113 Palma, Gabriel 237 Park, Chung-Hee 129 Park, Tae-Joon 127–8 participation restrictions 4 Perot, Ross 67 Peru 219 PGAM (Platinum Grove Asset Management) 171 Philippines, education and growth 180, 181 Phoenix Venture Holdings 86 Pigou, Arthur 250 Pinochet, Augusto 245 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 180 Plain English Campaign 175 planned economies communist system 200–204 indicative systems 204–6 survival 199–200, 208–9 Platinum Grove Asset Management (PGAM) 171 Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) 127–8 pollution 3, 9, 169 poor individuals 28–30, 140–42, 216–18 Portes, Richard 235 Portman, Natalie 162 POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company) 127–8 post-industrial society 39, 88–9, 91–2, 96, 98, 101, 257–8 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) 118 see also SAPs PPP (purchasing power parity) 106–9 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni 138–40, 141 price regulations 5–6 stability 51–61 Pritchett, Lant 181 private equity funds 85–6, 87 professional managers 14–22, 44–5, 166, 200 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 180 protectionism and growth 62–3, 72–3 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 positive examples 63–5, 69 PRSPs see Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers purchasing power parity (PPP) 106–9 R&D see research and development (R&D) Rai, Aishwarya 162 Rania, Queen 162 rationality see bounded rationality theory RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) 156 real demand effect 94 regulation business/corporate 196–8 child labour 2–3, 197 deregulation 234–8, 259–60 legitimacy 4–6 markets 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 price 5–6 Reinhart, Carmen 57, 59 Renault 21, 75–6 Report on the Subject of Manufactures (Hamilton) 66 The Rescuers (Disney animation) 113–14 research and development (R&D) 78–9, 87, 132, 166 funding 206 reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ricardo, David 141 rich individuals 28–30, 140–42 river transport 121 Rogoff, Kenneth 57, 59 Roodman, David 162 Roosevelt, Franklin 191 Rover 86 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 156 Rubinow, I.M. 34 Ruhr occupation 52 Rumsfeld, Donald 174–5 Rwanda 123 Santander 172 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programs) 118, 124 Sarkozy, Nicolas 90 Scholes, Myron 170–71 Schumpeter, Joseph 16, 165–7, 249 Second World War planning 204 (second) Bank of the USA 68 self-interest 41–2, 45 critique 42–3 enlightened 255–6 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 and market discipline 44–5 and motivation complexity 46–7 Sen, Amartya 250 Senegal 118 service industries 92–3 balance of payments 97–100, 101 comparative dynamism 94–5, 96–7 knowledge-based 98, 99 Seychelles 100 share buybacks 19–20 shareholder value maximisation 17–22 shareholders government 21 ownership of companies 11 short-term interests 11–12, 19–20 shipbuilders 219 Simon, Herbert 173–6, 208–9, 250 Singapore government direction 133 industrial production 100 PPP income 107 protectionism 70 SOEs 205 Sloan Jr, Alfred 191–2 Smith, Adam 13, 14, 15, 41, 43, 169, 239 social dumping 67 social mobility 103–4, 220 socio-economic environment 215–17 SOEs (state-owned enterprises) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 South Africa 55, 121 and apartheid 213–16 South Korea bank loans 81 economic officials 244 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 123 financial drive 235 foreign debt 234 government direction 126–9, 133–4, 135, 136 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 125–36, 205, 242–5 inflation 55, 56 job insecurity effect 222–4, 226, 227 post-war 212–14 protectionism 62, 69, 70 R&D funding 206 regulation 196–7 Soviet Union 200–204 Spain 122 Spielberg, Steven 172 Sri Lanka 121 Stalin, Josef 139–40, 145 standard of living comparisons 105–7 US 102–11 Stanford, Alan 172 state owned enterprises (SOEs) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 steel mill subsidies 126–8 workers 219 Stiglitz, Joseph 250 Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) 118, 124 Sub-Saharan Africa 73, 112–24 culture issues 123 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 122–3 free market policies 118–19, 262 geographical factors 121 growth rates 73, 112, 116–19 institutional quality 123 natural resources 119–20, 121–2 structural conditions 114–16, 119–24 underdevelopment 112–13, 124 Sutton, Willie 52 Sweden 15, 21–2 CEO remuneration 152 income inequality 144 industrial policy 205 industrial production 100 per capita income 104 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Switzerland CEO remuneration 152–3 ethnic divisions 122 geography 121 higher education 185–6, 188 intellectual property rights 71 manufacturing 100, 258 protectionism 69, 71 standard of living 104–6, 232–3 Taiwan business regulation 196 economic officials 244 education and growth 180 government direction 136 indicative planning 205 protectionism 69, 70 Tanzania 116 TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) 8 tax havens 258 technological revolution 31–2, 38–40 telegraph 37–8 Telenor 164 Thatcher, Margaret 50, 225–6, 261 Time-Warner group 132–3 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 180, 183 Toledo, Alejandro 219 Toyota and apartheid 214 production system 47 public money bail-out 80 trade restrictions 4 transnational corporations historical debts 80 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 nationality of capital 74–5, 76–7 production movement 79, 81–2 see also corporate sector Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 180, 183 trickle-down economics 137–8 and upward distribution of income 144–7 Trotsky, Leon 138 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) 8 2008 financial crisis xiii, 144, 155–6, 171–2, 197–8, 233–4, 236, , 238–9, 245–7, 249, 254 Uganda 115–16 uncertainty 174–5 unemployment 218–19 United Kingdom CEO remuneration 153, 155–6 financial deregulation 235–6, 237 NHS 261 shipbuilders 219 see also Britain United Nations 162 United States economic model 104 Federal Reserve Board 171, 172, 246 financial deregulation 235–8 immigrant expectations 103–4 income inequality 144 inequalities 107–11 protectionism and growth 64–8, 69 R&D funding 206 standard of living 102–11 steel workers 219 welfare state and growth 228–30 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 136 university education effect 185–8 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) 200 upward redistribution of income 143–4 and trickle-down economics 144–7 Uruguay growth 73 income inequality 144 USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 136 vacuum cleaners 34 Venezuela 144 Versailles Treaty 52 Vietnam 203–4 Volkswagen government share ownership 21 public money bail-out 80 wage gaps political determination 23–8 and protectionism 23–6, 67 wage legislation 5 Wagoner, Rick 45 Wall Street Journal 68, 83 Walpole, Robert 69–70 washing machines 31–2, 34–6 Washington, George 65, 66–7 Welch, Jack 17, 22, 45 welfare economics 250 welfare states 59, 110–43, 146–7, 215, 220, 221–30 and growth 228–30 Wilson, Charlie 192, 193 Windows Vista system 135 woollen manufacturing industry 70 work to rule 46–7 working hours 2, 7, 109–10 World Bank and free market 262 and free trade 72 and POSCO 126–8 government intervention 42, 44, 66 macro-economic stability 56 SAPs 118 WTO (World Trade Organization) 66, 262 Yes, Minister/Prime Minister (comedy series) 44 Yunus, Muhammad 161–2 Zimbabwe, hyperinflation 53–4


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The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian Prime Minister, called them ‘rogue speculators’ for helping to precipitate the crisis. What had been created was a financial system in which emerging countries could suffer great floods of ‘hot money’ followed by great droughts, hardly a sound basis for stability or growth. A year later, the largest of America’s hedge funds—the Greenwich-based Long Term Capital Management—had to be bailed out by a consortium of Wall Street banks to the tune of $3.6 billion to save the fund. It had been brought to its knees by a mix of poor investments and massive over-leverage. Leveraging offers potentially higher profits but only by greatly increasing the risk. As traders describe the risk, funds can ‘eat like chickens but shit like elephants’.

According to their architects, by anticipating and controlling the level of risk, finance could increase the level of liquidity in the markets and improve the level of efficiency with which resources were allocated, thus enabling a higher level of national and world economic activity. This claim seemed to be vindicated when two hedge fund partners, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1997. Their Greenwichbased firm, Long Term Capital Management had been founded by John Meriwether, a former highly successful bond trader at Salomon, Lewis’s boss and widely believed to be the inspiration for the Bonfire of the Vanities , Tom Wolf’s 1980s novel of Wall Street excess. For a while the heavily-leveraged operation grew to be one of the most lucrative of the American hedge funds.


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The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

A clue was to be provided nine months later, not so far away – in Cyprus (see here). 2 Of Fiscal Criminals and Bond Vigilantes Dramatis personae Nick Clegg, UK Liberal Democrat leader Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England (2003–13) David Cameron, then leader of the UK Opposition James Carville, adviser to President Clinton Brian Edmonds, bond trader, Cantor Fitzgerald Anonymous hedge fund credit default swap trader George Soros, financier and philanthropist Jim Rickards, ex-Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), lawyer, economist, trader Gordon Brown, British prime minister (2007–10) Jesse Norman, Conservative MP, member of the Treasury Select Committee Rachel Lomax, deputy governor of the Bank of England (2003–08) Dick Moore, mayor of Elkhart, Indiana, USA Robert Lucas, Nobel Prize in Economics.

Some senior bond-market participants believed that the very act of buying the insurance aggressively in markets that are less liquid than that of the underlying bonds actually contributed directly to the rise in interest rates paid on government bonds, and the sense of fear and panic. The market has at least an element of dangerous circularity. Jim Rickards used to work for Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which went belly-up in 1998. He describes the Big Euro Short as a ‘piñata party’ in which hedge funds were hunting as a feral pack, snapping at the soft underbellies of Greece, Italy and Spain. And then they watched as the money dropped out. He worried that the practice has ‘national security implications’, in that these three countries are all important Nato allies of the USA.

Vasicek’s first innovation was to assess the probability of individual corporate loans defaulting. He used information from share prices to calculate ‘asset values’, also known as ‘enterprise values’. It drew on the theories of two of his friends, the Nobel prize-winners Robert Merton and Myron Scholes (later to come to grief at Long Term Capital Management). Vasicek’s formula estimated a probability of default based on the movement and volatility of the share price. It was a more timely and useful measure than, say, a credit rating. KMV was surprisingly successful at selling these default predictions for vast sums to financiers sceptical about the assessments of the Big Three credit-ratings agencies.


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Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In December 1997 JP Morgan succeeded in securitising $10 billion of its existing portfolio of loans in a so-called BISTRO (broad index secured trust offering) deal and thus reducing the amount of capital it had to hold from $800 million to just $160 million. In the markets the joke was that the acronym actually stood for ‘BIS Total Rip Off’, in honour of the BIS (Bank of International Settlements), whose rules had been so easily avoided. Yet alarm bells should have been ringing. The following year, the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund very nearly collapsed when an investment strategy built on the mathematical models of Myron Scholes and Robert Merton (who had won the Nobel Prize for economics for his theories on how to price options) went spectacularly wrong. LTCM had anticipated the crisis in the Russian bond market as part of the fallout from the Asian crisis; but it had been unable to predict the behaviour of other assets.

See also Thomas Lee Hazen (2009) ‘Filling a Regulatory Gap: It is Time to Regulate Over-the-Counter Derivatives’, University of North Carolina Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1338339. 28 Satyajit Das (2006) Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives, Prentice-Hall. 29 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (2010) ‘Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: The Role of Investment Banks’, at http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/ Financial_Crisis/042710Exhibits.pdf. 30 Joseph Stiglitz, ‘The Insider: What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis’, New Republic, 17 April 2000. 31 David Jones (2000) ‘Emerging Problems with the Basel Capital Accord: Regulatory Capital Arbitrage and Related Issues’, Journal of Banking & Finance 24: 35–58. 32 Roger Lowenstein (2001) When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, Random House. 33 Allen Berger, Richard Herring and Giorgio Szego (1995) ‘The Role of Capital in Financial Institutions’, Journal of Banking and Finance 19 (3–4): 393–430. 34 Gary Gorton (2010) Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007, Oxford University Press. Chapter Seven: Communism for the Rich 1 Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef (2009) ‘Wages and Human Capital in the US Financial Industry: 1909–2006’, NBER Working Paper No. 14644. 2 See also Viral Acharya, Jennifer Carpenter, Xavier Gabaix, Kose John, Matthew Richardson, Marti Subrahmanyam, Rangarajan Sundaram and Eitan Zemel, ‘Corporate Governance in the Modern Financial Sector’, and Gian Luca Clementi, Thomas F.

., 17, 36, 135, 177 Cabinet Office, 218–19, 336, 337 Cable, Vincent, 220 Cambridge University, 9, 363 Cameron, David, 20, 179, 233–4, 235, 318, 338, 342; ‘Big Society’ policy, 19–20, 234, 271, 280 Campbell, Alastair, 141, 142, 224, 312 Canada, 121, 354, 358–9, 383 capital controls, abolition of, 32, 161 capitalism: see also entrepreneurs; innovation; amorality of, 16–19; ‘arms race’ effects, 105; boom and bust cycle, 181–7, 392; deregulation (from 1970s), 159–63, 388; fairness and, ix, x, 23–7, 41, 106, 122–3, 206–7, 210, 249, 385, 386, 394; as immutable force of nature, ix, 23, 40–2; incumbent firms, 29–30, 31, 105, 106, 110, 111–12, 253–5, 257, 297; interconnectedness of markets, 200–2, 204; knowledge-entrepreneurship dynamic, 27–8, 31, 103, 110–11, 112–13; liquidity as totemic, 199, 200, 202, 240, 243; need for ‘circuit breakers’, 197, 199, 202, 203; network theory and, 199–204, 206; required reforms of, 205–9, 215–16; stakeholder, x, 148–9; undue influence of, 32–3 Carlaw, Kenneth, 108, 263 Carnegie, Andrew, 195, 303 cars, motor, 91, 108, 109, 134, 269 Castells, Manuel, 317 Cayne, Jimmy, 173–4 CCTV cameras, 10 celebrity culture, 282, 314 central banks, 154, 157, 158, 160, 182, 185, 187, 208; see also Bank of England; Federal Reserve, 169–70, 176, 177, 183 Cerberus Capital Management, 177 Cervantes, Miguel de, 274 Channel 4, 330, 350 Charles I, King of England, 124–5 Charter One Financial, 150 chavs, mockery of, 25, 83, 272, 286–8 child poverty, 12, 21, 74–5, 83, 278, 279, 288–90, 291 China, x, 101, 112, 140, 144, 160, 226, 230, 354–5, 385; consumption levels, 375–6, 379, 380, 381; economic conflict with USA, 376–7, 378–80, 381, 382, 383; export led growth, 36, 169, 208, 226, 355–6, 375–7, 379–81, 382–3; rigged exchange rates, 36, 169, 355, 377, 378–9; surpluses of capital and, 149, 154, 169, 171, 208, 226, 375; unfairness of world system and, 383, 385 Christianity, 53, 54, 352, 353 Church of England, 128 Churchill, Winston, 138, 273, 313 Churchill Insurance, 150 Cisco, 253 Citigroup, 152, 158, 172, 177, 184, 202, 203, 242, 247 city academies, 278, 307 City of London, 34, 137, 138, 178–9, 252, 359; as incumbent elite, 14, 26, 31, 32–3, 210, 249, 355; in late nineteenth-century, 128–30; light-touch regulation of, 5, 32, 138, 145, 146–7, 151, 162, 187, 198–9; New Labour and, x–xi, 5, 19, 22, 142, 144–5, 355; remuneration levels see pay of executives and bankers civic engagement, 86, 313 civil service, 13, 221, 273, 312, 343 Clasper, Mike, 178 Clayton Act (USA, 1914), 133 Clegg, Nick, 22, 218, 318, 327–8, 342, 391 Clifton, Pete, 321 Clinton, Bill, 140, 177, 183 coalition government (from May 2010), 14, 20, 22, 37, 307, 311, 343, 346, 390–2; abolition of child trust fund, 302; capital spending cuts, 370–1; deficit reduction programme, xi, 19, 34, 214, 227, 357, 360–1, 364, 369–71, 373, 390–2; emergency budget (June 2010), 369–70; market fundamentalism and, 370; political reform commitment, 35, 341, 343–4, 346, 350, 390, 391; proposed financial reforms, 208, 209, 245, 252, 371; repudiation of Keynesian economics, xi, 390–1 Cohan, William, 158–9 Cohen, Ronald, 12, 245 collapse/crash of financial system, x, xi, 4, 9, 41, 144, 146, 152–4, 158–9, 168; costs of, 7, 19, 138, 152–3, 172, 214–15; errors responsible for, 136, 187–96, 197–204; global interconnectedness, 375, 382–3; lessening of internationalism following, 376–83; need to learn from/understand, 36–7; predictions/warnings of, 148, 153, 180, 182–5; recommended policy responses, 215–16; results of previous credit crunches, 358, 359–60, 361–2 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), 155, 167–8, 174 colonialism, 109, 124 Commodity Future Trading Commission, 182–3 communism, collapse of in Eastern Europe, 16, 19, 135, 140, 163 competition, 29, 30, 33, 51, 156, 185, 186, 207–8, 251; see also ‘open-access societies’; City of London and, 160, 178, 179, 198–9; deregulated banking and, 160, 161, 163, 164, 178, 179, 181; European Union and, 251, 258, 259; fairness and, 89–90, 99, 272; incumbent elites/oligarchs and, 104, 114, 129–30, 131–4, 257; innovation and, 40, 114, 257–60; national authorities/regimes, 201–2, 257–60, 316, 318; state facilitation of, 31 Competition Commission, 257–8 computer games, 233 Confederation of British Industry (CBI), 4, 6–7 Conservative Party, xi, 5, 11, 14, 97–8, 220, 343, 378; broken Britain claims, 16, 227, 271; budget deficit and, 19, 224, 357, 360–1, 368, 379; City/private sector funding of, 179, 257, 344; decline of class-based politics, 341; deregulation and, 32, 160, 161; fairness and, 83, 302, 374, 390; general election (1992) and, 140–1; general election (2010) and, 20, 97, 227, 234, 271, 357, 374, 379, 390; Conservative Party – continued government policies (1979-97), 32, 81, 275–6, 290; inheritance/wealth taxes and, 74, 302–3; market fundamentalism and, 5, 17, 138, 147, 160, 161; poverty and, 21, 279; reduced/small state policy, 20, 22, 233–4, 235 construction industry, 5, 33, 268 consumer goods, types of, 266–7 Continental Illinois collapse, 152, 162 Convention on Modern Liberty, 340 Cook, Robin, 142 Cootner, Paul, 194–5 Copenhagen climate change talks (2009), 226, 231, 385 Corporate Leadership Council, US, 93 Corzine, Jon, 177 county markets, pre-twentieth-century, 90 Coutts, Ken, 363 Cowell, Simon, 314, 315 ‘creative destruction’ process, 111, 112, 134 creative industries, 11, 71, 355 credit cards, 64, 354 credit crunch: see collapse/crash of financial system credit default swaps, 151, 152, 166–8, 170, 171, 175, 176, 191, 203, 207 Crédit Lyonnais collapse, 152 credit-rating agencies, 151, 165, 175, 196, 197, 248, 269, 362, 388; funding of, 151, 196, 207 criminal activity/allegations, 7, 101, 103, 104–5, 138, 167–8 Crosby, James, 178 Cuba, 61 culture, British, 12, 187, 282, 314 Dacre, Paul, 324, 326, 329 Daily Mail, 218, 286, 288, 315, 324, 325–7, 339, 342 Daily Telegraph, 288, 317, 319, 327 Darling, Alistair, 149, 204, 252 Darwin, Charles, 31 Data Monitor, 186 Davies, Howard, 198 Davies, Nick, Flat Earth News, 319, 321, 323–4, 326, 331–2 de Gaulle, Charles, 65 debt, 33, 155, 209, 351–63; corporate/commercial, 8, 29, 181, 245, 248, 352, 354, 359, 363, 374; moral attitudes towards, 351–4, 357, 360–1; necessity of, 155, 351, 353, 354; private, 5, 186, 187, 210, 226, 279–80, 354–7, 359, 363, 373; public, 9, 34, 164, 166, 167, 182, 203, 214, 224–6, 356–7, 362–3, 375, 388, 393; sustainable level of, 356–7, 368–9 Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 265 defence and armed forces, 34, 372 deficit, public, 4, 34, 213, 224–6, 335, 364–74; coalition’s reduction programme, xi, 19, 34, 214, 227, 357, 360–1, 364, 369–71, 373, 390–2, 393; need for fiscal policy, 224–5, 226, 357–8, 364, 365–9, 370, 374; speed of reduction of, 213, 224–5, 360–1, 368, 371 Delingpole, James, 287 Delong, Brad, 27, 106 democracy, 13–15, 235, 310–16, 333–48; centralisation of power and, 14–15, 35, 217, 313, 334, 337, 342; fair process and, 86, 89, 96–9; incumbent elites and, 35, 99; industrial revolution and, 128; media undermining of, 315–16, 317–18, 321–9, 333, 350; ‘open-access societies’ and, 136, 314 Democratic Party, US, 18, 140, 183, 379 Demos, 289 Deng Xiao Ping, 140 Denham, John, 21 deprivation and disadvantage, 10, 34, 288–93, 307–8, 393; low-earning households, 11–12, 13, 291, 361; weight of babies and, 13; young children and, 74–5, 83, 288–90 derivatives, 140, 145, 150–1, 164–8, 171, 175, 188, 207, 209; City of London and, 32, 137, 150–1, 157, 199; mathematical models (‘quants’) and, 188, 191; regulation and, 183, 197–8, 199 desert, due, concept of, 4, 24, 38–43, 45–7, 50–63, 64–8, 73–7, 80–2, 223, 395; see also effort, discretionary; proportionality; big finance and, 40–2, 82, 167, 174, 176, 210; debt and, 351–2; diplomacy/international relations and, 385–6; Enlightenment notions of, 53–6, 58–9, 112; luck and, 70, 73–7, 273; poverty relief systems and, 80–2, 277–8; productive entrepreneurship and, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 222, 392–3; taxation and, 40, 220, 266 Deutsche Bank, 170 developing countries, 71–2, 160, 354–5, 375, 376, 385 Diamond, Bob, 24 Dickens, Charles, 353 digitalisation, 34, 231, 320, 349, 350 Doepke, Matthias, 115–16 dot.com bubble, 9, 193 Drugs Advisory Panel, 11 Duffy, Gillian, 394 Durham University, 263 Dworkin, Ronald, 70 Dyson, James, 28, 33 East India Company, 130 Easyjet, 28, 233 eBay, 136 economic theory, 43–4, 188–9, 366; see also Keynesian economics; market fundamentalism economies of scale, 130–1, 254–5, 258 The Economist, 326, 330, 349 economy, British: see also capitalism; financial system, British; annual consumption levels, 375; balance of payments, 363–4; as ‘big firm’ economy, 254; change in landscape of trading partners, 230–1; coalition capital spending cuts, 370–1; collapse of tax base, 224, 368; cumulative loss of output caused by crash, 138, 153, 172, 214–15; desired level of state involvement, 234–5; domination of market fundamentalism, 16–17; economic boom, 3–4, 5–6, 12, 143, 173, 181–7, 244–5; fall in volatility, 365; fiscal deficit, 368; fiscal policy, 208, 224–5, 226, 357–8, 364–9, 370, 374; growth and, 9–10, 214–15, 218–19, 224, 359, 363; inefficient public spending, 335; investment in ‘intangibles’, 232–3; in late nineteenth-century, 128–30; ‘leading-edge’ sectors, 218–19; need for engaged long term ownership, 240–4, 249–51; as non-saver, 36, 354; potential new markets/opportunities, 231–3; public-private sector interdependence and, 219–22, 229–30, 261, 265–6, 391, 392; required reforms of, 20, 239–44, 249–52, 264–6, 371–4 see also national ecosystem of innovation; ‘specialising sectors’, 219; urgent need for reform, 36–7; volatility of, 297–8; vulnerability of after credit crunch, 358–64 economy, world: acute shortfall of demand, 375–6; Asian and/or OPEC capital surpluses and, 149, 153–4, 169, 171, 208, 226, 354, 375; conflicts of interest and, 137, 138; deregulation (from 1970s), 159–63; emerging powers’ attitudes to, 226; entrenched elites and, 137–8, 210; fall in volatility, 365; international institutions as unfair, 383, 385; London/New York axis, 149, 150–1, 157–8, 160, 187, 202; need for international cooperation, 357–8, 379–80, 381–3, 384, 385–6; post-crunch deleverage pressures, 359–60, 374–5; protectionism dangers, 36, 358, 376–7, 378, 379, 382, 386; savers/non-savers imbalance, 36, 169, 208, 222, 355, 356, 375–6, 378–83; shift of wealth from West to East, 36, 383–4; sovereign debt crises, 167, 203, 214; unheeded warnings, 182–5; wrecking of European ERM, 140, 144 Edinburgh University, 145 education, 10, 20–1, 128, 131, 272–4, 276, 278, 292–5, 304–8, 343; Building Schools for the Future programme, 371; cognitive and mental skills, 288–90, 304–6; private, 13, 114, 264–5, 272–3, 276, 283–4, 293–5, 304, 306 effort, discretionary, 50, 53, 54–5, 58–60, 80, 90–1, 114, 134; see also desert, due, concept of; fair process and, 91–4; indispensability and, 65–7; innovation and invention, 62, 65, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 117, 131, 223, 262–3, 392–3; luck and, 26–7, 65, 67, 70, 71, 73–4, 75–7; productive/unproductive, 43, 46–7, 51–2, 62, 64–5, 102–3, 392–3; proportionate reward for, 26, 39–40, 44, 47, 61, 74, 76–7, 84, 122, 272, 273, 2 84 egalitarianism, 27, 53–4, 55–6, 61, 75, 78–80, 144, 341, 343; Enlightenment equal worth concept, 53, 55, 59–60 Ehrenfeld, Rachel, 333 Eisman, Steve, 207 electoral politics: see also general election (6 May 2010); general elections, 97, 138, 277, 315; fair process and, 96–9; franchise, 128; general election (1992), x, 138, 140–1, 144, 148, 277; general election (1997), x, 138, 141 electricity, 134, 228, 256 electronic trading, 105 elites, incumbent, 23, 31–3, 99, 131; City of London, 14, 26, 31, 32–3, 210, 249, 355; competition and, 104, 113, 114, 129–30, 131–4, 257; democracy and, 35, 99; Enlightenment and, 122; history of (from 1880s), 131–4; history of in Britain (to 1900), 124–30; innovation and, 29–30, 110, 111–12, 113, 114, 115, 116; modern big finance and, 135, 137–8, 180, 210, 387–9; in ‘natural states’, 111, 113, 114–15, 116, 123–4, 127; New Labour’s failure to challenge, x–xi, 14, 22, 388, 389–90; world economy and, 137–8, 210 EMI, 28, 247, 248 employment and unemployment, 6, 75, 291–3, 295, 300, 373, 393; employment insurance concept, 298–9, 301, 374; lifelong learning schemes, 300, 301; lifelong savings plans, 300; unemployment benefit, 81, 281 Engels, Friedrich, 121–2 English language as lingua franca, 124 Enlightenment, European, 22, 30–1, 146, 261, 314–15; economics and, 104, 108–9, 116–17, 121–3; notions of fairness/desert, 53–6, 58–9, 112, 122–3, 394; science and technology and, 31, 108–9, 112–13, 116–17, 121, 126–7 Enron affair, 147 entrepreneurs: see also innovation; productive entrepreneurship; capitalist knowledge dynamic, 27–8, 31, 110–11, 112–13; challenges of the status quo, 29–30; Conservative reforms (1979-97) and, 275; private capital and, 241; public-private sector interdependence and, 219–22, 229–30, 261, 265–6, 391, 392; rent-seeking and, 61–2, 63, 78, 84, 101, 105, 112, 113–14, 116, 129, 135, 180; unproductive, 28–9, 33, 61–2, 63, 78, 84, 101–2, 103–5, 180 environmental issues, 35–6, 71–2, 102, 226, 228, 231, 236, 385, 390, 394; due desert and, 68; German Greens and, 269 Erie Railroad Company, 133 Essex County Council, 325, 332 European Commission, 298 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 140, 144, 166 European Union (EU), 11, 82, 179, 379–80, 383–4, 385; British media and, 15, 328, 378; Competition Commissioner, 251, 258, 259; scepticism towards, 15, 36, 328, 377, 378, 386 eurozone, 377 Fabian Society, 302–3 factory system, 126 fairness: see also desert, due, concept of; proportionality; abuse/playing of system and, 24–5, 27; asset fairness proposals, 301–3, 304; behavioural psychology and, 44, 47–50, 59–61; Blair’s conservative view of, 143; Britishness and, 15–16, 392–3, 395; capitalism and, ix, x, 23–7, 41, 106, 122–3, 206–7, 210, 249, 385, 386, 394; challenges to political left, 78–83; coalition government (from May 2010) and, 22, 37; commonly held attitudes, 44, 45–7; deficit reduction and, 226, 227, 374; economic and social determinism and, 56–8; Enlightenment notions of, 53–6, 58–9, 112, 122–3, 394; fair process, 84–94, 96, 98–9, 272; as foundation of morality, 24, 26, 45, 50; individual responsibility and, 39, 78–9; inequality in Britain, 78, 80, 275–6, 277–8, 342; international relations and, 226, 385–6; ‘Just World Delusion’, 83; luck and, 72–7; management-employee relationships, 90–2; models/frameworks of, 43–58; need for shared understanding of, 25, 37, 43; partisanship about, 42–3; politicians/political parties and, 22, 83, 271–2, 302–3, 374, 391–2; popular support for NHS and, 75, 77, 283; pre-Enlightenment notions, 52–3; shared capitalism and, 66, 92–3; state facilitation of, ix–x, 391–2, 394–5; welfare benefits to migrants and, 81–2, 282, 283, 284 Farnborough Sixth Form College, 294 Federal Reserve, 169–70, 176, 177, 183 Fees Act (1891), 128 Fertile Crescent, 106 feudalism, European, 53–4, 74, 104, 105 financial instruments, 103, 148, 157, 167–8 Financial Services and Markets Act (2001), 198 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 24, 147, 162, 178, 198–9, 208 financial system, British: see also capitalism; economy, British; Asian and/or OPEC capital surpluses and, 149, 154, 354; big finance as entrenched elite, 136, 137–8, 176, 178–80, 210, 387–9; declining support for entrepreneurship, 241; deregulation (1971), 161; fees and commissions, 33; importance of liquidity, 240, 243; lack of data on, 241; London/New York axis, 149, 150–1, 157–8, 160, 187, 202; massive growth of, 137, 138, 209, 219; need for tax reform, 209–10; regulation and see regulation; required reforms to companies, 249–50; savings institutions’ share holdings, 240–1; short termism of markets, 241, 242–3; unfairness of, 138, 210 Financial Times, 12, 149, 294, 330, 349, 361 Fink, Stanley, 179 fiscal policy, 208, 224–5, 226, 357–8, 364–9, 374; coalition rejection of, 370 fish stocks, conservation of, 394 Fitch (credit-rating agencies), 248 flexicurity social system, 299–301, 304, 374 Forbes’ annual list, 30 Ford, Henry, 195, 302 foreign exchange markets, 32, 161, 164, 165, 168, 363, 367; China’s rigged exchange rate, 36, 169, 355, 377, 378–9; currency options, 166, 191; eurozone, 377 foreign takeovers of British firms, 8, 388 Fortune magazine, 94 Foster, Sir Christopher, 313 foundation schools, 307 France, 51–2, 123–4, 163, 372, 375, 377 free trade, 163, 334, 379 Frey, Bruno, 60, 86 Friedman, Benjamin, 282–3 Fukuyama, Francis, 140 Fuld, Dick, 192 Future Jobs Fund, 373 G20 countries, 209, 358, 368, 374 Galliano, John, 143 Gardner, Howard, 274, 305–6 gated communities, 13 Gates, Bill, 71 Gates, Bill (Senior), 222 Gaussian distribution, 190–1, 194 ‘gearing’, 6 general election (6 May 2010), 97, 142, 179, 214, 217, 227, 234, 271, 314, 318, 327–8, 334, 378; Gillian Duffy incident, 394; result of, xi, 20, 345–6, 390 ‘generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasicity’ (GARCH), 194 genetically modified crops, 232 Germany, 36, 63, 244, 262, 269, 375–6, 379, 380; export led growth, 355–6, 375, 381–2; Fraunhofer Institutes, 252, 264; Greek bail-out and, 377; pre-1945 period, 128, 129, 134, 382, 383 Gieve, Sir John, 339–40 Gilligan, Andrew, 329 Gladwell, Malcolm, 76–7 Glasgow University, 323 Glass-Steagall Act, 162, 170, 202–3 Glastonbury festival, 143 globalisation, 32, 98, 140, 143, 144, 153–4, 163, 182, 297, 363, 366, 380 Goldman Sachs, 42, 63, 103, 150, 167–8, 174, 176, 177, 205 Goodwin, Sir Fred, 7, 150, 176, 340 Google, 131, 136, 253, 255, 258, 262 Goolsbee, Austin, 52 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 140 Gough, Ian, 79 Gould, Jay, 133 Gould, Philip, 142 government: see also democracy; political system, British; cabinet government, 312, 334, 337; centralisation of power, 14–15, 35, 217, 313, 334, 337, 341, 342; control of news agenda, 14, 224, 313; disregard of House of Commons, 14–15, 223, 339, 345; Number 10 Downing Street as new royal court, 14, 337, 338, 346, 347; press officers/secretaries, 14, 180, 224, 312; Prime Ministerial power, 337, 344, 345, 346 GPS navigation systems, 233, 265 Gray, Elisha, 221 Great Depression, 159, 162, 205, 362 Greece: classical, 25, 26, 38, 39, 44–5, 52–3, 59, 96, 107, 108; crisis and bail-out (2010), 167, 371, 377, 378 Green, Sir Philip, 12, 29, 33 Green Investment Bank, proposed, 252, 371 Greenhead College, Huddersfield, 294 Greenspan, Alan, 145–6, 165, 177, 183, 184, 197–8 Gregory, James, 277 growth, economic: Britain and, 9–10, 214–15, 219, 221, 359, 364; education and, 305–6; export led growth, 36, 169, 208, 226, 355–6, 375–7, 378–83; social investment and, 280–1 GSK, 219, 254 the Guardian, 319, 330, 349 Gupta, Sanjeev, 367 Gutenberg, Johannes, 110–11 Habsburg Empire, 127 Haines, Joe, 312 Haji-Ioannous, Stelios, 28 Haldane, Andrew, 8, 151, 153, 193, 214, 215 the Halifax, 186, 251 Hamilton, Lewis, 64, 65 Hammersmith and Fulham, Borough of, 167 Hampton, Sir Philip, 173 Hands, Guy, 28, 178, 246–8 Hanley, Lynsey, 291, 293, 302 Hanushek, Eric, 305–6 Hart, Betty, 289 Harvard University, 47, 62, 198 Hashimoto administration in Japan, 362 Hastings, Max, 217–18 Hauser, Marc, 47–50 Hawley, Michael, 65–6 Hayward, Tony, 216–17 HBOS, 157, 158, 178, 251 health and well-being, 9, 75, 77, 106, 232, 233, 290–1; see also National Health Service (NHS) Heckman, James, 290 hedge funds, 6, 21, 103, 157–8, 167–8, 172, 203, 205, 206, 240; collapses of, 152, 173–4, 187, 202; as destabilisers, 166–7, 168; destruction of ERM, 140, 144, 166; near collapse of LTCM, 169–70, 183, 193, 200–1 hedging, 164, 165–6 Heinz, Henry John, 302 Hermes fund management company, 242 Herrman, Edwina, 179 Herstatt Bank collapse, 152 Hetherington, Mark, 84 Hewitt, Patricia, 180 Hewlett-Packard, 30 Hills Report on social housing, 290 Hilton, Paris, 304 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 146 Hirst, Damien, 12 history, economic, 121–36, 166, 285–6, 353–4 Hobhouse, Leonard, 220, 222, 234, 235, 261, 266 Hobsbawm, Eric, 100 Hoffman, Elizabeth, 60 Holland, 113, 124, 230 Honda, 91, 269 Hong Kong, 168 Hopkins, Harry, 300 Horton, Tim, 277 House of Commons, 14–15, 223, 312–13, 337–9, 345 House of Lords, 15, 128, 129, 312, 334, 344, 346–7 housing, social, 10, 289, 290–1, 292, 308–9 housing cost credits, 308–9 HSBC, 181, 251 Huhne, Chris, 346 Hunt family, sale of cattle herds, 201 Hurka, Thomas, 45–6 Hutton, Will, works of, x; The State We’re In, x, 148–9 IBM, 29, 164, 254 Iceland, 7, 138 ICT industry, 9, 29–30, 109, 134, 135–6, 182, 229 immigration, 11, 143, 326, 328, 342, 343, 386, 394; from Eastern Europe, 82, 281–2, 283; welfare state and, 81–2, 281–2, 283, 284 incapacity benefit, 27 the Independent, 93, 330 Independent Safeguarding Authority, 339 India, 144, 226, 230, 254, 354–5 individual responsibility, 17, 38, 39, 78–9 individualism, 54, 57, 66, 111, 221, 281, 341, 366; capitalism/free market theories and, ix, 17, 19, 27, 40, 145, 221, 234–5 Indonesia, 168 Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (now 3i), 250 industrial revolution, 28, 112, 115, 121–3, 124, 126–8, 130, 315 inflation, 6, 32, 355, 364, 365; targets, 163, 165, 208, 359 Ingham, Bernard, 312 innovation: see also entrepreneurs; national ecosystem of innovation; as collective and social, 40, 131, 219–22, 261, 265–6, 388; comparisons between countries, 67; competition and, 40, 114, 257–60; development times, 240, 243; discretionary effort and, 62, 65, 102–3, 105–6, 131, 222, 392–3; dissemination of knowledge and, 110–11, 112–13, 219–22, 265–6; due desert and, 40, 62, 67, 112, 117; ‘financial innovation’, 63–4, 138, 147, 149, 153–4, 182; general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 107–11, 112, 117, 126–7, 134, 228–9, 256, 261, 384; high taxation as deterrent, 104, 105; history of, 107–17, 121–7, 131–4, 221; increased pace of advance, 228–9, 230, 266–7; incremental, 108, 254, 256; incumbent elites and, 29–30, 104, 106, 109, 111–12, 113, 114, 115, 116, 257; large firms and, 251–2, 254–5; as natural to humans, 106–7, 274; need for network of specialist banks, 251–2, 265, 371; in ‘open-access societies’, 109–13, 114, 116–17, 122–3, 126–7, 131, 136, 315; patents and copyright, 102, 103, 105, 110, 260–1, 263; private enterprise and, 100–1; regulation and, 268–70; risk-taking and, 6, 103, 111, 189; short term investment culture and, 33, 242–3, 244; small firms and, 252, 253–4, 255–6; universities and, 261–5 Innovation Fund, 21, 251, 252 Institute of Fiscal Studies, 275–6, 363, 368–9, 372 Institute of Government, 334, 335, 337, 343 insurance, 165–6, 187, 240, 242 Intel, 255, 256 intellectual property, 260–1 interest rates, 164, 191, 352–3, 354, 357, 359, 360, 361, 362, 367, 380 internal combustion engine, 28, 109, 134 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 9, 152–3, 177–8, 187, 207, 226, 383, 384; Asian currency crisis (1997) and, 168–9; proposed bank levy and financial activities tax, 209; support for fiscal policy, 367 internet, 11, 28, 52, 109, 134, 227, 256, 265; news and politics on, 316–17, 321, 349; pay-walls, 316, 349; as threat to print media, 324, 331, 349 iPods, 105, 143 Iraq War, 14–15, 18, 36, 144, 329 Ireland, 138 iron steamships, 126 Islam, 352, 353 Islamic fundamentalism, 283, 384 Israel, 251, 322–3 Italy, 101, 103, 317, 328 ITN, 330, 331 James, Howell, 180 Japan, 36, 67, 140, 163, 168, 244, 369, 375, 376, 385, 386; credit crunch (1989-92), 359–60, 361–2, 382; debt levels, 356, 362, 363; incumbent elites in early twentieth-century, 134; Tokyo Bay, 254; Top Runner programme, 269 Jenkins, Roger, 296 Jobcentre Plus, 300 Jobs, Steve, 29–30, 65–6, 71 John Lewis Group, 66, 67, 93, 246 Johnson, Boris, 179 Johnson, Simon, 177 Jones, Tom, 242 Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 21, 278–9 journalism, 318–21, 323–4, 326–7 Jovanovic, Boyan, 256 JP Morgan, 169, 191–2, 195–6 judges, 15 justice systems, 30–1, 44–5, 49; symbolised by pair of scales, 4, 40 Kahneman, Daniel, 94–5 Kant, Immanuel, 73, 112, 274 Kay, John, 175 Kennedy, Helena, 340 Keynesian economics, x, xi, 184, 190, 196–7, 354, 362, 390–1 Kindleberger, Charles, 184 King, Mervyn, 213 Kinnock, Neil, 142 kitemarking, need for, 267 Klenow, Peter, 52 Knetsch, Jack, 94–5 Knight, Frank, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921), 189, 191, 196–7 knowledge: capitalist advance of, 27–8, 31, 110–11, 112–13; public investment in learning, 28, 31, 40, 131, 220, 235, 261, 265 knowledge economy, 8, 11–12, 34, 135–6, 229–33, 258, 273–4, 341, 366; credit growth and, 355; graduate entry to, 295; large firms and, 251–2, 254–5; small firms and, 252, 253–4, 255–6, 261; state facilitation of, 219–22, 229–30 Koizumi administration in Japan, 362 Koo, Richard, 360, 361–2 Kuper, Simon, 352 Kwak, James, 64, 177 labour market, 52, 62, 83, 95; flexibility, 5, 275, 276, 299, 364–5, 387 laissez-faire ideology, 153, 198–9, 259 Laker, Freddie, 30 Lambert, Richard, 6–7 language acquisition and cognitive development, 288, 289 Large Hadron Collider, 263 Latin American debt crisis, 164 Lavoisier, Antoine, 31 Lazarus, Edmund, 179 Leahy, Sir Terry, 295 Learning and Skills Council, 282, 300 left wing politics, modern, 17, 38, 78–83 Lehman Brothers, 150, 152, 165, 170, 181, 192, 204 lender-of-last-resort function, 155, 158, 160, 187 Lerner, Melvin, 83 leverage, 6, 29, 154–6, 157, 158, 172, 179, 180, 198, 204, 209–10, 254, 363; disguised on balance sheet, 181, 195; effect on of credit crunches, 358, 359, 360, 361, 374–5; excess/massive levels, 7, 147–8, 149, 150–1, 158, 168, 170, 187, 192, 197, 203; need for reform of, 206, 207, 208; private equity and, 245–6, 247 Lewis, Jemima, 282, 287 Lewis, Joe, 12 libel laws, 332–3, 348–9 Liberal Democrats, xi, 11, 98, 141, 343, 360–1, 368; general election (2010) and, 97, 142, 179, 271, 390 libertarianism, 234 Likierman, Sir Andrew, 180 limited liability (introduced 1855), 353–4, 363 Lind, Allan, 85 Lindert, Peter, 280–1 Lipsey, Richard, 108, 263 Lisbon earthquake (1755), 54 Lisbon Treaty Constitution, 328 literacy and numeracy, 20–1 livestock fairs, pre-twentieth-century, 90 Lloyds Bank, 176, 178, 186, 202, 204, 251, 259 Lo, Andrew, 195 loan sharks, illegal, 291 local government, 307, 347–8 Locke, John, 54–5, 59 London School of Economics (LSE), 246 London Stock Exchange, 90, 162 London Underground, financing of, 336, 389 lone parent families, 292 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 169–70, 183, 193, 194, 200–1 long-term incentive plans (LTIPs), 6 Loomes, Graham, 59 luck, 23, 26–7, 38, 39, 40, 41, 67, 68, 69–77, 222, 273, 393–4; diplomacy/international relations and, 385–6; disadvantaged children and, 74–5, 83, 288–90; executive pay and, 138; taxation and, 73–4, 75, 78, 303 Luxembourg, 138 MacDonald, Ramsey, 315 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 62 Machin, Steve, 283–4 Macmillan Committee into City (1931), 179 Madoff, Bernie, 7 mafia, Italian, 101, 104–5 Major, John, 138, 180, 279, 334 Malaysia, 168 malls, out-of-town, 143 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 194, 195 Mandelson, Peter, 21, 24, 142, 148, 220 manufacturing sector, decline of, 5, 8, 219, 272, 292, 341, 363 Manza, Jeff, 281, 282 Marconi, 142–3 market fundamentalism, 9–19, 32–3, 40–2, 366; belief in efficiency of markets, 188–9, 190, 193, 194, 235–9, 366; coalition government (from May 2010) and, 370; collapse of, 3–4, 7–9, 19, 20, 219–20, 235, 392; Conservative Party and, 5, 17, 138, 147, 160, 161; domination of, 5–6, 14, 16–17, 163, 364–5, 387–90; likely resurgence of, 5, 8; New Labour and, x–xi, 5, 19, 144–9, 388, 389–90; post-communist fiasco in Russia, 135; rejection of fiscal policy, 224–5, 364–5, 367 mark-to-market accounting convention, 175 Marland, Lord Jonathan, 179 Marquand, David, 328 Marsh, Jodie, 64, 65 Marx, Karl, 56–8, 121–2 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 232, 274–5 mass production, 109, 134, 182 Masters, Blythe, 196 mathematical models (‘quants’), 105, 149, 151, 152, 165, 169, 188, 190–6, 203; extensions and elaborations, 194; Gaussian distribution, 190–1, 194; JP Morgan and, 195–6 Matthewson, Sir George (former chair of RBS), 25 Maude, Francis, 180 Mayhew, Henry, 285–6 McCartney, Paul, 247 McGoldrick, Mark, 174 McKinsey Global Institute, 253, 358–9, 360, 363 McQueen, Alexander, 143 media, mainstream, 6, 35, 312, 315–20, 321–32, 348–50; commoditisation of information, 318–20, 321; communications technology and, 316, 320, 349; domination of state by, 14, 16, 223–4, 338, 339, 343; fanatical anti-Europeanism, 15, 328, 378; foreign/tax exile ownership of, 218; hysterical tabloid campaigns, 10–11, 298, 319–20; ‘info-capitalism’, 317–18, 327, 328, 342; lauding of celebrity, 281, 314; modern 24/7 news agenda, 13, 224, 321, 343; regional newspapers, 331; as setter of agenda/narrative, 327–31, 342; television news, 330–1; undermining of democracy, 315–16, 317–18, 321–9, 333, 350; urgent need for reform, 35, 218, 344, 348–50, 391; view of poverty as deserved, 25, 53, 83, 281, 286; weakness of foreign coverage, 322, 323, 330 Mencken, H.L., 311 mergers and takeovers, 8, 21, 33, 92, 245, 251, 258, 259, 388 Merkel, Angela, 381–2 Merrill Lynch, 150, 170, 175, 192 Merton, Robert, 169, 191 Meucci, Antonnio, 221 Mexico, 30, 385 Meyer, Christopher, 332 Michalek, Richard, 175 Microsoft, 71, 114, 136, 253, 254, 258–9 Milburn, Alan, 273 Miles, David, 186–7 Milgram, Stanley, 200 millennium bug, 319 Miller, David, 70, 76, 77 minimum wage, 142, 278 Minsky, Hyman, 183, 185 Mirror newspapers, 319, 329 Mlodinow, Leonard, 72–3 MMR vaccine, 327 mobile phones, 30, 134, 143, 229, 349 modernity, 54–5, 104 Mokyr, Joel, 112 monarchy, 15, 312, 336 Mondragon, 94 monetary policy, 154, 182, 184, 185, 208, 362, 367 monopolies, 74, 102, 103, 160, 314; history of, 104, 113, 124, 125–6, 130–4; in the media, 30, 317, 318, 331, 350; modern new wave of, 35, 135–6, 137–8, 201–2, 258–9; ‘oligarchs’, 30, 65, 104 Monopolies and Mergers Commission, 258, 318 Moody’s (credit-ratings agency), 151, 175 morality, 16–27, 37, 44–54, 70, 73; see also desert, due, concept of; fairness; proportionality; debt and, 351–4, 357, 360–1 Morgan, JP, 67 Morgan, Piers, 329 Morgan Stanley, 150 Mulas-Granados, Carlos, 367 Murdoch, James, 389 Murdoch, Rupert, 317–18, 320, 327 Murphy, Kevin, 62, 63 Murray, Jim ‘Mad Dog’, 321 Myners, Paul, 340 Nash bargaining solution, 60 National Audit Office, 340 National Child Development Study, 289–90 national ecosystem of innovation, 33–4, 65, 103, 206, 218, 221, 239–44, 255–9, 374; state facilitation of, 102, 219–22, 229–30, 233, 251–2, 258–66, 269–70, 392 National Health Service (NHS), 21, 27, 34, 92, 265, 277, 336, 371–2; popular support for, 75, 77, 283 national insurance system, 81, 277, 302 national strategy for neighbourhood renewal, 278 Navigation Acts, abolition of, 126 Neiman, Susan, 18–19 neo-conservatism, 17–18, 144–9, 387–90 network theory, 199–201, 202–4, 206; Pareto curve and, 201–2 New Economics Foundation, 62 New Industry New Jobs strategy, 21 New Labour: budget deficit and, 224, 335, 360, 368, 369; business friendly/promarket policies, x–xi, 139–40, 142, 145, 146–7, 162, 198–9, 382; City of London and, x–xi, 5, 19, 22, 142–3, 144–5, 355; decline of class-based politics, 341; failure to challenge elites, x–xi, 14, 22, 388, 389–90; general election (1992) and, 138, 140–1, 144, 148, 277; general election (2005) and, 97; general election (2010) and, 20, 271, 334, 374, 378; light-touch regulation and, 138, 145, 146–7, 162, 198–9; New Industry New Jobs strategy, 21; one-off tax on bank bonuses, 26, 179, 249; record in government, 10–11, 19, 20–2, 220, 276–80, 302, 306, 334–6, 366–7, 389–90; reforms to by ‘modernisers’, 141; responses to newspaper campaigns, 11 New York markets, 140, 152, 162; Asian and/or OPEC capital surpluses and, 169, 171, 354; London/New York axis, 149, 150–1, 157–8, 160, 188, 202 Newsweek, 174 Newton, Isaac, 31, 127, 190 NHS Direct, 372 Nicoli, Eric, 13 non-executive directors (NEDs), 249–50 Nordhaus, William, 260 Nordic countries, 262; Iceland, 7, 138; Norway, 281; Sweden, 264, 281 North, Douglas, 113, 116, 129–30 Northern Rock, 9, 156, 157, 158, 186, 187–8, 202, 204, 251, 340–1 Norton Publishing, 93 Nozick, Robert, 234, 235 nuclear non-proliferation, 226, 384, 394 Nussbaum, Martha, 79 Obama, Barack, 18, 183, 380, 382–3, 394–5 the Observer, 141, 294, 327 Office for Budget Responsibility, 360 Office of Fair Trading (OFT), 257, 258 OFSTED, 276 oil production, 322; BP Gulf of Mexico disaster (2010), 216–17, 392; finite stocks and, 230, 384; OPEC, 149, 161, 171; price increase (early 1970s), 161; in USA, 130, 131, 132 Olsen, Ken, 29 Olympics (2012), 114 open markets, 29, 30, 31, 40, 89, 92, 100–1, 366, 377, 379, 382, 384; see also ‘open-access societies’; as determinants of value, 51–2, 62; fairness and, 60–1, 89–91, 94–6; ‘reference prices’ and, 94–6 ‘open-access societies’, 134, 135, 258, 272, 273, 275, 276, 280–1, 394; Britain as ‘open-access society’ (to 1850), 124, 126–7; democracy and, 136, 314; Enlightenment and, 30–1, 314–15, 394; innovation and invention in, 109–13, 114, 116–17, 122–3, 126–7, 131, 136, 315; partial political opening in, 129–30; US New Freedom programme, 132–3 opium production, 102 options, 166, 188, 191 Orange County derivatives losses, 167 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 180, 337, 373 Orwell, George, 37 Osborne, George, 147, 208, 224, 245, 302, 338 Overend, Gurney and Co., 156–7 Oxbridge/top university entry, 293–4, 306 Oxford University, 261 Page, Scott, 204 Paine, Tom, 347 Pareto, Vilfredo, 201–2 Paribas, 152, 187 Parkinson, Lance-Bombardier Ben, 13 participation, political, 35, 86, 96, 99 Paulson, Henry, 177 Paulson, John, 103, 167–8 pay of executives and bankers, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 22, 66–7, 138, 387; bonuses, 6, 25–6, 41, 174–5, 176, 179, 208, 242, 249, 388; high levels/rises of, 6–7, 13, 25, 82–3, 94, 172–6, 216, 296, 387, 393; Peter Mandelson on, 24; post-crash/bail-outs, 176, 216; in private equity houses, 248; remuneration committees, 6, 82, 83, 176; shared capitalism and, 66, 93; spurious justifications for, 42, 78, 82–3, 94, 176, 216 pension, state, 81, 372, 373 pension funds, 240, 242 Pettis, Michael, 379–80 pharmaceutical industry, 219, 255, 263, 265, 267–8 Phelps, Edmund, 275 philanthropy and charitable giving, 13, 25, 280 Philippines, 168 Philippon, Thomas, 172–3 Philips Electronics, Royal, 256 Pimco, 177 piracy, 101–2 Plato, 39, 44 Player, Gary, 76 pluralist state/society, x, 35, 99, 113, 233, 331, 350, 394 Poland, 67, 254 political parties, 13–14, 340, 341, 345, 390; see also under entries for individual parties political system, British: see also democracy; centralised constitution, 14–15, 35, 217, 334; coalitions as a good thing, 345–6; decline of class-based politics, 341; devolving of power to Cardiff and Edinburgh, 15, 334; expenses scandal, 3, 14, 217, 313, 341; history of (to late nineteenth-century), 124–30; lack of departmental coordination, 335, 336, 337; long-term policy making and, 217; monarchy and, 15, 312, 336; politicians’ lack of experience outside politics, 338; required reforms of, 344–8; select committee system, 339–40; settlement (of 1689), 125; sovereignty and, 223, 346, 347, 378; urgent need for reform, 35, 36–7, 218, 344; voter-politician disengagement, 217–18, 310, 311, 313–14, 340 Pommerehne, Werner, 60 population levels, world, 36 Portsmouth Football Club, 352 Portugal, 108, 109, 121, 377 poverty, 278–9; child development and, 288–90; circumstantial causes of, 26, 283–4; Conservative Party and, 279; ‘deserving’/’undeserving’ poor, 276, 277–8, 280, 284, 297, 301; Enlightenment views on, 53, 55–6; need for asset ownership, 301–3, 304; political left and, 78–83; the poor viewed as a race apart, 285–7; as relative not absolute, 55, 84; Adam Smith on, 55, 84; structure of market economy and, 78–9, 83; view that the poor deserve to be poor, 25, 52–3, 80, 83, 281, 285–8, 297, 301, 387; worldwide, 383, 384 Power2010 website, 340–1 PR companies and media, 322, 323 Press Complaints Commission (PCC), 325, 327, 331–2, 348 preventative medicine, 371 Price, Lance, 328, 340 Price, Mark, 93 Prince, Chuck, 184 printing press, 109, 110–11 prisoners, early release of, 11 private-equity firms, 6, 28–9, 158, 172, 177, 179, 205, 244–9, 374 Procter & Gamble, 167, 255 productive entrepreneurship, 6, 22–3, 28, 29–30, 33, 61–2, 63, 78, 84, 136, 298; in British history (to 1850), 28, 124, 126–7, 129; due desert/fairness and, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 223, 272, 393; general-purpose technologies (GPTs) and, 107–11, 112, 117, 126–7, 134, 228–9, 256, 261, 384 property market: baby boomer generation and, 372–3; Barker Review, 185; boom in, 5, 143, 161, 183–4, 185–7, 221; bust (1989-91), 161, 163; buy-to-let market, 186; commercial property, 7, 356, 359, 363; demutualisation of building societies, 156, 186; deregulation (1971) and, 161; Japanese crunch (1989-92) and, 361–2; need for tax on profits from home ownership, 308–9, 373–4; property as national obsession, 187; residential mortgages, 7, 183–4, 186, 356, 359, 363; securitised loans based mortgages, 171, 186, 188; shadow banking system and, 171, 172; ‘subprime’ mortgages, 64, 152, 161, 186, 203 proportionality, 4, 24, 26, 35, 38, 39–40, 44–6, 51, 84, 218; see also desert, due, concept of; contributory/discretionary benefits and, 63; diplomacy/ international relations and, 385–6; job seeker’s allowance as transgression of, 81; left wing politics and, 80; luck and, 73–7, 273; policy responses to crash and, 215–16; poverty relief systems and, 80–1; profit and, 40, 388; types of entrepreneurship and, 61–2, 63 protectionism, 36, 358, 376–7, 378, 379, 382, 386 Prussia, 128 Public Accounts Committee, 340 Purnell, James, 338 quantitative easing, 176 Quayle, Dan, 177 race, disadvantage and, 290 railways, 9, 28, 105, 109–10, 126 Rand, Ayn, 145, 234 Rawls, John, 57, 58, 63, 73, 78 Reagan, Ronald, 135, 163 recession, xi, 3, 8, 9, 138, 153, 210, 223, 335; of 1979-81 period, 161; efficacy of fiscal policy, 367–8; VAT decrease (2009) and, 366–7 reciprocity, 43, 45, 82, 86, 90, 143, 271, 304, 382; see also desert, due, concept of; proportionality Reckitt Benckiser, 82–3 Regional Development Agencies, 21 regulation: see also Bank of England; Financial Services Authority (FSA); Bank of International Settlements (BIS), 169, 182; Basel system, 158, 160, 163, 169, 170–1, 196, 385; big as beautiful in global banking, 201–2; Big Bang (1986), 90, 162; by-passing of, 137, 187; capital requirements/ratios, 162–3, 170–1, 208; dismantling of post-war system, 149, 158, 159–63; economists’ doubts over deregulation, 163; example of China, 160; failure to prevent crash, 154, 197, 198–9; Glass-Steagall abolition (1999), 170, 202–3; light-touch, 5, 32, 138, 151, 162, 198–9; New Deal rules (1930s), 159, 162; in pharmaceutical industry, 267–8; as pro-business tool, 268–70; proposed Financial Policy Committee, 208; required reforms of, 267, 269–70, 376, 377, 384, 392; reserve requirements scrapped (1979), 208; task of banking authorities, 157; Top Runner programme in Japan, 269 Reinhart, Carmen, 214, 356 Repo 105 technique, 181 Reshef, Ariell, 172–3 Reuters, 322, 331 riches and wealth, 11–13, 272–3, 283–4, 387–8; see also pay of executives and bankers; the rich as deserving of their wealth, 25–6, 52, 278, 296–7 Rickards, James, 194 risk, 149, 158, 165, 298–302, 352–3; credit default swaps and, 151, 152, 166–8, 170, 171, 175, 176, 191, 203, 207; derivatives and see derivatives; distinction between uncertainty and, 189–90, 191, 192–3, 196–7; employment insurance concept, 298–9, 301, 374; management, 165, 170, 171, 189, 191–2, 193–4, 195–6, 202, 203, 210, 354; securitisation and, 32, 147, 165, 169, 171, 186, 188, 196; structured investment vehicles and, 151, 165, 169, 171, 188; value at risk (VaR), 171, 192, 195, 196 Risley, Todd, 289 Ritchie, Andrew, 103 Ritter, Scott, 329 Robinson, Sir Gerry, 295 Rogoff, Ken, 214, 356 rogue states, 36 Rolling Stones, 247 Rolls-Royce, 219, 231 Rome, classical, 45, 74, 108, 116 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 133, 300 Rothermere, Viscount, 327 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56, 58, 112 Rousseau, Peter, 256 Rowling, J.K., 64, 65 Rowthorn, Robert, 292, 363 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 25, 150, 152, 157, 173, 181, 199, 251, 259; collapse of, 7, 137, 150, 158, 175–6, 202, 203, 204; Sir Fred Goodwin and, 7, 150, 176, 340 Rubin, Robert, 174, 177, 183 rule of law, x, 4, 220, 235 Russell, Bertrand, 189 Russia, 127, 134–5, 169, 201, 354–5, 385; fall of communism, 135, 140; oligarchs, 30, 65, 135 Rwandan genocide, 71 Ryanair, 233 sailing ships, three-masted, 108 Sandbrook, Dominic, 22 Sands, Peter (CEO of Standard Chartered Bank), 26 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 51, 377 Sassoon, Sir James, 178 Scholes, Myron, 169, 191, 193 Schumpeter, Joseph, 62, 67, 111 science and technology: capitalist dynamism and, 27–8, 31, 112–13; digitalisation, 34, 231, 320, 349, 350; the Enlightenment and, 31, 108–9, 112–13, 116–17, 121, 126–7; general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 107–11, 112, 117, 126–7, 134, 228–9, 256, 261, 384; increased pace of advance, 228–9, 253, 297; nanotechnology, 232; New Labour improvements, 21; new opportunities and, 33–4, 228–9, 231–3; new technologies, 232, 233, 240; universities and, 261–5 Scotland, devolving of power to, 15, 334 Scott, James, 114–15 Scott Bader, 93 Scott Trust, 327 Second World War, 134, 313 Securities and Exchanges Commission, 151, 167–8 securitisation, 32, 147, 165, 169, 171, 186, 187, 196 self-determination, 85–6 self-employment, 86 self-interest, 59, 60, 78 Sen, Amartya, 51, 232, 275 service sector, 8, 291, 341, 355 shadow banking system, 148, 153, 157–8, 170, 171, 172, 187 Shakespeare, William, 39, 274, 351 shareholders, 156, 197, 216–17, 240–4, 250 Sher, George, 46, 50, 51 Sherman Act (USA, 1890), 133 Sherraden, Michael, 301 Shiller, Robert, 43, 298, 299 Shimer, Robert, 299 Shleifer, Andrei, 62, 63, 92 short selling, 103 Sicilian mafia, 101, 105 Simon, Herbert, 222 Simpson, George, 142–3 single mothers, 17, 53, 287 sixth form education, 306 Sky (broadcasting company), 30, 318, 330, 389 Skype, 253 Slim, Carlos, 30 Sloan School of Management, 195 Slumdog Millionaire, 283 Smith, Adam, 55, 84, 104, 112, 121, 122, 126, 145–6 Smith, John, 148 Snoddy, Ray, 322 Snow, John, 177 social capital, 88–9, 92 social class, 78, 130, 230, 304, 343, 388; childcare and, 278, 288–90; continued importance of, 271, 283–96; decline of class-based politics, 341; education and, 13, 17, 223, 264–5, 272–3, 274, 276, 292–5, 304, 308; historical development of, 56–8, 109, 115–16, 122, 123–5, 127–8, 199; New Labour and, 271, 277–9; working-class opinion, 16, 143 social investment, 10, 19, 20–1, 279, 280–1 social polarisation, 9–16, 34–5, 223, 271–4, 282–5, 286–97, 342; Conservative reforms (1979-97) and, 275–6; New Labour and, 277–9; private education and, 13, 223, 264–5, 272–3, 276, 283–4, 293–5, 304; required reforms for reduction of, 297–309 social security benefits, 277, 278, 299–301, 328; contributory, 63, 81, 283; flexicurity social system, 299–301, 304, 374; to immigrants, 81–2, 282, 283, 284; job seeker’s allowance, 81, 281, 298, 301; New Labour and ‘undeserving’ claimants, 143, 277–8; non-contributory, 63, 79, 81, 82; targeting of/two-tier system, 277, 281 socialism, 22, 32, 38, 75, 138, 144, 145, 394 Soham murder case, 10, 339 Solomon Brothers, 173 Sony, 254–5 Soros, George, 166 Sorrell, Martin, 349 Soskice, David, 342–3 South Korea, 168, 358–9 South Sea Bubble, 125–6 Spain, 123–4, 207, 358–9, 371, 377 Spamann, Holger, 198 special purpose vehicles, 181 Spitzer, Matthew, 60 sport, cheating in, 23 stakeholder capitalism, x, 148–9 Standard Oil, 130–1, 132 state, British: anti-statism, 20, 22, 233–4, 235, 311; big finance’s penetration of, 176, 178–80; ‘choice architecture’ and, 238, 252; desired level of involvement, 234–5; domination of by media, 14, 16, 221, 338, 339, 343; facilitation of fairness, ix–x, 391–2, 394–5; investment in knowledge, 28, 31, 40, 220, 235, 261, 265; need for government as employer of last resort, 300; need for hybrid financial system, 244, 249–52; need for intervention in markets, 219–22, 229–30, 235–9, 252, 392; need for reshaping of, 34; pluralism, x, 35, 99, 113, 233, 331, 350, 394; public ownership, 32, 240; target-setting in, 91–2; threats to civil liberty and, 340 steam engine, 110, 126 Steinmueller, W.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

location, 30 logic, 16 central limit theorem and, 62 network formation and, 122–123 power laws and, 73–75 structure-logic-function organization, 60 log-log plot, 72 lognormal distribution, 60 multiplying shocks and, 66–67 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 161 long-run equilibrium output, 103 long-tailed distributions, 59 catastrophes and, 76–77 contemplation of, 78–79 equity and, 75–76 implications of, 75–78 volatility and, 77–78 loss aversion, 52 LOTB value. See last-on-the-bus value Lotka-Volterra equations, 202, 205, 207 Lotka-Volterra model, 205 LTCM. See Long Term Capital Management Lucas critique, 57, 58 Lyapunov functions, 181–183, 186 models without, 187–188 Madison, James, 195 magnitude, 84 defining, 85 majority rule, 286–287 majority-vote equal sharing, 292 Mallon, Mary, 140 Malthus, Thomas, 97, 209 many-model thinking, 40 bagging and, 41–42 blind spots and, 2–3 classes in, 2 cognitive closure and, 56–58 data and, 3–4 defining, 1 independent lies and, 28–30 for inequality, 343–354 need for, 5–7 opioid epidemic and, 339–342 separability and, 11–12 for value, 241–242 maoi, 269–270 market creation, 215–216 Market Entry Game, 243, 246 Markov model, 341 decision, 199 examples, 190–192 one-to-many and, 194–197 Matching Pennies, 244 Matthew effect, 70 Mauboussin, Michael, 88 maximal entropy, 148–150 maximization, entropy and, 146 Maybach Landaulet, 297 Mayer, Marissa, 227 McCarthy, Tom, 98 McDonald’s, 9 McKinsey, 4 mean in normal distribution, 60 regression to, 87 measurement error, 85 mechanism design, 283 median voter theorem, 232 medical school, 80 Merton, Robert, 69–70, 73 message space, 284 metabolic rates, 38–39 micro-macro loop, 55 Micromotives and Macrobehavior (Schelling), 184 Microsoft, 167 Milgram, Stanley, 124 Miller, John, 209–210 Minimize Risk Game, 245 Mirzakhani, Maryam, 181 Mississippi River Basin Model Waterways Experimentation Station, 23 model error decomposition theorem, defining, 35 model granularity, 222–223 modeling and models characteristics of, 6 of people, 46–47 power laws and, 73–75 practice of, 5 types of, 13–15 uses of, 15 models, of social phenomena, 44 monotonic ordering, 16 Monte Carlo method, for random networks, 121 Moore, Marianne, 131 Mount Fuji landscape, 328, 328 (fig.), 334 Mount-Reiter diagram, 284–286 multi-armed bandit problems, 319, 326, 340 Bayesian, 321–324 multiple congestible goods, 277 multiple-variable regression, 88–89 multivariable linear models, 87–90 Munger, Charlie, 1 music lab experiments, 76 Myerson value, 130 myopic best response, 174 Nash equilibrium, 244, 262, 275–277 National Institutes of Health, 4 National Milk Day, 229 nations failure of, 104–105 success of, 104–105 negative externality, 186–187 negative feedbacks, 201 systems dynamics models and, 211 threshold models with, 220–222 negatives, 92 neorealism, 313 net payoff, 288 network formation functions and, 123–126 logic and, 122–123 model, 123 quality and degree, 123 network robustness, 127–128 network size, random walk models and, 158–159, 158 (fig.)

Had the stock market risen at 12% per year (in real dollars), then stock prices would have increased 256-fold, an impossibility.21 In the long run, assuming the efficient market hypothesis or something close to it is a reasonable assumption. In the short run, betting on prices correcting can be risky. The case of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund whose board of directors included two Nobel Prize winners in economics, proves instructive. In 1996 and 1997, LTCM posted returns in excess of 40% in part by identifying inefficiencies and predicting the market would correct. In 1998, they noticed (correctly) that the price of Russian bonds was out of alignment with prices of US Treasury bonds.


pages: 477 words: 144,329

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

After he left Salomon, he formed a hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management. There he made bets using the same theory, but it didn’t work, since his models (undoubtedly built on a computer spreadsheet) were flawed, and his bets turned out to be bigger than his new balance sheet could support. This quickly led to catastrophe, and since Long-Term Capital was doing business with so many large Wall Street firms, its failure put the whole industry at risk. More than a dozen banks had to join forces and cobble together a bailout to limit the damage in the larger global financial markets. Long-Term Capital Management collapsed after only four years, a spectacular disaster that tainted Meriwether’s legacy and lost him and others enormous sums of money

., 102 Leach, Robin, 282 Lehman Brothers, 51, 335–36, 344 Levchin, Max, 307 Levi Strauss & Co., 230 Levitt, Arthur, 324 Lewis, Mark, 320, 321 Lewis, Michael, 45, 206 Lexington Institute, 124 Liar’s Poker (Lewis), 45, 206 Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, 282 Lockheed Corporation, 124 Long-Term Capital Management, 67 LOR, 37 Lorsch, Bob, 218–19, 221–23, 244–45 Los Angeles Times, 332 Loughlin, Lori, 291–92 Love, Mike, 178, 179, 182 low-latency trading, 243 Lucent Technologies, 190–96, 215 Citi and, 200–201 M&A department of, 190–91, 194 Optical Fiber Solutions Division of, 200–202 quarterly earnings forecast of, 194 vendor financing at, 191–95, 215 Viqueira at, 190, 191–95, 215 Main Street and Wall Street (Ripley), 74 Mancuso, Rudy, 297–98 Marathon Oil, 163–64 Marks, Michael, 187 Martin Marietta, 118, 124 Grumman’s negotiations with, 124, 125, 136–38, 142, 146 McCarthy Group, 294 McDonnell Douglas, 118, 124 McGinn, Rich, 191, 194 Medea (Euripides), 9 Medellín drug cartel, 39–40 MediaPost, 294 Meeker, Mary, 196 Mellencamp, John Cougar, 115 Memmo, Nick, 164 mergers and acquisitions: Lucent and, 190–91, 194 pooling and, 170–72, 176 roll-ups, 153, 167 Salomon’s group for, 116, 118, 119, 128–29, 131, 180, 190, 195, 199, 200, 229, 259 secrecy about, 260–61 of U.S.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Portfolio theory, the capital asset pricing model and the efficient market hypothesis are useful, indeed indispensable, models, but none of them describe ‘the world as it really is’. When people take these financial models too literally, populate them with invented numbers and base important decisions on them, the models become misleading, even dangerous. As they did in the global financial crisis. And on many other occasions. The large US hedge fund Long Term Capital Management collapsed in 1998 because the fund and its Nobel Prize-winning advisers, including Robert C. Merton, had too much faith in their models. (Merton was the son of the sociologist Robert K. Merton, whom we described in chapter 3 as the first social scientist to formulate the general issue of reflexivity – an issue which became highly pertinent as traders aware of LTCM’s strategies positioned themselves to profit from the inability of the fund to maintain them.)

EVOLUTION AND DECISION-MAKING 1 Sterling et al. (2015). 2 And is a metaphor, or story, rather than an empirical claim about the world. 3 Hamilton (1964) p. 16. 4 See Evans-Pritchard (1940) p. 140 for an example of a tribe which explained that they would – and in his case did – offer wilfully misleading directions to someone not well known to them. The anecdote is striking because our expectations are so different. 5 Alchian (1950). 6 He calls this ‘consilience’ (Wilson 1999). 7 Maynard Smith (1964). 8 Bear Stearns refused to join the syndicate which bailed out Long Term Capital Management. When Bear Stearns itself ran into trouble ten years later, no one was willing to help them – see Taft (2012). 9 Gilman (1996). 10 Aktipis et al. (2011) p. 132. 11 Maddison Project Database, version 2018; Office for National Statistics (2015). 12 Wrangham (2019). 13 This is the cooperative principle of linguistics, which recognises that statements are part of conversations and derive their meaning from the background to those conversations. 14 Mercier and Sperber (2017), from the book description. 15 In the words of the Harvard evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich (Henrich 2017). 16 Ortiz-Ospina and Roser (2019). 17 Ferguson (1782) p. 205. 18 Smith (1776b) p. 35. 19 Upton and George (2010). 20 Sometimes ascribed to Aesop, but first sourced to Orson Welles’ Mr Arkadin (1955); see also The Crying Game . 21 The two points of view are represented by Plomin (2018) and Pinker (2003), respectively. 22 The quotation is attributed to the American comedian George Burns. 23 Whately (1854) p. 127. 24 For example Cosmides and Tooby (1989) and Cosmides (1989); for a summary of criticisms, in particular those of Sperber, see Atran (2001). 25 Taleb (2018), chapter 19. 26 There is a wide range of estimates of the extent of mortality in the Black Death but there were certainly many locations in which a majority of the population died. 27 The MIT economist Andrew Lo has developed an extended example to reinforce the point (Lo 2017, chapter 6). 28 Scott (1998), Part I. 29 Gráda and Mokyr (1984). 30 And later vice presidential candidate in Ross Perot’s quixotic bid for the US presidency in 1992. 31 Collins (2001) p. 85. 32 HC Deb (4 June 1940), Vol. 361, cc. 787–98. 33 Isaacson (2011) pp. 107–8. 34 Lohr (2011). 35 Bower’s characteristically unsympathetic biographies are controversial. 36 Bower (2001) p. 25. 37 See for example Keren and Schul (2009), Keren (2013), Kruglanski and Gigerenzer (2011), and Mercier and Sperber (2017). 38 Libet et al. (1983). 39 Damasio (1995), chapter 3. 40 See Henrich (2017) for further analysis of this point. 41 Of course, at most one player can win.

., 188 Leeson, Nick, 411 Lehman Brothers, failure of (2008), 5 , 36 , 158–9 , 267 , 410–11 , 412 Leonardo da Vinci, 219 , 421 , 428 LeRoy, Stephen, 74 , 78 Let’s Make a Deal (US quiz show), 62–3 , 65 , 69 Lewis, Michael, 135 , 215 ; The Undoing Project , 121 , 393–4 Libet, Benjamin, 171 LIBOR scandal, 192 Libratus (poker-playing computer), 263 life expectancy, 43 , 56 , 57 , 161 , 232–3 Lincoln, Abraham, 266 , 269 , 290 Literary Digest , 240 , 390 Livy (Roman historian), 54 , 186 , 187 Lloyds Bank, 325 Lloyd’s of London, 55–6 , 322–4 , 325 , 326 Loch Ness monster, 325 , 326 Loewenstein, George, 128–9 , 135 , 310 London School of Economics, 339 , 382–3 Long Term Capital Management, 153 , 309 Louis XIV, King of France, 411 Lucas, Robert, 36 , 92 , 93 , 338–9 , 341 , 345 , 346 , 348 , 354 Maa-speaking people of East Africa, 160–1 , 189 MacArthur, Douglas, 292–3 , 420 Macartney, Lord, 419 Mackay, Charles, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , 315 Malthus, Thomas, 253 , 358–61 , 362–3 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 238 Manhattan grid plan, 424–5 Manville, Brook, 374 Mao Tse-tung, 4–5 , 292 Markowitz, Harry, 307 , 308 , 309–10 , 318 , 320 , 332 , 333 , 366 Márquez, Gabriel García, 226 Marshall, Alfred, 276 , 381 , 382 Marshall, Barry, 284 , 306 Marshall, George, 292 Marxism, 220 Mary Celeste mystery (1872), 33–4 , 44 Mary Poppins (film, 1964), 306 mathematical reasoning, xiv , 12 , 19 , 42–3 , 47 , 53–4 , 93 , 343 , 401 , 404–5 ; appropriate use of, 383 ; fixed point theorems, 254 ; fractal geometry, 238–9 ; ‘grand auction’ of Arrow and Debreu, 343–5 ; and historical narratives, 188 ; small world applications of, 175–6 Matsushita, Konosuke, 410 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift (1925), 190–1 Max Planck Institute, Berlin, 152 maximising behaviour, xiv , 258 , 381–2 ; ‘ambiguity aversion’ concept, 135 ; and evolutionary rationality, 157 , 158 , 166–7 ; and greed, 127–8 , 409 ; limits to, xiv–xv , 41–4 , 152 , 171–2 , 310 , 345 , 382 , 400–1 , 435–44 ; maximising expected utility, 108 , 111–14 , 115–18 , 129–30 , 400 ; and utilitarian theory, 110–11 Maxwell, Robert, 312 , 313 May, Robert, 375 Maynard, John, 156 McHugh, Dodd, 425 McLaren racing team, 391 McNamara, Robert, 281–2 , 298–300 McRaven, Admiral William, 298 Meadow, Professor Sir Roy, 197–8 , 200 , 201 medicine, 22 , 32 , 39–40 , 88–9 , 383 , 384 , 387 ; computer technologies, 185–6 ; doctors’ decision-making, 184–6 , 194 , 398–9 ; HIV infections, 375–6 ; infectious diseases, 282–3 , 285 ; puerperal fever, 282–3 , 306 ; ‘randomised controlled trials’ (RCTs), 243–5 ; screening for cancer, 66–7 , 206 ; stomach ulcers, 284 , 306 ; twentieth century improvements, 57 ; and uncertainty, 44–5 mercantilism, 249 Mercier, Hugo, 162 , 272 , 415 Méré, Chevalier de, 53 , 59 , 60 , 61 Merton, Robert C., 309 Merton, Robert K., 35–6 , 309 MESSENGER (NASA probe), 18–19 , 26 , 35 , 218 , 394 meteorology, 23 , 43 , 101–2 , 406 Michelangelo, 421 , 428 Michelson, Albert, 430 Microsoft, 29 , 30–1 migration, 369–70 , 372 ; European to USA, 427 military campaigns and strategy, 3–4 , 24–6 , 292–3 , 294–5 , 298–300 , 412–13 , 433 military-industrial complex, 294 Mill, John Stuart, 110 , 429–30 ; System of Logic (1843), 70 Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman , 220 Ming emperors, 419 Mintzberg, Henry, 296 , 410 Mirowski, Philip, 388 MMR triple vaccine, 394 mobile phones, 30–1 , 38–9 , 257 , 344 models: appropriate use of, 376–7 ; of Canadian fisheries, 368–9 , 370 , 371–2 , 423 ; consulting firms, 180 , 182–3 , 275–6 , 365 , 370–1 , 405 ; EU migration models, 370 , 372 ; invented numbers in, 320 , 363–4 , 365 , 371 , 373 , 404 , 405 , 423 ; maps as not the territory, 391–4 ; microeconomic research, 382 , 392 ; misuse/abuse of, 312–13 , 320 , 368–76 , 405 ; at NASA, 373–4 , 391–2 ; policy-based evidence, 370–1 , 373–4 , 405 , 412–13 ; and public consultation, 372 ; reproduction of large/real-world, 390–2 ; role of incentives/targets, 409 ; stationarity as assumed, 333 , 339 , 340–1 , 349 , 350 , 366–7 , 371–2 ; as tools, 384–6 ; transport modelling, 363–5 , 370 , 371 , 372 , 396 , 404 , 407 ; WebTAG, 363–4 , 365 , 371 , 404 , 407 ; WHO HIV model, 375–6 ; see also economic models; small world models Moivre, Abraham de, 57–8 , 233 money supply, 96 Moneyball (film, 2011), 273 MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer) machine, 339 ‘Monte Carlo simulations’, 365 Montgomery, Bernard Law, 293 Moore, Dudley, 97 Morgenstern, Oskar, 111 , 133 , 435–7 Moses, Robert, 425 Mourinho, José, 265 Mrs White’s Chocolate House (St James’s), 55 Murray, Bill, 419 Musk, Elon, 128 , 130 , 307 Mussabini, Sam, 273 mutualisation: in insurance markets, 325–6 ; and !


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The evidence seemed to be everywhere: Deng Xiaoping’s reforms had paved the way for Western and Japanese capital to pour into China; the Berlin Wall had come down; Latin American economies had embarked on ‘free-market’ and ‘sound-money’ reforms which were bringing hitherto excessive inflation to heel; Western Europe was completing the ‘single market’, built on the so-called ‘four freedoms’ (free movement of goods, services, capital and labour – principles first established, if not acted upon, in the 1957 Treaty of Rome); and the ‘commanding heights’ of industry were, in the majority of countries, rapidly being privatized. When corporate scandals did come along – the Savings and Loans, Long Term Capital Management and Enron crises in the US; the Guinness, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Barings and Maxwell affairs in the UK; the Yamaichi and Long Term Credit Bank shocks in Japan – it didn’t seem to matter too much: corporate wrong-doing and outright greed alone appeared not to have the capacity to throw economies off course.

(i) Jolie, Angelina (i) Jordan (country) (i) Joyce, James (i) Juncker, Jean-Claude (i) Juncker Plan (i), (ii)n3 Junts pel Sí (i) Kaczińsky, Jarosław (i) Kaduna (i) Karbala, Battle of (i) Kazakhstan (i), (ii) Kennan, George (i) Keynes, John Maynard ‘animal spirits’ (i) bancor (i), (ii), (iii) Churchill and (i) demand management (i), (ii) IMF and (i) on fashion (i) on gold (i) ‘paradox of thrift’ (i) unemployment, inflation and (i) Kim, Dr Jim Yong (i) King, Mervyn (i)n12 Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de (i) Kirchner, Néstor (i) Kosmos (i) Korean War (i), (ii) Kunming (i) Kurds (i) Kuril Islands (i) Kuwait (i) Kyrgyzstan (i) Labour Party (UK) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Lagarde, Christine (i) Lagos (i) Latin America (i) balance of payments deficits (i) bringing inflation to heel (i) debt crises (i) immigrants enter US (i) income of (i) Law and Justice party (Poland) (i) Le Pen, Marine (i) League of Nations (i), (ii), (iii) Lebanon (i) Lee Kuan Yew (i) Lehman Brothers (i) Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (i), (ii) Leopold II, King (Belgium) (i), (ii)n6 Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes) (i) Lewis, Arthur (i) Lewis Model (i) liberal democracy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Liberia (i) Libya (i), (ii) Lima (i) Lion King, The (Disney) (i) Lithuania (i) living standards Brazil (i) Italy (i) Mexico (i) New Zealand (i) Northern Europe and US (i) post-Second World War, industrialized countries (i) Soviet Union (i) under threat (i) US (i), (ii) various (i), (ii) West and parts of Asia (i) Western and Eastern Europe (i) Western Europe (i) Livingstone, David (i) Locke, John (i) London banker to the world (i) BBC Two and the power cut (i) clubs (i) financial centres (i) living standards (i) squalor to comfort in (i) London School of Economics (i) Long Term Capital Management (i) Long Term Credit Bank of Japan (i) Louvre (i) Love Thy Neighbour (i) Lucas, Robert (i) Luxembourg (i), (ii) Lydon, John (Johnny Rotten) (i) Maastricht Treaty (i), (ii) Macau (i), (ii) macroeconomics (i) Madagascar (i) Madrid (i) Magic Mountain, The (Thomas Mann) (i) malaria (i), (ii) Malaysia (i), (ii), (iii) Mali (i) Manchester Guardian (i) Manchuria (i), (ii) Manila (i) Mann, Katja (i) Mann, Thomas (i) Mansa Musa (i) Mao Zedong (i), (ii), (iii) Marshall, George (i), (ii) Marshall Plan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Marston Valley Brick Company (i), (ii) Marx, Karl (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Mary II, Queen (i) Massachusetts (i) Maxwell, Robert (i) May, Theresa (i) Mazzini, Giuseppe (i) McCarthy, Joe (i) McCloskey, Deirdre (i) Mecca (i) Mediterranean (i), (ii), (iii) Medvedev, Dmitry (i) Meiji Restoration (i), (ii) mercantilism (i) Mercia (i) Merkel, Angela (i), (ii) Mesopotamia (i) Mexico immigration into America (i) North American Free Trade Association (i), (ii) per capita incomes (i) tequila crisis (i) TPP (i) Trump and (i), (ii), (iii) US border (i) Mian, Atif (i) Microsoft (i) Middle East China’s trade routes (i) failure of liberal democracy (i), (ii) Islam on march (i) US failure to deliver peace (i) US inconsistency (i) US no longer reliant on (i) Milanović, Branko (i) military spending (i), (ii) Millennium Development Goal (i) Miller, Robert (i) Ming Dynasty (i) Minsky, Hyman (i), (ii), (iii)n12 Miss World (i) Mississippi (state) (i) Mitterrand, François (i), (ii) Mogadishu (i) Mohammad, Prophet (i), (ii), (iii) see also Islam Mohammad Mossadeq (i) Mohammad Reza Shah (i) Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (i) Mombasa (i) Monaco (i) monetarism (i) Mongols (i), (ii), (iii) Montesquieu (i), (ii), (iii) Moore’s Law (i) Moors (i), (ii) Morgenthau, Hans (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n1 Morsi, Mohammad (i) Moscow (i) Moscow Olympics (i) Mosul (i) ‘Moving to Opportunity’ (US Department of Housing and Urban Development) (i) Mubarak, Hosni (i) Mulan (Disney) (i) Mumbai (i) Muslim Brotherhood (i) Muslims see also Islam Constantinople falls (i) Nigerian clashes (i) Poland and (i) Trump and (i), (ii) UK immigrants (i) Mussolini, Benito (i) Myanmar (i) Nader Shah (i) Napoleonic Wars (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Nasser, Gamal Abdel (i) nation states (i) decision-making (i) economic logic and (i) ethnic and cultural tensions (i) EU differs from (i) Eurozone (i) globalization and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Mazzini on (i) Ottoman Empire (i) them and us (i) National Endowment for Democracy (i) National Health Service (NHS) (i) Native Americans (i) NATO (North Atlantic Treaty) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Nazis (i) Nelson, Admiral Lord (i) Netflix (i) Netherlands (i), (ii) New York (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) New York Times (i) New Zealand (i), (ii), (iii) Nice (i) Nicholas II, Tsar (i) Nietzsche, Friedrich (i) Nigeria (i) Nile, River (i) Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell) (i) Nixon, Richard (i) Nixon Shock (i), (ii), (iii) North Africa African trade (i) freedom statistics for (i) Islam reaches (i), (ii) liberal democracy absent (i), (ii) North American Free Trade Agreement (i), (ii) North Korea (i), (ii) Northern Ireland (i), (ii) Norway (i) Nye, Joseph (i) Obama, Barack Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and (i) Duterte’s insult (i) Merkel and (i) ‘pivot to Asia’ (i), (ii), (iii) rejected for Trump (i) TPP (i) Oborne, Peter (i)n6 OECC (Organisation for European Economic Co-operation) (i), (ii) OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (i), (ii), (iii)n18 Offa (i) Office of the US Trade Representative (i), (ii) oil 1970s (i) Iran threatens to nationalise (i) price collapses (i), (ii) US and Middle East (i) Oman (i) Oosterbeek (i) Open University (i) Orwell, George (i) Osman I (Ottomans) (i) Ottoman Empire (i) Constantinople falls (i) Crimean War (i) crumbles (i) Egypt in (i) First World War (i) independence from (i) origins of (i) Persia pushes back (i) Pacific (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) PACOM (US Pacific Command) (i) Pakistan (i), (ii), (iii) Palestinian Authority (i) Pamir Mountains (i) Paracel Islands (i) Paranoid Style (i) Paris (i), (ii), (iii) Paris, Treaty of (1951) (i) Paris climate deal 2015 (i) Party for Freedom (Netherlands) (i) Pearl Harbor (i) per capita incomes China and India (i) China and US (i) Eastern Europe (i) Italy (i) Mexico (i) Nigeria (i) Northern Europe and US (i) Poland (i) UK (i) Ukraine (i) US (i), (ii) various (i) Permanent Court of Arbitration (The Hague) (i) Perón, Juan (i) Persia (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also Iran Peru (i) Peter the Great (i) petrodollar (i) see also dollar (US) Pew Research Center (i) Philadelphia (i) Philippines (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Phytophthora infestans (potato blight) (i) Piketty, Thomas (i) Plaza Accord (i), (ii) Podemos (i) Poland a train route through (i) Coca-Cola (i) Germany post First World War and (i) post fall of Berlin Wall (i) Second Gulf War (i) Western Europe and (i) politicians (i) Poltava, Battle of (i) population ageing (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) population statistics (i) Africa (i) Black Death (i) China (i) EU (i) immigrants in New World (i) India (i) Ireland (i) Syria (i) United States (i), (ii) various (i) populism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Port Harcourt (i) Portugal (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) potatoes (i) Powell, Enoch (i) Pratas Islands (i) Princip, Gavrilo (i) Private Eye (i) protectionism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Protestants (i) Prussia (i) Putin, Vladimir (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Al Qaeda (i), (ii)n2 Qing dynasty (i), (ii) quantitative easing (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Quran (i) Radicals (British political party) (i) railways (i), (ii), (iii) Raj (i) Randall, Alan (i) RBS (i) Reagan, Ronald (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Red Army (i) Red Feed (i) Reformation (i) refugees (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) see also asylum seekers; immigration Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) (i) Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) (i), (ii) regulators (i) Reith, Lord (i) Remainers (i) Renesas Electronics (i) Republican Party (US) (i), (ii) Reputation Institute (i) reserve currencies competition for (i) Triffin Dilemma (i) US dollar (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Revolutionary War (US) (i) Ricardo, David (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n10 rich, the (i) rising sea levels (i) Robinson, James A.


pages: 323 words: 92,135

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

By the 1990s, a couple hundred funds had become thousands, most of them fast-money operations eking out tiny returns on each No Homa 11 trade but buying and selling so much stuff day in and day out that it eventually added up to real money. That’s what Julian Robertson at Tiger and the Nobel laureates at Long Term Capital Management did. They ran huge pots of capital through monster trading floors filled with computer monitors covered in dancing green and red prices. These folks hedged anything that moved. I was trying to raise money to get in the game. “You Andy? Yeah, I remember you. Chips or something like that. You sat back there with Jack Grubman.”

See local area networks laptops, 155, 259, 277 Lardner, Dionysius, 93 Larscom, 97 Larson, Bill, 18, 19 laser diode drivers, 81, 84 layer 4–7 switching, 140 306 LCDs, 2, 3, 155, 156–57 Lehman Brothers, 44 Lerner, Sandy, 191 Lewis, Michael, 25 Liar’s Poker (Lewis), 25 Liberate, 176, 177 limited liability corporations, 57 Lincoln Lab (MIT), 187 Linux operating system, 247 liquid crystal displays, 155, 156–57 literacy, 122 local area networks, 187, 188, 189–91, 197, 199 locomotives, 92–93 Logitech, 259 London Metal Exchange, 94 Long Term Capital Management, 11, 163, 166–69 looms, 64–65, 66 Lotus, 200 Lotus 1–2–3 spreadsheet, 66 Lotus Notes, 200 Lovitz, Jon, 262 LSI Logic, 130, 141 Lucent, 290 Lusitania (ocean liner), 95 Lynch, Peter, 27–28 Macromedia, 97 Malaysia, 1, 132, 175, 199, 252, 270, 281 management, 106–7 manufacturing capital investment in, 90–91 design vs., 99–100, 234, 268 intellectual property separated from, 128, 130–35, 136, 234–35, 238, 251, 271 inventions and, 55–56, 58, 89, 125–26, 272 Index job market and, 241–45, 246, 261 outsourced low costs of, 133–35, 175, 251, 258–59 second derivatives, 26–28, 72, 77, 226 See also industrial economy; Industrial Revolution margin surplus, 234, 259, 260, 262–63, 266, 270, 295 importance of, 275, 277, 279, 280–83 PC’s effect on, 258 MAR/Hedge, 169 market demand, 78 components of, 57–59 Marks, Art, 144 Matsushita, 134 Mauretania (ocean liner), 95 Mayfield, 194 MCI, 61, 62, 72 Mead, Carver, 183 Meeker, Mary, 228 memory chips, 124, 126, 127, 154–55, 156 Metcalfe, Bob, 183, 188–91, 202, 290 Metcalfe’s Law, 190, 226 Mexican debt crisis, 164 Michelson, Albert, 190 microchips, 11, 46–47, 102–3, 129–35, 154–55 company sales, 208 development of, 124–28 outsourced manufacture of, 130–35, 199, 252–55, 259 production costs, 141 See also microprocessors Microma, 127–28 Micron Technology, 19–21, 154 Index microprocessors, 101, 123–28 demand for faster, 66 significance of, 125, 183 Microsoft, 61, 69, 97, 128, 142, 194, 207, 260, 270 browser, 199–201 company value, 274 innovative process of, 278 tie-ins by, 197 as top market cap company, 111 See also Windows Microstrategy, 177 Microsystems, 44 Milken, Michael, 11 Miller, George, 223 mining industry, 53, 57–59 MIT, 184, 185, 187 MMC (chip company), 208 momentum funds, 207 Mondale, Walter, 187 Monetary Conference, 264–65 monster markets, 45, 46, 67, 248, 279, 295 Montgomery Securities Hedge Fund conference, 29–33 Moore, Gordon, 103, 124, 128 Moore, Nick, 18–21, 72, 162, 175–81, 188, 208, 217–19, 228–29, 293, 296 Moore’s Law, 103, 124 Morgan Stanley, 11, 24–25, 39–40, 45, 131, 153, 160, 224, 251 Morgan Stanley Tech Conference (2001), 228–29 Morgan Stanley Tokyo, 154 Morley, Edward, 190 Morse Chain, 110 Mosaic Communications, 193, 195, 196–97 Mostek, 127 Motorola, 11, 127 307 mouse inventor of, 118, 119 outsourced manufacture of, 259 MP3.com, 212–16, 226, 248, 293 MP3 files, 206 Mueller, Glenn, 194, 195, 197–98 Mueller, Nancy, 198 music downloading, 202, 205–8, 247 copyright violation, 293 domain rights, 212–16, 226, 248 piracy, 206–7, 263 See also Napster music software, 146–49 mutual funds, 290 nanotechnology, 296 Napoleonic Wars, 25, 271 Napster, 190, 202, 203, 205–7, 213, 248, 263 NASA, 101, 184 NASA/Ames, 187 NASDAQ, 223, 224, 225, 288 Nash, Jack, 14–17, 24, 29, 105, 278 National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 197 NCP, 185 Nelson, Ted, 118 NetApp.


pages: 265 words: 93,231

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, medical residency, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Quicken Loans, risk free rate, Robert Bork, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, the new new thing, too big to fail, value at risk, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.

My entire reputation had been built on covering these stocks. If I was wrong, that would be the end of the career of Steve Eisman." Eisman published his report in September 1997, in the middle of what appeared to be one of the greatest economic booms in U.S. history. Less than a year later, Russia defaulted and a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management went bankrupt. In the subsequent flight to safety, the early subprime lenders were denied capital and promptly went bankrupt en masse. Their failure was interpreted as an indictment of their accounting practices, which allowed them to record profits before they were realized. No one but Vinny, so far as Vinny could tell, ever really understood the crappiness of the loans they had made.


pages: 310 words: 90,817

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

bank run, banks create money, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, currency peg, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, inflation targeting, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, open economy, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, savings glut, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

As the new money mainly lifted the prices of stocks, bonds, and increasingly houses, and as the ongoing but comparatively moderate price increases in the standard “consumption basket” were judged to be acceptable, money-fueled credit expansion was tolerated and actively supported by the central bank. Since the late 1990s the Fed has on various occasions successfully extended the credit boom: in 1998, when the collapse of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund and the default of Russia threatened to kick off a wave of international deleveraging; toward the end of 1999, when the Fed injected substantial amounts of money prohibitively out of concern about potential computer problems related to Y2K; between 2001 and 2004, after the Enron and WorldCom corporate failures and the bursting of the NASDAQ bubble, when the Fed left interest rates at 1 percent for three years.

See also money, paper money individualism industrial commodities Industrial Revolution inelastic money inelastic, elastic versus inflation commodity money and paper money and inflationary meltdown inflationism international policy coordination and interest interest rates rising international capital flows international market exchange International Monetary Fund (IMF) interventionism investing investment activity J Jackson, Andrew Jacobson Schwartz, Anna Jefferson, Thomas Jevons, William Stanley Jin Dynasty K Keynes, John Maynard Keynesianism Keynesians L laissez-faire Law, John Lehman Brothers lender of last resort lending activity, money as enhancer liquidity, tightening loan market, money injection via Long Term Capital Management M macroeconomics political appeal of problems with Malthus, Robert market economy Marx, Karl Massachusetts, paper money and medium of exchange money as multiple supply meltdown, inflationary Menger, Carl Mill, James Ming Dynasty misallocation of capital Mises, Ludwig von Monetarism monetary base monetary crisis theory Monetary History of the United States monetary intervention monetary policy Monetary Regimes and Inflation monetary stability, price level and monetization, of debt of government debt money as enhancer of lending activity bank versus individual ownership demand for evolution of functions of nationalization of origin of ownership of purpose of money balances money creation money demand money supply without wealth demand versus money injections even and nontransparent even, instant, and transparent price stability and uneven and nontransparent via loan market money production cost other goods versus money supply controlling expanding money demand without relative prices and N Napoleonic Wars NASDAQ nationalization, credit and money Neoclassical School of Economics New Deal Nixon, Richard M.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

There is also a sound mathematical reason for spreading your bets. Consider some fascinating research by Victor Haghani, a name that might ring a bell for some readers.[9] He isn’t only one of the sharpest minds in finance but also a man who learned things the hard way and practices what he preaches. Haghani was one of the founding partners of Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund staffed by Nobel Prize winners that thought it had found a free money machine by exploiting small discrepancies between the prices of nearly identical securities. It used what in hindsight seems like insane amounts of borrowed money to make its bets because it convinced the banks that lent to it that the risks it was taking were minimal.

., 179 Klarman, Seth, 184 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 Kruger, Justin, 28 Kynikos Associates, 77 L Ladies’ Home Journal, 150 Lamberton, Cait, 54, 62 Lamont, Owen, 80 Langer, Ellen, 27 Langlois, Shawn, 45 Laufer, Henry, 237 Lay, Kenneth, 85 Lebed, Jonathan, 163 Leder, Michelle, 239 Ledger, Heath, 138 Left, Andrew, 39, 116–26, 148, 191, 214, 217 GameStop and, 120–24, 129, 130, 133, 146 harassment of, 122 WallStreetBets and, 121–23, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 238 Lehman Brothers, 80, 117 Lending Tree, 162 Levie, Aaron, 26 Lewis, Michael, 16, 88 Lindzon, Howard, 24, 49, 176 LinkedIn, 239 Livermore, Jesse, 78–79 locating a borrow, 72–73, 80 Loeb, Dan, 111 Lombardi, Vince, 8 Long-Term Capital Management, 260 Loop Capital, 128 Los Angeles Times, 215 loss aversion, myopic, 236 lotteries, 62, 239, 241, 242 Lowenstein, Roger, 260 Lucid Motors, 164 M Mad Money, 254 Madoff, Bernie, 117, 206 MagnifyMoney, 162 Mahoney, Seth, 19, 31, 176–77 Malaysia, 75 Malkiel, Burton, 253 Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Kindleberger), 179 Manning, Peyton, 64 Man Who Solved the Market, The (Zuckerman), 237 Maplelane Capital, 217 March Madness, 57 Marcus, 257 margin calls, 203–5 margin debt, 58–59, 62, 67, 138, 188 Markets Insider, 103 MarketWatch, 45, 180 MassMutual, 87, 131, 171 Mavrck, 142 Mayday, 48–50, 66 McCabe, Caitlin, 128–29 McCormick, Packy, 23, 35, 104, 202 McDonald, Larry, 99 McDonald’s, 154 McHenry, Patrick, 239 McLean, Bethany, 85 Medallion Fund, 237 MedBox, 117 Melvin Capital Management, 6–8, 56, 72, 94–96, 110–12, 114, 119, 121, 123, 128–30, 132, 135, 136, 146, 189, 190, 202, 205, 217, 218, 222, 227 meme stocks, xii–xiv, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 22, 30, 32–34, 36, 39, 40, 47, 54, 63, 67, 72, 73, 76, 100, 108, 123, 125, 127, 129, 132–33, 135, 137–40, 146, 147, 153–55, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 169, 170, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185, 191, 193, 194, 198–99, 204–5, 208, 219, 220, 222, 227, 229, 230, 237, 238, 240, 246 AMC, 39, 93, 125, 127, 132, 169, 188, 220–21, 224–26 Bed Bath & Beyond, 115, 133, 188 BlackBerry, 93, 115, 133, 169, 178, 188, 224 bot activity and, 165, 166 GameStop, see GameStop, GameStop short squeeze insiders of, 224 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 margin debt and, 58 Naked, 132, 188 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 payment for order flow and, 207 Robinhood’s trading restrictions on, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206 Merton, Robert, 101, 102, 108 Microsoft, 46, 93 Mihm, Stephen, 48 millennials, 21, 26, 27, 56, 71, 88, 142, 143, 148, 162, 242, 246, 255 Minnis, Chad, 126, 157, 242 MoneyWatch, 59 monthly subscription services, 32 Morgan Stanley, 28, 55, 178, 219 Morningstar, 216, 244, 245, 254, 255 Motherboard, 131–32 Motter, John, 215–17, 226 Mudrick, Jason, 220–21 Mudrick Capital Management, 220 Mulligan, Finley, 230 Mulligan, Quinn, 142, 214 Munger, Charlie, 183–84, 241 Murphy, Paul, 78 Musk, Elon, 19, 75, 82–83, 92, 124, 143, 149, 152–53, 155–57, 160, 161, 167, 212, 216 tweets of, x, 60, 82, 83, 124, 144, 152–54, 161, 170 Must Asset Management, 221 mutual funds, 139, 151, 221, 234, 244, 245, 254–56 myopic loss aversion, 236 N Naked Brand, 132, 188 Nasdaq, 60, 92, 98, 104 Nasdaq Whale, 98, 104–6, 108, 109, 227 Nathan, Dan, 192 National Council on Problem Gambling, 31, 57 National Futures Association, 118 Nations, Scott, 99 Nations Indexes, 99 NCAA Basketball, 57 Netflix, x–xi, 15, 50, 98, 133, 208 Netscape, 24 Neumann, Adam, 105 New Yorker, 143 New York Mets, 8, 161 New York Post, 124, 172 New York Stock Exchange, 49 New York University, 20, 82, 177 Nikola, 64 NIO, 120 Nobel Prize, 101, 260 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 nudges, 31–32, 235–36 Nvidia, 98 O Obama, Barack, 13, 38 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 160, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 12, 125 Odean, Terrance, 235, 238, 243 Odey, Crispin, 126 Ohanian, Alexis, 12, 37–38, 125 O’Mara, Margaret, 38, 156, 157 Omega Family Office, 191 O’Neal, Shaquille, 64 Oppenheimer, Robert, 83 options, 34–35, 99–107, 217 call, see call options delta and, 107, 108 losses and quick approval processes for, 103 put, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Robinhood and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 Options Clearing Corporation, 102 P Pagel, Michaela, 235 Palantir Technologies, 120 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 143, 144, 152–53, 155, 157–58, 160, 164, 212, 234, 246, 253 Palm, 84 PalmPilot, 84 Pao, Ellen, 38 Paperwork Crisis, 49 Parker, Sean, 38 payment for order flow, 10, 33, 153, 196, 206–9 Penn National, 57 penny stocks, 60, 120, 133, 166, 167 Permit Capital, 223 Pershing Square Holdings, 56 Pets.com, 90 PetSmart, 89 Pew Research, 71 Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, The (Hirst), 7 Piggly Wiggly, 78–79 PiiQ Media, 166 PIMCO, 216 Plotkin, Gabriel, 41, 56, 67, 73, 80, 85, 86, 95–96, 110–12, 114–15, 116, 122, 123, 129, 130, 133, 140, 146, 148, 157, 158, 161, 191, 197, 213–14, 217, 218, 227, 240, 246, 250, 253 at congressional hearing, 6–11 Porsche, 77 Portnoy, Dave, 57, 152–55, 158–59, 161, 181, 188–89, 212 Povilanskas, Kaspar, 195 Pruzan, Jonathan, 219 Psaki, Jen, 192 Public.com, 196, 207, 209 pump and dump, 163 put options, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Q Qualcomm, 46 R RagingBull, 163 Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Malkiel), 253 Raskob, John J., 150–52, 154, 156 Raytheon, 153–54 RC Ventures LLC, 114 Reagan, Ronald, 156, 234 Reddit, xi, xii, 11–12, 19, 22, 23, 25, 36–39, 41, 42, 107, 122, 125, 162, 164, 199 founding of, 37–38 Gill’s influence on, 141–42; see also Gill, Keith; WallStreetBets karma on, 47, 141–42 mechanics and demographics of, and GameStop, 37 offensive subreddits on, 38 r/ClassActionRobinHood, 196 r/GMEbagholders, 140 r/investing, ix, 46 r/wallstreetbets, see WallStreetBets Super Bowl ad of, 12 Volkswagen squeeze and, 78 Reddit Revolution, xv, 41, 42, 75, 99, 152, 170, 192, 206, 211, 219, 220, 230, 246, 261 see also GameStop, GameStop short squeeze; WallStreetBets rehypothecation, 80, 92 reinforcement learning, 35 Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Lefèvre), 78 Renaissance Technologies, 237 retail trading, xiii, xiv, xvi, 4, 7, 9–14, 49, 56–59, 63–64, 66, 67, 81, 98, 140–41, 143, 169–70, 178, 181, 183, 186, 194, 218, 237, 238, 244, 247 retirement accounts and pension funds, 5, 13, 27, 31–32, 41, 69, 76, 77, 81, 171, 182, 234, 235, 245, 252, 255, 256 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 135–36 RiskReversal Advisors, 192 Ritter, Jay, 63, 65 Roaring Kitty (Gill’s YouTube persona), 2, 18, 45, 48–49, 92, 130, 133, 144, 171, 174–75, 191, 211, 213 Roaring Kitty LLC, 171 Robinhood, xi, xiii, xv, 4–6, 13–14, 19, 22–35, 41–42, 50, 53, 55, 57, 61, 66, 70, 81, 98, 139, 141, 153, 154, 157, 158, 161, 176, 178, 183, 184, 187–90, 193, 194, 195–210, 212–13, 219, 237–38, 243, 245, 246, 259 account transfer fees of, 54 average revenue per user of, 66–67 Buffett on, 240–41 call options and, 97–98 Citadel and, 10, 11 clearinghouse of, 187 commissions and, 49, 50 customer loan write-offs of, 205 daily average revenue trades of, 59 daily deposit requirement of, 205 former regulators hired by, 239–40 founding of, 3, 23–25, 90 funding crisis of, 187–88, 193, 198, 203, 205–6 gamification and, 29–31 Gold accounts, 32, 58, 97, 202 growth of, 25–26, 50 herding events and, 238 Hertz and, 61 hyperactive traders and, 193, 202, 207, 236 initial public offering of, 200–201, 219 Instant accounts, 32 Kearns and, 103–4 lawsuits against, 196 margin loans of, 58–59, 205 median account balances with, 50, 54 options and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 payment for order flow and, 10, 33, 196, 206–9 revenue from securities lending, 73 risky behavior encouraged by, 202–3 Robintrack and, 53, 61 SPACs and, 64 stimulus checks and, 56 Super Bowl ad of, 28, 30, 200 technical snafus by, 53–54 Top 100 Fund and, 61 trading restricted by, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206, 209 valuation of, 49 WallStreetBets and, 22–23 wholesalers and, 33–35, 49, 104, 106 Robin Hood (charitable foundation), 196–97 robo-advisers, xv, 27, 257–58 Betterment, 27, 54, 183, 193, 242, 257, 258, 261 SoFi, 27, 56, 57, 158 Rockefeller, John D., 9 Rodriguez, Alex, 64 Rogers, Will, 163 Rogozinski, Jaime, 23, 39, 46, 50, 53, 55, 70–71, 97, 122, 138, 144, 190, 231 Roper, Barbara, 29–30, 35, 54, 185, 241 Rozanski, Jeffrey, 46 Rukeyser, Louis, 156 Russell 2000 Value Index, 125, 191 S S3 Partners, 76, 81, 130, 133, 170, 217 SAC Capital Advisors, 7, 110 Sanders, Bernie, 65–66, 198 S&P (Standard & Poor’s), 83 S&P Dow Jones Indices, 70, 254 S&P 500, 76 Sanford C.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

He could return to his old position but would have to report to Maughan, with less freedom to run his operation. Unwilling to work under a shorter leash, Meriwether had broken off negotiations and in 1994 went off to found his own hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management. It would operate the same way as the bond arbitrage unit at Salomon, except that Meriwether and his partners got to keep the profits. One by one, Meriwether’s key lieutenants left Salomon to join him at the new harbor-front offices of Long-Term Capital Management in Greenwich, Connecticut. Deprived of his biggest moneymakers, Deryck Maughan saw the “for sale” sign heading for Buffett’s block of stock and began planning for the day when Buffett would wash his hands of Salomon.13 In his 1996 shareholder letter, Buffett said that “virtually all stocks” were overvalued.

Nonetheless, his pale-blue eyes are focused and intent. He sits surrounded by icons and mementos of fifty years. In the hallways outside his office, Nebraska Cornhuskers football photographs, his paycheck from an appearance on a soap opera, the offer letter (never accepted) to buy a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, and Coca-Cola memorabilia everywhere. On the coffee table inside the office, a classic Coca-Cola bottle. A baseball glove encased in Lucite. Over the sofa, a certificate that he completed Dale Carnegie’s public-speaking course in January 1952. The Wells Fargo stagecoach, westbound atop a bookcase.

Image 65 Totally focused on bridge while playing for the Corporate America bridge team against the U.S. Congress team in 1989. Image 66 With Kay Graham at her home on Martha’s Vineyard. Image 67 Improvising a toast at Bill and Melinda Gates’s wedding reception in 1994. Image 68 While on vacation with the Gateses during the Long-Term Capital Management crisis in 1998, Buffett tries to get satellite phone reception in the Grand Canyon. Image 69 Reunion of the original Graham Group in 1995. From the left: Buffett, Tom Knapp, Munger, Roy Tolles, Sandy Gottesman, Bill Scott, Marshall Weinberg, Walter Schloss, Ed Anderson, Bill Ruane.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

See also lifelong learning Le Bon, Gustave, 281 Lee, Bruce, 35 Lee, Stan, 321 Lee Kuan Yew, 277 legitimacy brands, 222 Lehman Brothers, 264 lending business, 317 Lenin, Vladimir, 261 Letterman, David, 352 Lev, Baruch, 312 leverage, 258, 265–266, 318 Levitt, Theodore, 329 lifelong learning, 1, 37; Buffett on, 4–5; dedication to, 195; pursuit of, 4–6 liking and disliking tendency, 341–342 Lima, Marcelo, 169, 286 Lincoln, Abraham, 35 Lindy effect, 16 LinkedIn, 371 liquidity, 220, 232–233, 254–255 litigation, 133 Little Book of Talent, The (Coyle), 42 Livermore, Jesse, 145, 281, 349 Loeb, Gerald, 185; on stocks, 216 lollapalooza effects, 28–29 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 256, 258, 263 long-term compounding, 23 long-term growth, 212 long-term investment, 103 long-term value, 99–100, 102 Lorimer, George, 86 loss aversion, 343–345 loss frames, 345 Lountzis, Paul, 296 low-cost advantages, ROIC and, 224–225 low fixed asset intensity, 211 low-risk bonds, 240 LTCM. See Long-Term Capital Management Lu, Li, 90–91, 369–370 luck, 251, 321–322; humility and, 326–328; improvement of, 323, 326–328; Maggiulli on, 328; in stock market, 331; survival and, 326 Lynch, Peter, 154, 177, 192, 201, 269, 271, 283; on investing, 60, 103; on spinoffs, 204; on stalwarts, 231–232; on stocks, 236; on wealth, 79 M&A.

(Because we tend not to do so, rare and implausible events frequently are grossly mispriced.) Prudent individuals define risk management as a process of dealing with the potential consequences of being wrong. In 2007, Buffett gave a talk to a group of MBA students at the University of Florida, wherein he shared his thoughts on the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM): To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and did need, and that’s foolish. That is just plain foolish. Doesn’t make any difference what your IQ is. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense.


All About Asset Allocation, Second Edition by Richard Ferri

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, inverted yield curve, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Mason jar, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, pattern recognition, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Every advisor who claims to have skill cannot be above average. In aggregate, these advisors are the market, and after advisor fees, fund expenses, and trading costs, advisors’ clients must perform below the market. It can be no other way. During 1998 congressional testimony concerning the economic crisis caused by the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan cautioned against buying into any new concept designed to outperform the markets. The following statement was given before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives: Planning for Investment Success 15 This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they had built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract an abnormal return from financial markets.

Develop a good asset allocation plan, implement the plan, maintain the plan, and make adjustments as your needs change. Asset allocation is not an exciting investment strategy, but when it comes to making money, boring can be very profitable. NOTES 1 “Private-Sector Refinancing of the Large Hedge Fund, Long-Term Capital Management,” testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, October 1, 1998. 2 Roger G. Ibbotson and Paul D. Kaplan, “Does Asset Allocation Policy Explain 40, 90 or 100 Percent of Performance?” Financial Analysts Journal, January/February 2000, pp. 26–33. 3 Gary P.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The rise of finance was accompanied by more frequent and widespread financial crises, from the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s to the worldwide banking collapse of 2007–08 and subsequent global recession. Little was done to prevent them, even after the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 and the related collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, a US hedge fund that boasted two Nobel Prize-winning neo-liberal economists on its board. There was no political will to challenge the might of financial capital. At the heart of neo-liberalism is a contradiction. While its proponents profess a belief in free ‘unregulated’ markets, they favour regulations to prevent collective bodies from operating in favour of social solidarity.

Scott 1 ‘follow-on’ patenting 1 Ford, Henry 1, 2 Ford Motor Company 1 foreign direct investment 1, 2 ‘forum shopping’ 1 fossil fuel industry 1 Foucault, Michel 1 Foxconn 1, 2 fracking 1, 2 Freelancer.com 1 Freelancers Union 1 ‘freelancing’ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Friedman, Milton 1, 2, 3, 4 Gates, Bill 1, 2 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 1, 2 General Electric 1, 2 General Motors 1, 2 Getaround 1 Giddens, Anthony 1 Gigwalk 1 Gilded Age 1, 2 Gilead 1, 2 GiveDirectly 1 Global Transformation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Goldman Sachs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Goodwin, Fred 1 Google 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 GPFG (Government Pension Fund Global, Norway) 1, 2 Gramsci, Antonio 1 Great Convergence 1, 2 ‘Great Gatsby Curve’ 1 Great Transformation 1, 2, 3 Greenspan, Alan 1 Griffin Schools Trust 1 Grillo, Beppe 1 Guardian, The 1, 2 guilds 1, 2, 3 Gunster, Gerry 1 Guy, Gillian 1 Haldane, Andrew 1 Hamilton, Alexander 1 Hammurabi, King 1 Handy 1 Harberger, Arnold 1 Hardin, Garrett 1 Harris, John 1 Hartwick, John 1 Hartwick’s Rule of Inter-Generational Equity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Hartz IV welfare reform 1 Hassle.com 1 Hawking, Stephen 1 Hayek, Friedrich 1, 2, 3, 4 Health and Social Care Act (2012) 1 ‘helicopter money’ 1 ‘help-to-buy’ scheme 1 Henry III, King 1 heteromation 1 Hilferding, Rudolf 1 Hitler, Adolf 1 HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) 1 Hobson, John 1 Hollande, François 1 Homejoy 1 homelessness 1, 2, 3 hoovering (of patents) 1 household debt 1, 2, 3, 4 housing debt 1 Hurd, Nick 1 Husson, Michel 1 Hutton, Will 1 ICSID (International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes) 1, 2 ‘idea-intensive’ firms 1 Illich, Ivan 1 ILO (International Labour Organization) 1 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Independent, The 1 individualisation 1 ‘industrial time’ regime 1 Inequality 1 inheritance tax 1 Institute for Fiscal Studies 1, 2, 3 Institute of Economic Affairs 1, 2 intellectual commons 1, 2 intellectual property branding 1 and commons 1 copyright 1 and lies of rentier capitalism 1 and lobbying 1 and revolt of precariat 1, 2, 3 trade and investment treaties 1 see also patents International Association of Political Consultants 1 International Energy Agency 1 ‘inversion deals’ 1 Investment Court System 1 ‘investment plan for Europe’ 1 IOM (International Organization for Migration) 1 IPSE (Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed) 1 ISA (individual savings allowance) 1 ISDS (Investor–State Dispute Settlement) 1, 2, 3, 4 ITN (Independent Television News) 1 Jackson, Michael 1 James I, King 1 Jefferson, Thomas 1, 2 Jobs (Jumpstart Our Businesses) Act (2012) 1 John, King 1 Johnson, Boris 1, 2 Jospin, Lionel 1 JP Morgan 1, 2 Juncker, Jean-Claude 1 Kalanick, Travis 1 Kay, John 1 Kennedy, John F. 1 Kent Reliance 1 Keynes, John Maynard 1, 2, 3, 4 Kids Company 1 King, Martin Luther 1 King, Matt 1 Kingfisher 1 Kinnock, Neil 1 Kinnock, Stephen 1 Klaus, Václav 1 Koch, Charles 1, 2 Koch, David 1 Kondratieff ‘long waves’ theory 1 Kraft 1 Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique) network 1 Kwarteng, Kwasi 1 labourism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Lady Gaga 1 Lancers 1 landlord debt 1 Lansley, Andrew 1, 2 Laplanche, Renaud 1 Lauderdale, Earl of 1 Lauderdale Paradox 1, 2 Lawson, Nigel 1 Lazzarato, Maurizio 1 Leader’s Group 1 Lebedev, Evgeny 1 Lee, John 1 Legal and General Property 1 Legal Services Act (2007) 1 Lehman Brothers 1, 2 Lending Club 1, 2 Lenin, Vladimir 1 library services 1 Lidl 1 lies of rentier capitalism 1, 2, 3 LinkedIn 1, 2 living wage 1, 2, 3, 4 Lloyds Banking Group 1, 2 lobbying 1, 2 Lobbying Act (2014) 1 London Debt Agreement (1953) 1 London Economic Conference (1933) 1 Long-Term Capital Management 1 ‘Luddites’ 1 Lyft 1, 2, 3 McKinsey Global Institute 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Macmillan, Harold 1 McNamara, Robert 1 Magna Carta (1215) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Mail on Sunday 1 Major, John 1, 2, 3 Malaysia Square (London) 1 Malthus, Thomas 1 Manafort, Paul 1 Mandelson, Peter 1 ‘market exclusivity’ 1 Marshall, Paul 1 Marshall Plan 1 Marx, Karl 1, 2 Mason, Paul 1, 2, 3, 4 mass media 1, 2, 3, 4 MeasureOne 1 Medallion Financial 1 mental health 1 Messina, Jim 1, 2 Met Patrol Plus 1 Metro 1 Microsoft 1 migration 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Milburn, Alan 1, 2, 3 Miliband, Ed 1, 2 Milner, Yuri 1 Miłosz, Czesław 1 Milstein, César 1 Mincome 1 minimum wage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Mirrlees, James 1 Mises, Ludwig von 1, 2 Mishel, Lawrence 1 Mitterrand, François 1 Money Advice Trust 1 Monitor 1 Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) 1, 2, 3 Monti, Mario 1, 2, 3 ‘moonlighters’ 1 moral hazards 1, 2, 3 Motorola 1 MoVimento 1 Stelle (M 2S) 3 MPC (Monetary Policy Committee) 1 Mugabe, Robert 1 Murdoch, Rupert 1, 2, 3, 4 Murphy, Richard 1 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 1, 2 NAIRU (nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment) 1 Nash, John 1, 2 National Audit Office 1, 2 National Council for Voluntary Organisations 1 National Crime Agency 1 National Gallery 1 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (1949) 1 National Trust 1 Nationwide Building Society 1 ‘natural capital’ 1 Neo-liberalism 1, 2 and commons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and democracy 1, 2, 3 and occupational dismantling 1 and revolt of precariat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and shaping of rentier capitalism 1, 2 and subsidies 1, 2, 3, 4 New Labour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 New Scotland Yard 1 Newman, Maurice 1 News of the World 1 NGOs (non-governmental organisations) 1 NHS (National Health Service) 1, 2, 3 Nine Elms development (London) 1, 2 ‘non-dom’ status 1, 2 North Sea oil 1, 2, 3 North York Moors National Park Authority 1 Northern Rock 1, 2 O’Neill, Jim 1 Obama, Barack 1, 2, 3 Observer, The 1, 2 Occidental Petroleum 1 occupational dismantling 1 Occupy Movement 1, 2, 3, 4 ODI (Overseas Development Institute) 1 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Ofcom 1 Office for Budget Responsibility 1, 2 offshore tax havens 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Oil Change International 1 Ola Cabs 1, 2 Olympic Park (Stratford) 1 on-call employees 1 on-demand economy 1, 2, 3 online dispute resolution 1 ONS (Office of National Statistics) 1, 2, 3, 4 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) 1 Optum 1 Osborne, George 1 Ostrom, Elinor 1 Oxfam 1 PAC (Parliamentary Accounts Committee) 1 PACs (Political Action Committees) 1 Paine, Thomas 1 Panama Papers 1 Paolozzi, Sir Eduardo 1 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883) 1 ‘participation income’ system 1 party politics 1 ‘pass-through’ structures 1 patent boxes 1 patents 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 see also intellectual property Paulson, Henry 1 payday loans 1 PayPal 1 peer-to-peer lending 1, 2, 3 PeoplePerHour 1 PEP (Personal Equity Plan) 1 Perkins, Adam 1 Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund 1 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) 1 PFI (private finance initiative) 1, 2, 3 Pfizer 1, 2 Pharmac 1 Philip Morris International 1, 2, 3 Phillips, A.


pages: 342 words: 99,390

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history by Gregory Zuckerman

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Robert Shiller, rolodex, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, technology bubble, zero-sum game

Each of the legendary hedge-fund managers suffered deep losses in the late 1990s or in 2000, however, much as Hall of Fame ballplayers often stumble in the latter years of their playing days, sending a message that even the “"stars”" couldn’'t best the market forever. The 1998 collapse of mega–-hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, which lost 90 percent of its value over a matter of months, also put a damper on the industry, while cratering global markets. By the end of the 1990s, there were just 515 hedge funds in existence, managing less than $500 billion, a pittance of the trillions managed by traditional investment managers.

“"John didn’'t fit the profile of the average hedge-fund manger. He was living downtown in SoHo and in the Hamptons. He had a different lifestyle than [what the] institutional investors were used to seeing,”" Novello says. Paulson’'s fund was hurt by 1998’'s Russian-debt default, the implosion of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, and the resulting market tumult. His patience wore thin with one employee, Dennis Chu, who was left frazzled and unable to make clear recommendations to his boss. “"Just tell me what you think,”" Paulson screamed at Chu, who eventually left the firm. Sometimes Paulson hinted at what might have been aggravating him, claiming that competitors and friends seemed to be pulling away.


pages: 345 words: 100,989

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

He had started out at O’Connor Associates, a fabled Chicago options trading firm founded in the 1970s and renowned as a stable for maths whizzes, many of whom came to dominate derivatives trading in the decades that followed. O’Connor was bought in the late 1990s by Swiss Bank Corporation (which later became the giant Swiss bank UBS). There, for a time, Solo was a star and protégé of the top management. He helped resolve the mess left behind by UBS’s ill-fated investment in the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, whose near-collapse in 1998 sparked genuine fears of a global financial meltdown. He was also at the forefront of the development of the market for credit default swaps, a kind of financial contract that offers protection against the possibility a borrower will default on loan payments.

Morgan ref1 Julius Baer ref1, ref2 Justice, James ‘Jay’, III ref1 Justice, Jim ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Justice, Jim, Jnr ref1 Justice family ref1, ref2, ref3 Katerra ref1 Katz, Adrian ref1 Kelly, Dr David ref1 Kerry Ireland Investments ref1, ref2 Kerry Leeds Investments ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Khan, Iqbal ref1, ref2 Khashoggi, Jamal ref1 Kieser, Eberhard ref1 King, Ian ref1, ref2 King & King ref1 Kingfisher ref1 Kleinman, Mark ref1 KPMG ref1, ref2, ref3 Labour government ref1 Laidir ref1 Lanco ref1, ref2 Lane, Jonathan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Lanng, Christian ref1 Laufer Ltd ref1, ref2, ref3 Left, Andrew ref1 Legal & General ref1 Lewis, Michael ref1 Liberty House Group ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Liberty Steel ref1 Liechtenstein ref1 Little Red Boxes (LRBs) (biofuel generators/GenSets) ref1, ref2, ref3 Lloyds ref1, ref2 Long-Term Capital Management ref1 Lotus Formula One team ref1 Lourie ref1 Luckin Coffee ref1 Lutnick, Howard ref1 Macey-Dare, Julian ref1 McGraw Hill ref1 McKinsey & Company ref1, ref2, ref3 McLennan, Marsh ref1 McNamara, Richard ref1 Macquarie ref1 Madoff, Bernie ref1 Major, John ref1 Manchester University ref1, ref2 Marks & Spencer ref1 Massoudi, Arash ref1 Mathys, Luc ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Maude, Francis ref1 Mecca ref1 Mechel ref1, ref2 Medici, Cosimo de’ ref1, ref2 Merrill Lynch ref1, ref2, ref3 Mexico ref1 Microsoft ref1 Middle East ref1 mining ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Ministry of Defence ref1 Ministry of Finance (German) ref1 Mir Steel ref1 MIS Motorsport ref1 Misra, Rajeev ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Mizuho ref1, ref2 Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) ref1 Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra ref1, ref2, ref3 Moody’s ref1 Morgan Stanley ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23 Trade Receivable electronic Financing System (TReFS) ref1, ref2, ref3 Mubadala Investment Company ref1 Muddy Waters ref1 multi-obligor programmes ref1, ref2 Myners, Paul ref1, ref2 Nacional Financiera (Nafin) ref1 Nagle, Jessica ref1, ref2 National Health Service (NHS) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Natixis ref1 NetJets ref1 Network Rail ref1, ref2 Neumann, Adam ref1, ref2, ref3 News Building ref1 Nexia Sydney ref1 NHS see National Health Service NHS Trusts ref1 NMC Health ref1, ref2 NordFinanz Bank AG (NoFi) ref1 Norwegian Air ref1 Obama, Barack ref1, ref2 Obi Mobiles ref1 O’Connor Associates ref1, ref2, ref3 oil, Mexican ref1 Old Lane LLC ref1 Oliver, Craig ref1 Oracle ref1 Orbian ref1 Ortiz, Ricardo ref1 Osborne, George ref1, ref2 OYO Hospitality ref1, ref2 OYO Hotels ref1 OzEcom ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) ref1 Panamera ref1, ref2 Pandit, Vikram ref1 Parduman Group ref1 Patron Systems ref1 payroll processes ref1 Pemex ref1 PEPS see Pharmacy Earlier Payment Scheme Pepsi-Cola Co. ref1 Peter Greensill Family Trust ref1 Pharmacy Earlier Payment Scheme (PEPS) ref1 pharmacy plan ref1 Philips ref1 PIF see Public Investment Fund Pizza Express ref1 Ponzi, Charles ref1 Ponzi schemes ref1 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 PrimeRevenue ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Primevere ref1 Private Equity News ref1 private jets ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Procter & Gamble ref1 Project Cloud ref1 Project Dill ref1, ref2 Project Olympus ref1 ‘Project Perceval’ ref1 ProPublica ref1 Prudential ref1 Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) ref1 Prytania Solutions ref1, ref2, ref3 Public ref1 Public Investment Fund (PIF) ref1 Putin, Vladimir ref1 Qunaba, Queensland, Australia ref1 QV Foods ref1 Ramsay, Gordon ref1 Ras, Bart ref1 Rasmussen ref1 Ratamacue ref1 Raza, Wasif ref1 receivables (IOUs) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 prospective/future ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 registration agents ref1 Rehbein ref1 Reuters News Agency ref1, ref2 reverse factoring ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 see also supply chain finance Reynolds, Charles ref1, ref2, ref3 Rigzone ref1 Rio Tinto ref1 Ritz-Carlton hotel, Half Moon Bay ref1 Rohner, Urs ref1 Rolet, Xavier ref1 Rothschild ref1, ref2, ref3 Rothschild, Lord ref1 Roxburgh, Charles ref1 Royal Bank of Scotland ref1 Royal Horseguards Hotel ref1 Ruhan, Andy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Russo, Patricia ref1 R.W.


pages: 121 words: 31,813

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions by Lee Freeman-Shor

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, family office, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Pershing Square Capital Management, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

, and Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, who in 1943 said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Experts are surprisingly bad at forecasting. Falling for your own hype can also often lead to mistakes that the least intelligent person in the world would not be capable of. Warren Buffett, when talking about the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, marvelled at “10 or 15 guys with an average IQ of maybe 170 getting themselves into a position where they can lose all their money”.14 And crowds are often surprisingly wise – the market can be right even when everyone who makes it up is individually wrong. In 1987 Jack Treynor presented 56 of his students with a jar full of jelly beans and asked them a simple question.


pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

But that doesn’t change anything in the meantime. This is what John Maynard Keynes meant when he said that markets can stay wrong longer than you can stay solvent. In the summer of 1998, a small group of experts forgot this lesson and in the process brought the world to the brink of financial catastrophe. The experts worked for Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund that was started in 1994 by John Meriwether, a former bond trader whose trading skills had made him a legend on Wall Street. From the outside, LTCM looked a little like the Manhattan Project of investing. Meriwether had hired a host of Wall Street whiz kids who were experts in using computer models to figure out how to make money.

The best definition of “market efficiency,” I think, is that the market is efficient if it consistently provides a better forecast of the future discounted free cash flow of companies than any other individual or system provides. Just how small the world of arbitrageurs was in the summer of 1998 is shown in Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000). Donald MacKenzie focuses on the role of imitation in the crisis. Because other arbitrageurs tried to emulate LTCM, funds were caught holding the same positions, leaving them concerned with only one thing: getting out before everyone else did. See Donald MacKenzie, “Mathematizing Risk: Markets, Arbitrage and Crises,” paper presented at the Organizational Encounters with Risk workshop, London School of Economics Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (May 2002), http://www.sociology.ed.ac.uk/Research/Staff/LSE.pdf.


pages: 311 words: 17,232

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

Amaranth lost $2 billion on its natural gas positions over a two-week period to the middle of September 2006, which led to the Greenwich Connecticut-based hedge fund liquidating its entire $8 billion portfolio US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (2007). Amaranth reported the single greatest losses TRADERS | 247 ever by a hedge fund, even more than the losses of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). The collapse of Amaranth highlighted the vast sums that are moved in commodity markets, the fact that the US natural gas markets are notoriously volatile, the predatory nature that some funds display when they are able to borrow large amounts of money and the secretive nature in which some of the markets still operate.

(Comex) 255 Commodity Future Trading Commission (CFTC) (US) 74, 253, 263 commodity indices 240–2 commodity market manipulation 245–7 Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs) 238 Congo, copper in 201, 202, 210–11 | 293 Connaughton, James 29, 31 ConocoPhilips 57, 79 Conservation International 93 Continental Power Exchange (CPE) 257, 258 Cooke, Jay 198, 222 n. 18 copper 4, 9, 11 applications 187–90 Congo 201, 202, 210–11 cost 211–13, 214–17 demand 182–5 electrical applications 186–7 in electricity generation 194–5 history 185–6 prices 199–201, 222 n. 17 production 195–8, 199 recycling 183, 184–5 theft 179–82 trade 211–13 under-sea extraction 217 in vehicles 190–4 Copper Export Association 201 Copper Exporters Incorporated 201 Copper Producers’ Association 200 coralconnect.com 260 corn 68–84, 96–8, 98–9, 99–101 hybrids 101–3 GM 104–6 diversity 106–10 Corn Products 233 cotton 166 Countryside Alliance 146 credit crisis (2007) 7 Crocker, Thomas 138 Cruse, Richard 111 D1 Oils 57, 58, 59 Dabhol gas-fired power plant 35 Dales, John 138 Daly, Herman 136 Darwin, Charles 67 Davis, Adam 157 Davis, Miles 183 Day after Tomorrow, The 15 n. 1 De Angelis, Anthony ‘Tino’ 245 De Beers 200, 210 De Soto, Hernando 136 Deere, John 100 deforestation 87, 147 Dennis, Richard 237 Deripaska, Oleg 199 Deutsche Bank 246, 261 294 | INDEX Diamond, Jared 97 DiCaprio, Leonardo 130 Dimas, Stavros 160 distillers’ dried grains with solubles (DDGS) 81 Dittar, Thomas 231 Donchian, Richard 237–8 Donson, Harry 199 dot.com bubble 7, 14, 241, 243 Doud, Gregg 82, 83 Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index 240 Dresdner Kleinwort 47 Drexel Burnham Lambert 254 Dreyfus, Louis 89 Duke Energy 258 Dunavant, Billy 237 DuPont 102 E85 79 Ealet, Isabelle 259, 260 Earth Sanctuatires 157 Earth Summit Bali 142 Rio 1992 141 Ebay 38 Ecosystem Marketplace 157 Edison, Thomas 17, 95, 186 Ehrlich, Paul 13, 14, 16 n. 9 Population Bomb, The 14 Eisenhower, President 40 El Paso 258 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) 153 electric vehicles 54, 191–3 11th Hour, The 130 Elf 261 Elton, Ben 135 Emissions Trading Program 139 Energy Information Administration (EIA) 38 Energy Policy Act 2005 (US) 28 energy security 28–9 Energy Security Act 1980 (US) 74 Enron 35, 164, 165, 213, 246, 257–64 Enron Online 213, 225 n. 40, 257, 258, 259 Environmental Protection Agency (US) 27, 62 n. 17, 75, 139 ethanol 69–70, 73–81, 92, 119 n. 6 see also biofuels Eurex 262 European Climate Exchange 146 European Union 142, 158, 160 Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) 185 Evelyn, John 127 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) 13, 270 Exxon 32, 50, 52, 261 ExxonMobil 13, 79, 242, 254 Faraday, Michael 186 Farm Credit Administration 76 farm debt crisis 114–15 farm payments 115–16 farm sinks 154–5 Fearnley-Whittingstall 86 Federal Bureau of Investigation 246 Federal Clean Water Act (US) 156 F-gases 131 Firewire 260 Fisher, Mark 266, 269 Fleming, Roddy 219 flex-fuel cars 92–3 Fonda, Jane 114 Food and Agricultural Organization 148, 159 Ford, Bill 267 Ford, President Gerald 30, 115 Ford, Henry 73, 95, 195 Fordlandia 195 forest economics 149–50 forestry carbon credits 147 forests 147–51 Forrest, Andrew 199 Forward Contracts (Regulations) Act 1952 (US) 249 Forward Markets Commission (FMC) 249 Four Winds Capital Management 149, 159, 184 Franklin, Benjamin 157 Freese, Barbara 27 Friedland, Robert 199 Frost Fairs 127 fuel cell vehicles 53, 192–3 Futures Inc. 237 futures trading 235–6, 245, 247–50 gas 21–2 Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) 61 n. 8 gasohol 73 gene shuffling 105 General Atlantic 267, 269 General Motors 53, 54, 191, 193 INDEX genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds 105–6 Glencore 199, 211 Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005 148 Global Initiatives173 n. 28 Global Positioning Systems (GPS) 191 global warming 24–6, 75 Globex 267 glycerin 82 Golder and Associates 206 Goldman 255, 260, 261 Goldman Sachs 57, 146, 254, 259 Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) 240, 241 Goldstein Samuelson 245 Google 37, 38 Gore, Al 16 n. 5, 28, 38, 126, 129, 143 Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) certificates 146 Grant, President Ulysses S. 214 Greenburg, Marty 269 greenhouse effect 131 greenhouse gas emissions 25, 131 see also carbon dioxide; nitrous oxide Greenspan, Alan 244 Gresham Investment Management 242, 243 Guggenheim brothers 197 Guttman, Lou 251, 255, 259 Hamanaka, Yasuo 246 Hanbury-Tension, Robin 146 Harding, President Warren 103 hedge funds 23640 Henry Moore Foundation 180, 181 Herfindahl, Orris 215, 226 n. 46 Heston, Charlton 15, n. 4 Hezbollah 46 Hi-Bred Corn Company 102 high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) 89–90 Highland Star 219 Hill, James Jerome 215 Homestead Act 1862 (US) 100 Honda 53 Howard, John 133, 171 n. 16 Hu Jintao, President 219 Hub, Henry 257 Humphries, Jon 181 Hunt Brothers 245 Hunter, Brian 246, 247 | 295 Hurricane Katrina 135 Hurricane Rita 134 Hussein, Saddam 48 hybrid cars 53 hydroelectric power 34 hydrogen cars 54 hypoxia zone 111 iAqua 165 IEA 32 IMF 16 n. 6 Inconvenient Truth, An 16 n. 5, 129 Indonesia palm oil 93–4 Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) 31–2 intelligent lighting 38 IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) 246, 261, 262, 265, 266, 267 Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC) 203, 204 International Bauxite Association (IBA) 203 International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) 144 International Commercial Exchange (ICE) 273 n. 15 International Copper Cartel 201 International Energy Agency (IEA) 19, 25, 26, 40, 140–1, 153, 194 International Monetary Fund 57 International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (UN) 24, 132, 134, 147, 149, 170 n. 3 International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) 250, 256, 257, 262, 263, 264, 265 International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) 41 International Tin Council 203 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture 107 Iowa Farm Bureau 36, 76, 155 Iowa Stored Energy Park 36 Japanese car market 18 Jardine Matheson 225 n. 40 Jarecki, Dr Henry 242, 243, 244 jatropha 57–9 Jefferson, Thomas 109 Jevons, William Stanley 20 Joint, Charles 181 296 | INDEX Joint Implementation (JI) 151 Jones, Paul Tudor 237, 238 Kabila, Joseph 210 Kanza, T.R. 211 Katanga of Congo 201, 225 n. 37 Kennecott Copper 199 Kennedy, Joseph (Joe) 264 Khosla Partners 38 Khosla, Vinod 37 Kitchen, Louise 258 Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers 37 Kooyker, Willem 237, 238 Kovner, Bruce 237, 238 Krull, Pete 81 Kyoto Protocol 24, 27, 50, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 151, 169 n. 2, 194 clean development mechanism (CDM) 151 Lamkey, Kendall 112 Land and Water Resources, Inc. 155 Land Grant College Act (US) 101 Lange, Jessica 114 lead credits 172 n. 20 LED (light-emitting diodes) 38 Lehman brothers 241 Leiter, Joseph 245 Leopold II, King 210 Liebreich, Michael 39 Liffe 267 Lincoln, President Abraham 69, 100, 101, 119 n. 1 Lintner, Dr John 243 liquid coal 33–4 London Clearing House 263 London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe) 262 London Metal Exchange (LME) 16 n. 10, 43, 196, 204, 212, 213, 246 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) 247 Louisiana Light Sweet 253 Lourey, Richard 166, 168 Lovelock, James 131 Lyme Timber Company, The 149 Mackintosh, John 232, 234, 270 Madonna 6 malaria 156 Malthus, Thomas 130 manure lagoons 154–5 Mao, Chairman 210 Markowitz, Harry 243 Marks, Jan 268 Marks, Michel 252, 253, 254, 268 Marks, Rebecca 164, 165 Mars, Forrest E., Jr 60 Matheson, Hugh 225 n. 40 Matif 262 McCain, John 80 McDonalds 89 Megatons to Megawatts programme 42 Melamed, Leo 249–50, 264 Mendel, Gregor (Johann) 102, 122 n. 30 Merrill Lynch 241, 246 Mesa Water 163–4 methane 128, 131, 152, 154 methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) 74 Microsoft 13 Midwestern Regional Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord 143 milk 88–9 Milken, Michael 254 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Board 156 Mittal, Laskma 212 Mobile 261 Mocatta Metals 242 Monsanto 106, 108 Montéon, Michael 199 Montgomery, David 138 Moor Capital 237 Moore, Henry 179, 182 Morgan, J.P. 246 Morgan Stanley 254, 255, 259, 260, 261 Muir, John 125 Mulholland, William 162 Murphy, Eddie 256 Murray Darling Basin 165–6 Musk, Elon 38 Nabisco 238–9 Nanosolar 38 Nasdaq 262 Nassar, President 210 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 192 National Alcohol Programme (Brazil) 92 National Cattlemen’s Beef Association 82 National Commission on Supplies and Shortages (US) 7, 16 n. 5 National Corn Growers’ Association 80 National Energy Policy (US) 28 INDEX National Petroleum Council (NPC) 30, 50 National Security Space Office (NSSO) (US) 39 NCDEX 248, 249 Nelson, Willie 115 New Deal Farm Laws 103 New Deal for Agriculture 76, 89 New Energy Finance 39 New Farm and Forest Products Task Force 95 New York Board of Trade 240, 255 New York Cocoa Exchange 255 New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange 255 New York Cotton Exchange 237, 252, 255 New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) 43, 156, 246, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269 New York Metal Exchange 226 n. 42 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) 198, 253, 255, 256, 264, 268, 270 Newman, Paul 265 Nicholson, Jack 162 nickel 217–18, 227 n. 50, 227 n. 52 nitrates 110–11 nitrogen oxide emissions 139 nitrous oxide 131, 139, 140, 152 Nixon, President 27, 30, 115, 231, 252 Noble Group 199 North, John Thomas 198, 199, 209 Norton, Gale 163 nuclear energy 34 nuclear power 21, 39–44 Nuexco Trading Corporation 42 Nybot 255, 256, 265 Obama, Barack 79, 80, 143 obesity 121 n. 19 O’Connor, Edmund 231 O’Connor, William 231 OECD 158, 159 oil 44–53 energy content 51–2 palm 93 prices 8–9, 10, 52–3 sands 49–50 shale 50–1, 64 n. 33 shocks 5, 7 soya 82 trading 250–5, 266 Oliver, Jamie 86 onion futures trading 245 | 297 Ontario Teachers’ Fund 244, 272 n. 8 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) 4, 9, 10, 22, 44–7, 203, 204, 251, 254 over-the-counter (OTC) trading 16 n. 8, 254–5 Owens Valley rape (1908) 162 Pachauri, Dr Rajendra K. 59 Page, Larry 38 Paley Commission 8 palm oil 93 Palmer, Fred 62 n. 14 Parthenon Capital 156, 267 PayPal 38 Peadon, Brian 165 perfluorocarbon 131 PGGM 244 Phaunos Timber Fund 149 Phelps Dodge 199 Phibro 254 Pickens, T.


pages: 319 words: 106,772

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

For example, people might have E F F ICIE N T MARKE TS , RANDOM WALKS, AND BUBB LES 189 been concerned about a big, rare event, such as a complete nationalization and confiscation of the stock market by the government, or an enormous technological breakthrough that would make existing companies able to pay many times more dividends. As noted earlier, my work invited the attention of an army of critics. Most notable among them was Robert Merton, a brilliant financial theorist who was later to win the Nobel Prize in economics (and also to suffer a major financial loss as a principal in the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund). Merton, with Terry Marsh, wrote an article in the American Economic Review in 1986 that argued against my results and concluded, ironically, that speculative markets were not too volatile.26 John Campbell and I wrote a number of papers attempting to put these claims of excess volatility on a more secure footing, and we developed statistical models to study the issue and deal with some of the problems emphasized by the critics.27 We felt that we had established in a fairly convincing way that stock markets do violate the efficient markets model.

., 238n7 Laster, David, 262n31 Lawrence, Joseph, 172 Learning, 191–200, 262–63n1–14; about mutual funds, diversification, and holding, 197–200; about risk, 192–95; about stocks versus bonds, 193–97; unlearning and, 200 LeBaron, Blake, 244n22 Lee, In-Ho, 256n6 Lefevre, Edwin, 103 Lehmann, Bruce, 237n11 Leland, Hayne, 92, 93 LeRoy, Stephen, 184 Liang, J. Nellie, 238n7, 262n31 Levine, Ross, 237n1 Lichtenstein, Sarah, 142 Lin, Hsiou-Wei, 239n17 Lo, Andrew, 237n11 290 Logistic curve, 158, 257n13 London stock exchange, 3, 81 Long Term Capital Management, 189 Long-term investing, 176–77, 197–200 Long-term returns, 10–14, 194–95 Loomis, Graham, 243n12 Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio, 237n1 Loser stocks, 130 Lotteries, 40–41 Lotus Development Corporation, 154 Loughran, Tim, 259n21 Lucas, Deborah, 263n14 Lynch, Peter, 181, 259n17 Maas, Anne, 255n16 McDonald’s, 177 Mackay, Charles, 177 Mackinlay, Craig, 237n11 McKinley, William, 102 MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, 73 McNichols, Maureen, 239n17 Macro markets, 229–31 Macro Markets (Shiller), 230 Macro securities, 230, 267n30 Magical thinking, 143 Maier, N.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Someone must take the other side of that contract. Such insurance can be easy to purchase in good times, but in bad times, no one will be willing to provide it. The system cannot insure itself. Making a huge bet, particularly on illiquid assets, is thus a very perilous pastime. The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 was a classic example of this. LTCM was a hedge fund led by a bond trader called John Meriwether who had worked at Salomon Brothers, then one of Wall Street’s leading firms. He hired a stellar team, including two Nobel prize-winning economists, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. LTCM pursued a strategy called arbitrage, buying assets that looked artificially cheap and selling short (betting on a falling price) similar assets that looked expensive.

Montgomery hyperinflation Iceland Icesave Incas India individual voluntary arrangement Industrial Revolution inflation inflation target inflation-linked bonds Interest Equalization Tax interest rates International Monetary Fund (IMF) Invergordon mutiny investment investment banks Iraq Ireland Irish Nationwide Building Society Isabella, Queen of Spain Italy It’s a Wonderful Life Jackson, Andrew Japan Jefferson, Thomas Jewish custom Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, Simon Johnson Matthey Bank Joshi, Dhaval J P Morgan Jubilee Debt Campaign jubilees, and writing off debts Julius Caesar junk bonds Kaiser Wilhem II of Germany Kennedy, John Kennedy, Robert Keynes, John Maynard Keynesianism Kim Jong Il Kindleberger, Charles King, Martin Luther King, Mervyn Knightian uncertainty Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Koo, Richard KPCB Krugman, Paul Kwak, James Labour Party Lachman, Desmond Lagarde, Christine Landsbanki Law, John League of Nations Lees, Adam Leeson, Nick Legatum Institute Lehman Brothers lender of last resort Lenin, V. I. leverage leveraged buyout Lewis, Michael Liberal Democrat party (UK) Liberal Party (UK) life expectancy life-cycle theory Little Dorrit lire Live 8 concert Lloyd George, David Lombard Odier Lombard Street Research London School of Economics Long Term Capital Management longevity Louis XIV, King of France Louis XV, King of France Louvre accord Lucas, Robert Lucullus, Roman general Luxembourg Macaulay, Thomas McCarthy, Cormac Macdonald, James MacDonald, Ramsay McKinsey McNamara, Robert Madoff, Bernie Malthusian trap Mandelson, Peter Marais, Matthieu Marco Polo Mares, Arnaud Marks & Spencer Marshall, George Marshall Aid Marshalsea Prison Mauro, Paolo May, Sir George means/media of exchange Medicaid Medicare Mellon, Andrew mercantilism Merchant of Venice, The Meriwether, John Merkel, Angela Merton, Robert Mexico Mill, John Stuart Milne-Bailey, Walter Minsky, Hyman Mises, Ludwig von Mississippi Project Mitterrand, Francois Mobutu, Joseph Mongols monetarism monetary policy monetary targets money markets money supply Moody’s Moore’s Law moral hazard Morgan Stanley Morgenthau, Henry Morrison, Herbert mortgages mortgage-backed bonds Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative Napier, Russell Napoleon, emperor of France Napoleonic Wars Nasser, president of Egypt National Association of Home Builders National Association of Realtors National Association of Security Dealers Netherlands New Century New Hampshire New Jersey Newton, Sir Isaac New York Times New Zealand Nixon, Richard Norman, Montagu North Carolina Northern Ireland Northern Rock North Korea North Rhine Westphalia, Germany Norway Obama, Barack odious debt Odysseus OECD d’Orléans, duc Ottoman Empire output gap Overstone, Lord overvalued currency owner-equivalent rent Papandreou, George paper money paradox of thrift Paris club Passfield, Lord (Sidney Webb) Paulson, Hank pawnbroking pension age pension funds pensions Pepin the Short Perot, Ross Perry, Rick Persians Peter Pan Philip II, King of Spain Philip IV, King of France PIGS countries PIMCO Plaza accord Poland Ponzi, Charles Ponzi scheme population growth populism portfolio insurance Portugal pound Prasad, Eswar precious metals Price-earnings ratio primary surplus Prince, Chuck principal-agent problem printing money private equity property market protectionism Protestant work ethic public choice theory public-sector workers purchasing power parity pyramid schemes Quaintance, Lee quantitative easing (QE) Quincy, Josiah railway mania Rajan, Raghuram Rand, Ayn Reagan, Ronald real bills theory real interest rates Record, Neil Reformation, the Reichsbank Reichsmark Reid, Jim Reinhart, Carmen renminbi Rentenmark rentiers reparations Republican Party reserve currency retail price index retirement revaluation Revolutionary War Ridley, Matt Roberts, Russell Rogoff, Kenneth Romanovs Roosevelt, Franklin D.


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

All the diversification and hedging strategies that were supposed to keep banks from blowing up were, as David Viniar, the chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs put it, blindsided by “25 standard deviation moves, several days in a row.”24 This is similar to the “ten sigma event” claim reportedly made by John Meriweather when his hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), blew up in 1998.25 What these sigmas refer to is the number of standard deviations from the mean of a probability distribution at which an outcome will, probabilistically speaking, occur, with each higher sigma (number) being increasingly less likely than the last. According to Mr.

, 123, 124 General Theory, 126, 127, 145 in Germany, 195 in Ireland, 208 Keynesian economics, ix, 16, 39, 54–56, 122, 137, 140–141, 149 See also Phillips curve on austerity, 97–98, 101, 125–131 “paradox of thrift”, 8 rediscovery of, 221 Kinsella, Stephen, 61, 208 Kirkman, Geoffrey, ix Kirshner, Jonathan, 202 Koo, Richard “Balance Sheet Recession”, 211 Konczal, Mike, 212, 213 Krugman, Paul, 11, 55, 165, 207 and the euro, 78 Krups, 132 Kuronuma, Yuji, 197 Kwak, James, 11 Kydland, Finn, 157 Lagarde, Christine, 218 Landsbanki, 237 “Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes versus Spending” (Alesina and Ardagna), 173, 212 Latvia austerity in, 18, 103, 179, 216–226, 217 fig. 6.1, 221 Laval, Pierre, 202 Law, John and the national debt of France, 114 Lehman Brothers, 25, 29 leverage, 32 and banking, 25, 26, 32 of European banks, 89 ratios of, 48 liberalism, 98–101 See also neoliberalism liquidationism, 101, 119–122, 204 liquidity support, 45 List, Friedrich, 134 Lithuania austerity in, 18, 103, 179, 216–226, 217 fig. 6.1 Lloyd George, David “We Can Conquer Unemployment”, 123, 124 Lo, Andrew, 22 Locke, John, 17, 100–101 and austerity, 114–115 and the creation of the market, 105–106 as an economic revolutionary, 104–105 on taxes, 106 relationship between the market and the state, 115–122 Second Treatise of Government, 104 Long Term Capital Management. See Merriweather, John long-term refinancing operations in Europe, 86, 89 Lundberg, Erik, 191 Maastricht Treaty, 78, 92, 141 Malone, Martin, 236 Marshall, T. H., 117 Marxist, 195 Mauldin, John, 66, 67 McBride, David, ix Meidner, Rudolph, 193 Mellon, Andrew, 119, 126, 128 Menger, Carl, 143 Merkel, Angela, 52, 166 and austerity, 115 Merriweather, John, 32 Microsoft corporate headquarters in Ireland, 246 Mill, John Stuart, 117–119 On Liberty, 116 Principles of Political Economy, 116 Minsky, Hyman, 143 Mises, Ludwig von, 120, 144 and the New Liberals, 118 model of credit crunches and collapses, 146–147 Mitchell, Wesley, 120 modern business cycle theory, 119 moral hazard, 42, 64, 84, 159 trades, 81–82, 90, 230 mortgage-backed security, 24, 28 See also real estate Morgan, J.


pages: 341 words: 107,933

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity by Guy Hands

Airbus A320, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deal flow, Etonian, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flag carrier, high net worth, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, traveling salesman

In normal times, Ethan’s team securitised the loans they made and sold them on as quickly as possible to mitigate the danger of a strong yen that left them with dollar assets worth less than the yen that had been borrowed. But the times weren’t normal: 1998 saw the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management and a Russian debt crisis. Nomura decided that Ethan’s business was too risky and needed to cut back. Ethan negotiated a multimillion-dollar exit and Nomura selected a combination of its own people and Ethan’s people to manage the business. Unfortunately, the new management squabbled amongst themselves and the business started going south.

(Beatles, The), 191 Hendon Hall Hotel, London, 301 Hermes, 275 Hertford College, Oxford, 52 Hewlett-Packard, 70 Hill, Rupert, 44 Hill Samuel, 65 Holiday Inn, 182 Holy Trinity school, Cookham, 6–9, 12–13 homosexuality, 248 Hong Kong, 72, 74, 96, 123, 275 ‘Hotel California’ (Eagles), 258 Howard, Mark, 256–7 Howe, Geoffrey, 57 Hugo, Victor, 325 Hurdelbrink, Michael, 126–7, 129 Hyper Entertainment, 131 hyperglycaemia, 32 hypnotism, 294 ‘I Am Human’ (Escape The Fate), ix ‘I Fought the Law’ (The Clash), 229 ‘If–’ (Kipling), 25, 245 In Rainbows (Radiohead), 204 India, 96, 223, 226–7 initial public offerings (IPOs), 160, 163 Inland Revenue, 138, 225–6, 247 Inntrepreneur, 107 Institute for Fiscal Studies, 321 Institute for Government, 321 Intelligent Investor, The (Graham), 16 InterContinental Hotels Group, 182 International Monetary Fund, 50 ‘Internationale, The’, 245 Investcorp, 81 Investment Advisory Committee (IAC), 179–80 Iran, 156 Iraq, 82–3 Ireland, 11 Iron Maiden, 172 Irving, John, 19 Island Records, 207 Islington, London, 321, 323 Italy, 262, 273, 276 Jackson, Gary, 55 Jackson, Janet, 206–7 Jagger, Michael ‘Mick’, 205 Japan, xii–xiii, 72–3, 79, 84, 91–114, 124, 136, 148–9 fish markets in, 166 four as unlucky number, 273 fugu, 148 hostess clubs, 136 leadership in, 200 nemawashi, 101–2, 111 sokaiya, 124 Yakuza, 124, 129 Zaitech bubble (c. 1984–9), 79 Jennings, Waylon, 41 Jericho, Oxford, 60 John Hancock, 225 Jones, Davy, 39 Joseph, Keith, 50 Judd School, Tonbridge, 23–5, 28–9, 31–3 junk bonds, 79–81 Kachingwe, Mayamiko, 151, 155, 157 karaoke, 200 Keble College, Oxford, 34, 35 Kent House, Knightsbridge, 185 Keogh, John, 67, 70, 72, 74 KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), xiii Kiernan, Jamie, 66 King George Island, Antarctica, 277 King, Justin, 266, 268–71, 273–7, 281, 283–5, 295–6, 308 Kingfisher Airlines, 156 Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, 36–9 Kinski, Michael, 144–5, 146, 148 Kipling, Rudyard, 25, 245 Klein, Michael, 123–4, 161, 163, 173, 181, 187, 219, 222 Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), 164, 165, 215 Kona, Hawaii, 166 Kroll, 158 Kulenkampff, Georg, 157, 159 Kuwait, 82, 222 Lady Gaga, 141 Laine, Sami, 313 Langeni people, 17 Lansdowne’s, Sevenoaks, 26–8, 29 Las Vegas, Nevada, 257 Lawson, Dominic, 57 Lawson, Nigel, 56 Lawson, Nigella, 57 Leahy, Terence ‘Terry’, 266 Leat, Chad, 222, 238, 239 Lehman Brothers, 128, 218 Leicester Square, London, 263 Leighton, Allan, 218 Lemaire Channel, 278 Lennon, John, 208 Levi, Lorenzo, 157 Liar’s Poker (Lewis), 84 Libby, Lewis ‘Scooter’, 241 Limited Partners (LPs), 183 Linden Park, Tunbridge Wells, 33, 34 Linens ’n Things, 215 Livingstone, Kenneth ‘Ken’, 132 Lloyd George, David, 58 Lloyds Banking Group, 267, 271 London, England Citigroup litigation, 255–7 Goldman Sachs, 65–72, 74–8 Nomura, 91–114, 122–40 London School of Economics, 32 London Stock Exchange, 92 Long-Term Capital Management, 125 Love (Cirque du Soleil), 207 Lynch, Gerard, 248 Lynn, Lesley, 222, 226, 227 Mackintosh, Clive, 54 Macmillan, Harold, 58 Macquarie Group, 159 Magdalen College, Oxford, 54, 55 Magic Circle, 232 Magnuson, Rick, 91, 137 Mallya, Vijay, 156 ‘Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies …’ (Jennings and Nelson), 41 Man Group, 182, 186 Manchester United FC, 182, 289 Mandela, Nelson, 5 Mansfield College, Oxford, 34–6, 43–59, 322 Maria Grey Teacher Training College, 4, 9 market crash (1989), 194 Marks & Spencer, 183 Martin, George, 207 Mason, Nicholas, 113 Matsuura, Shu, 105 Mauna Kea, Hawaii, 227 May, Brian, 113 May, Philip, 54, 56 May, Theresa, 56 McCartney, Paul, 208 McCrae, Julian, 321 McDonald’s, 86, 203, 264–6, 278, 283, 289, 290, 309–10, 315 McKillop, Tom, 292 McKinsey, 261, 314 McLaughlan, Roger, 273 Medici family, 262 Melchionna, Jerry, 93, 126–8 mergers and acquisitions, 120 Mermaid Theatre, Blackfriars, 39 Merrill Lynch, 86, 91, 92, 149, 172 Midland Bank, 65 Miles, Bill, 144, 145, 163 Millennium Dome, London, 130–36 Miller, Andrew, 290, 291 Ministry of Defence, 196, 279–81, 300 Minogue, Kylie, 178, 209–10 Mondale, Walter, 130 Monday Club, 53–4 Monkees, The, 39 Moody’s, 169 Moore, Michael, 244–5 Moreno, Glen, 292 Morgan Stanley, 85, 128–9, 155, 226 Morris, Doug, 195 Mortara, Michael, 84 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), 194 Moscow, Russia, xii–xiii Moulton, Jon, 263 Mthethwa people, 17 Murdoch, James, 198 Murdoch, Rupert, 155, 174 music industry, 169–71, 176, 190, 195–6, 198, 201, 203, 207, 234 ‘My Way’ (Sinatra), 200 Naga, 283, 310–11 Natal University, 3 National Association for Gifted Children, 9 National Lottery, 117 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 9, 26, 33 Nazzaro, Pasquale, 290, 291 Nelson Street, Oxford, 60 Nelson, Willie, 41 nemawashi, 101–2, 111 New Century, 181 New Jersey, United States, 222 New Millennium Experience Company, 133–6 New York Times, 169 New York, United States, 69, 75, 80, 84 Citigroup litigation, 233, 234, 238–52 Nomura, 125, 126 Pearl Street, 80, 81, 240 New Zealand, 225 News Corporation, 155 Newcourt, 123 newts, 132 Nicoli, Eric, 173, 174, 176, 198–9, 242, 256 Nikko, 79 Nirvana, 181 Nixon, Peter, 37 Nomura, xii–xiv, 79, 91–114, 121, 123–40, 143–4, 313 Angel Trains, 110–11, 121 Annington Homes, 279 AT&T Capital, 123 CCA, 125–9 Citigroup and, 123–4 Millennium Dome, 130–36 PFG, 98–114, 120, 129, 137, 144, 313 Phoenix Inns, 100–108 sokaiya scandal (1997), 124 Terra Firma and, 225 Unique Pub Company, 123 US shares listing (2000), 136–7 Nonconformist Christianity, 43 Norman, Archibald, 218 North Carolina, 148 North Sea oil, xiii, xv Northern Foods, 220 Northern Ireland, 50 Norway, 264–6 O’Donnell, Augustine ‘Gus’, 162, 186 O’Driscoll, Pat, 220 Oaktree Capital, 215 Odeon, 198 Odeon Cinemas, 278 Old Government House Hotel, Guernsey, 180 Old Lane, 226–7 Old, Richard, 55 Oman, 302, 305 Ono, Yoko, 208 Operation Desert Storm (1991), 82–3 Oriel College, Oxford, 49 Orpington, Kent, 38 Osaka, Japan, 148 Oxford University, 4, 10, 32–6, 39, 43–59, 263 Bullingdon Club, 45 Conservative Association (OUCA), 53–8, 61 debating society, 49–50 drinking culture, 46 Hertford College, 52 Magdalen College, 54, 55 Mansfield College, 34–6, 43–59, 322 Union, 53, 54, 56, 58–9 University College, 321 Pandit, Vikram, 223, 226–7 Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, 178 Parmaco, 296, 300, 311–16 Parmalat, 243 Partners Group, 316 Patten, John, 52–3 Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, 241 Pea Stacks, Guernsey, 325–6 Pearl Street, New York, 80, 81, 240 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 321 Pegasus Aviation Finance Company, 155 Penner, Ethan, 91–3, 124–8, 170 Permira, 173 Personal Presentations, 315 Pessina, Stefano, 164, 166 philosophy, 48 Phoenix, Arizona, 86 Phoenix Inns, 100–108 photography, 14, 25, 29–31 Pimlico, London, 169 Pink Floyd, 113, 172, 178 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 276 pobbles, 28 Point, The (1977 play), 39 poker, 29 Poland, 57–8 Poster Shop, London, 60 Premier Inn, 316 Prescott, John, 132, 134 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 135 Prince, Charles ‘Chuck’, 188, 217, 223 Principal Finance Group (PFG), 98–114, 120, 129, 137, 144, 160, 313 private equity, 98, 110, 118–22, 123, 177, 193 Private Guy, 58–9 Project Blackjack, 219 Project Ford, 273 Project Poker, 219 pronunciation, 11 Proposition 8 (2008), 248 prostitution, 195 Prudential Insurance, 170 Pryce, Tim, 138, 150, 180, 217, 224, 232, 233, 247, 248, 249, 252 pubs, 100–108, 123 Punja, Riaz, 155 punk music, xi, 43 Punta Arenas, Chile, 277 Qaboos bin Said, Sultan of Oman, 302 Qantas, 108 Qatar, 268 Queen (band), 113 Queen’s University Belfast, 32 Radiohead, 172, 204 Railtrack, 108 Railway and Bike pub, Sevenoaks, 26 railways, 108–11, 121, 196 Rakoff, Jed Saul, 236, 251–2 Randolph Hotel, Oxford, 66 Ravenscroft Preparatory School, Somerset, 13–19, 23 Reckitt Benckiser, 223 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 325 Retreat, The, Cookham, 6 ‘Revolution 1’ (Beatles, The), 303 Rhode Island, 126 Rhodesia (1965–79), xv, 4, 5, 6 Riccardi family, 262 Ritter, E.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

In December 1996, Greenspan rattled Wall Street by asking in public whether ‘irrational exuberance’ had infected the stock market, but as this question turned out to be rhetorical and elicited no further action, the bull market in equities continued. Low inflation gave Greenspan the freedom to apply monetary balm at moments of financial distress. In late September 1998, the Fed funds rate was cut by 25 basis points after the near failure of Long Term Capital Management, an over-leveraged hedge fund. The markets responded warmly to the advent of what was called the ‘Greenspan put’ – an unwritten contract with Wall Street that committed the Federal Reserve to intervene to halt market declines. Between October 1997 and its peak two and a half years later, the Nasdaq Index of technology stocks enjoyed a near threefold gain.

(The Big Brother show started the following year and, nearly two decades later, a reality TV star became US president.) It can be viewed, too, as an allegory for the bubble economy that also came into existence at around this date. A couple of months after The Truman Show opened in cinemas, the ‘Greenspan put’ emerged from the Fed’s response to the crisis at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. As in The Truman Show, we have come to live in a controlled environment, with its fake money, fake interest rates, fake economy, fake jobs and fake politicians. Our bubble world is sustained by a combination of passive acquiescence and powerful vested interests. It’s a 24/7 show with a global audience.

., Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), 159–60, 298 leveraged loan market, 223, 231 Levine, Ross, 266 Leviticus, Book of, 9 Lewis, Michael, The Big Short, 198 Li-Gang Liu, 277* Li Keqiang, 277 Libya, 255 Lidderdale, William, 79 Lindert, Peter, Unequal Gains (with Jeffrey Williamson), 203, 216 Liu He, 277 Liu Zhijun, 275 Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of, 65, 70 Locke, John, xxii, xxiv–xxv, 38–40, 39*, 41, 42, 43–4, 49, 156, 202 Long Term Capital Management, 111, 186 Lou Jiwei, 281 Louis XIV, King of France, 38, 48, 60 Lubbock, Cecil, 93 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 258 Luther, Martin, 26 Ma, Yueran, 220 Macau, 285, 287 MacGregor, Gregor, 65 Mackay, Charles, 71 Malaysia, 258 Mandeville, Bernard, Fable of the Bees (1714), 27 Mankiw, Greg, 244 Manley, Thomas, 37 Mantega, Guido, 254, 257 Marcartney, Lord, 265 marginal utility theory, 95†, 218 Marsh (insurance-broker), 220 Marshall, Alfred, 99–100 Martin, William McChesney, 109*, 109 Marx, Karl, 4†, 9, 17, 19*, 141†, 217*, 287, 298; on failure of Overend Gurney, 73–4; on usury, 16, 200–201 Massie, John, 41 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift (1925), 3–4 Mayer, Thomas, 134–5 Mayweather, Floyd ‘Crypto’, 178 McCain, John, 110 McCulley, Paul, 113* McKinnon, Ronald, 256, 264, 266, 269, 283, 286 McManus, T.


pages: 379 words: 113,656

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

A Russian budgetary crisis ensued, and the government was forced to default on its sovereign debt, not something that even former superpowers are supposed to do. The shock to the world debt markets caused investors to flee bonds of any kind other than those of the U.S. government. Just prior to this, and little known to the rest of world, a hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut, called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), had placed huge bets on what it perceived were mispricings in a wide range of bonds. But now, to the fund’s horror, the prices that were supposed to converge began to diverge instead, evaporating positions worth billions of dollars in a few months. Concerned that if LTCM were forced to liquidate its assets, the very markets in which it operated might fail, the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve coordinated a bailout by a consortium of the largest investment banks in the country, thus averting a potential catastrophe.

Lessons for a Connected Age An engaging and insightful account of the 1997 Asian crisis is contained in Friedman, T. L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999). Quite a lot of Harry Potter–related information can be found at http://www.insideharrypotter.com. And finally, a brief but illuminating account of the problems that beset Long Term Capital Management in the fall of 1998, is MacKenzie, D. Fear in the markets. London Review of Books, 22(8), 31–32 (2000). CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE WORLD GETS SMALLER: ANOTHER YEAR IN THE CONNECTED AGE Dodds, P. S., Muhamad, R., and Watts, D. J. An experimental study of search in global social networks.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Sooner or later—sooner would be preferable—these critiques (many others have been omitted for brevity) must start converging into a revisionist framework and into a new “spin.” More disconcertingly, the fallibility of derivatives and their underlying mathematical calculations and assumptions now spans two decades—so-called program insurance in 1987, the flawed convergence plays and risk arbitrage of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, and the multiple miscalculations of 2007 (flawed quantitative analysis, risk myopia, and the crippling opacity and toxic “contagion” of collateralized debt obligations). The risk of risk is no longer just a bad pun. Members of the Austrian School, bubble blamers, and Minsky acolytes indicting Ponzi finance have made some valid criticisms.

Kerry, John Kindleberger, Charles Kissinger, Henry Klare, Michael Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company Korea, People’s Democratic Republic of (North Korea) Korea, Republic of (South Korea) Korean War Kowalchik, Don Kravis, Henry Krugman, Paul Kuttner, Robert Kuwait Labour Party, British Lagarde, Christine Landes, David Lasry, Marc Latin America Law, Bonar Leamer, Edward Lease, Mary Elizabeth Left Behind (book series) Lehman Brothers Lescure, Jean Leuchtenburg, William leverage leveraged buyouts Leverett, Flynt Lewis, Michael Lewis, Sinclair Liberal Party, British Liberal Party, Canadian Lincoln, Abraham Lloyd George, David Long-Term Capital Management Louis XIV, king of France Lula da Silva, Luis Ignacio McCain, John MacDonald, Duncan MacDonald, Ramsay Machiavelli, Niccolò Mack, John McPherson, Aimee Semple Madoff, Bernard Malaysia Mallaby, Sebastian Malthus, Thomas Malvey, Jack Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Kindleberger) Mankiw, N.


pages: 130 words: 11,880

Optimization Methods in Finance by Gerard Cornuejols, Reha Tutuncu

asset allocation, call centre, constrained optimization, correlation coefficient, diversification, financial engineering, finite state, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, index fund, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, passive investing, Sharpe ratio, transaction costs, value at risk

Since companies can not ignore such risks and can not insure themselves completely against risks, they have to manage it. This is a hard task even with the support of advanced mathematical techniques–poor risk management practices led to several spectacular failures in the financial industry during the last decade (e.g., Barings Bank, Long Term Capital Management, Orange County). The development of a coherent risk management practice requires quantitative risk measures that adequately reflect the vulnerabilities of a company. Examples of these risk measures include portfolio variance as in the Markowitz MVO model, the Valueat-Risk (VaR) and the expected shortfall (also known as conditional VaR, or CVaR)).


Stock Market Wizards: Interviews With America's Top Stock Traders by Jack D. Schwager

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, book value, commodity trading advisor, computer vision, East Village, Edward Thorp, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, the scientific method, transaction costs, Y2K

Although we initially made a lot of money on our fixed income trading, we experienced significant losses during the global liquidity crisis in late 1998, as was the case for most fixed income arbitrage traders during that period. While our losses were much smaller, in both percentage and absolute dollar terms, than those suffered by, for example, Long Term Capital Management, they were significant enough that we're no longer engaged in this sort of trading at all. LTCM—a hedge fund headed by renowned former-Salomon bond trader John Meriwether and whose principals included economics Nobel laureates Robert Merton and Myron Scholes—was on the brink of extinction during the second half of 1998.

., 21, 22, 43-44, 52, 58, 59, 60, 62, 65, 328, 329 risk of, 101, 109-10, 112, 138-40,328 strike price for, 151, 159, 160, 167, 327-28, 329, 330 volatility of, 330 66, 72-73, 79, 81, 89, 92, 94, 149, 152, 154-55, 158, 164, 165, 166-67, 172, 216, 306, 320, 321, 325 entry and exit, 157-58, 162-63, 171, 217, 220, 231,232,257,305,308 recovery of, 25-26, 44 relative, 42, 51, 81, 1 72-73, 311 run-ups of, 17, 35-40, 43-44, 229, 277, 325 leveraged buyouts (LBOs), 248-50, 253 Levitt, Jim, 80, 81 Morgan Stanley, 256, 263 multiple regression, 1 30 Lewis, Michael, 246 Liars Poker (Lewis), 246 mutual funds, 34-36, 40, 55, 82, 189-206, 207, 214 Livermore, Jesse, 176-77 Liz Claibornc, 6, 10, 12 Nasdaq, 75, 110, 158 Network Associates, 89-90 Pairs Trading: Performance- of a Relative Value Arbitrage Lloyd's Bank, 4-6 Lo, Andrew, 265 Newman, Bill, 58 New Yorker, 229 Rule (Gatev, Goetzmann, and Rouwenhort), 256n parallel processors, 258-63 lognormal curve, 237n Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 19—20, New York Post, 278 Pearle Vision, 242 New York Stock Exchange, 107,312 Nintendo, 276 Novell, 22 Pegasystems, 91 Peil, Tom, 208 OEX, 84 phone cards, 146 pig-at-the-trough approach, 58, 73 locked-in, 255 PIMCO, 144 probable, 255 reinvestment of, 25 risk vs., 70-71, 76, 125, 127, 128-29, 132, 134-35, 166, 207, 222, 237, 249-50, 255, 265, 269, 299, 323, 326 sources of, xiii sales vs., 44 271, 306 Love, Richard, 171 LTXX, 63 Lynch, Peter, 34, 66-67, 157, 161, 316-17 oil prices, 81 Okumus, Ahmet, 148-68 background, 148-49, 160-61 fund managed by, 149, 153, 162-63 McGuinn, Ed, 59 macroeconomics, 15—16, 18, 26, 81 Magic Faith and Healing: Studies in Primitive Psychiatry Today (Kiev), 289 Mammis, Justin, 209 losses of, 149-53, 167 as novice trader, 148-49, 153-57 management, 25-26, 45,91, 141-42, 150, 156-57, 166,250-52 manufacturers, 65—66 Marcus, Michael, 191 margin calls, 103, 105 market makers, 234, 247^18 market timers, 196 Marlin fund, 207 Masters, Michael, 207-20 background of, 209-14 fund managed by, 207 as novice trader, 209 profits of, 207, 209, 218 strategy of, 211-12, 214-20, 301, 302, 304, 307, 308 profits of, 155-56, 162 strategy of, 155-68, 306, 308, 309-10, 318, 319, 325 Okumus Opportunity Fund, 148, 153, 162-63 Olympics, 288, 289-90, 291, 297, 310 Olympic Sports Medicine Committee, U.S., 288, 289-90 One Vf on Wall Street (Lynch), 66-67, 1 57 Oppenheimer & Co., 32 options: bid/ask differentials for, 134-35 box spread for, 134 call, 101-2, 103, 108-9, 113, 124, 150-51, 325, 327, 328, 329 cumulative tick indicator for, 107-11,114 Masters, Suzanne, 214 Masters Capital Management, 207 exercised, 103, 151n, 159, 325, 327, 328 expiration of, 121-22, 151,313, 329-30 M.B.A.s, 4, 5,31,209 Men's Wearhouse, 68 Meriwether, John, 271 index, 140 "in the money" vs.


pages: 490 words: 117,629

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by David F. Swensen

asset allocation, asset-backed security, Benchmark Capital, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, classic study, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, junk bonds, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pez dispenser, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, the market place, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Because most compilers of data rely on self-reporting of results by hedge funds, the integrity of the data depends on the fidelity of the hedge funds. As struggling hedge funds fight to stay in business, reporting of results to third-party database providers takes a back seat to the day-to-day challenges of crisis management. Consider the record of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), the infamous hedge fund that nearly brought down the world’s financial system. According to the New York Times, the database of Tremont Capital Management, a leading purveyor of hedge fund data, contains LTCM’s performance only through October 1997, nearly a year prior to the firm’s collapse.

mutual-fund fees and mutual-fund portfolio turnover and S&P 500 Funds Index of Liquidity domestic corporate bonds and ETFs and high-yield bonds and leveraged buyouts and portfolio construction and tax-exempt bonds and U.S. Treasury bonds and Long/short investing Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) Loomis-Sayles International Equity Fund Lord Abbett McDonough, William Malaysia Managers asset-backed securities and chasing performance and co-investment by domestic corporate bonds and domestic equities and fees and market timing and relations between investors and style-based venture capital and Wells Capital, and see also active managers, active management; passive managers, passive management Marisco Focus Fund Market, markets asset-backed securities and basic investment principles and bear bull characteristics of chasing performance and contrarian behavior and core asset classes and depth of domestic corporate bonds and domestic equities and emerging markets equities and ETFs and foreign bonds and foreign developed equities and in future hedge funds and and hidden causes of poor mutual-fund performance high-yield bonds and Internet bubble and leveraged buyouts and mutual-fund failure and mutual-fund fees and mutual-fund performance deficit and mutual-fund portfolio management evaluation and mutual-fund portfolio turnover and non-core asset classes and portfolio construction and real estate and rebalancing and retirement plans and security selection and taxes and tax-exempt bonds and TIPS and U.S.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

But as enthusiasm for the New Economy continued to grow, the prices of these stocks rose even further—many of them doubling and then doubling again. Only in retrospect do we know that the bubble burst during 2000. In the meantime, many traders lost their shirts. The market can remain irrational longer than the arbitrageur can remain solvent. This is especially true when the arbitrageur is credit constrained. Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund in which Nobel laureates devised the strategies, found itself in an untenable position when the prices of its hedges moved against it and it had insufficient capital to keep them afloat. The natural players in the game of selling overpriced securities short and buying underpriced ones are global hedge funds, with trillions of dollars to invest.

., 33–34, 54, 57, 66, 169, 189, 250 Kindleberger, Charles, 242 King’s College, 33 Kipling, Rudyard, 79 Kirby, Robert, 227 Kleiner Perkins, 87 Kriezer, Lloyd, 168 Krizelman, Todd, 86 Kubik, Jeffrey, 242, 253 La Crosse and Minnesota Steam Packet Company, 120–21 La Rochefoucauld, 109, 409 Law, John, 42 Lay, Ken, 94–95 Le Bon, Gustave, 37 Lehman Brothers, 152 Leinweber, David, 148 Letterman, David, 252 leverage, 39, 104 Liberty University, 74 life-cycle funds, 370 Life-Cycle Investment Guide, 366–67 life cycles of corporations and industries, 120–21 life insurance, 26, 295–96 Lintner, John, 209 Litton Industries, 64 Lo, Andrew, 139, 286 loading fees, 317, 400 loans: in housing bubble, 98–104 looser standards for, 100–101, 104 Lompoc Federal Prison, 74 Long Term Capital Management, 249 loss aversion, 231, 243–45, 256 “lost decade,” 206–7, 331, 411 Lucent, 83, 90, 166 Lynch, Peter, 132, 176, 184 Macaulay, Thomas B., 329 Mackay, Charles, 38–39 MacKinlay, A. Craig, 139 Madoff, Bernard L., 258–59 Magee, John, 112, 113 Magellan Fund, 131, 176, 184 Making It in America (Minkow), 73 Malkiel Step, 380, 401–5 management, security analysts and, 169–70 managers, money, 326 Manhattan, 119 Man Nobody Knows, The (Barton), 48 marginal tax rates, 311–13 margin buying, 49, 52, 216 market manipulation, 49–50, 57–58, 59 market matrices, 63 market risk, see systematic risk market timing, 158, 258 Markowitz, Harry, 197, 200, 202, 209, 243 Marxism, 29 Master Trader (Birinyi), 157 Mates, Fred, 176 Mates Investment Fund, 176 Mayer, Martin, 66 McDonald’s, 68, 69 media, 254 Internet bubble and, 91–93 Meeker, Mary, 88, 89 mergers, see conglomerates Merrill Lynch, 88, 151–52, 172, 219 Michelin, 401 Michigan, University of, 157 Milkrishnamurthi, Sudhir, 163 millionaire, invention of word, 43 “mind share,” 89–90 Minkow, Barry, 73–75, 166 Minnesota, University of, 222 Minnie Pearl, 68 Mississippi Company, 42–43, 47 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 163 modern portfolio theory (MPT), 189–90, 196–204, 209, 211, 229 as applied to international scene, 201–8 diversification and, 201–8 invention of, 197 mathematics of, 197–98 modular building blocks, 63–64 Money Game, The (“Smith”), 109 money-market funds, 298, 300, 308, 414 risks of, 308 tax-exempt, 300, 414 Montgomery Ward, 48, 53 Montier, James, 284 Moody’s, bond ratings by, 318 Morgan, J.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

A symmetrical social contract between nonequals made modernity possible. However, the storms of capital became super-energized when computers got cheap enough to network finance in the last two decades of the 20th century. That story will be told shortly. For now it’s enough to say that with Enron, Long-Term Capital Management, and their descendants in the new century, the fluid of capital became a superfluid. Just as with the real climate, the financial climate was amplified by modern technology, and extremes became more extreme. Finally the middle-class levees were breached. One by one, they fell under the surging pressures of superflows of information and capital.

., 296, 298 lawyers, 98–99, 100, 136, 184, 318–19 leadership, 341–51 legacy prices, 272–75, 288 legal issues, 49, 63, 74–82, 98–99, 100, 104–5, 108, 136, 184, 204, 206, 318–19 Lehman Brothers, 188 lemonade stands, 79–82 “lemons,” 118–19 Lennon, John, 211, 213 levees, economic, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 52, 92, 94, 96, 98, 108, 171, 176n, 224–25, 239–43, 253–54, 263, 345 leveraged mortgages, 49–50, 61, 227, 245, 289n, 296 liberal arts, 97 liberalism, 135–36, 148, 152, 202, 204, 208, 235, 236, 251, 253, 256, 265, 293, 350 libertarianism, 14, 34, 80, 202, 208, 210, 262, 321 liberty, 13–15, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 licensing agreements, 79–82 “Lifestreams” (Gelernter), 313 Lights in the Tunnel, The (Ford), 56n Linux, 206, 253, 291, 344 litigation, 98–99, 100, 104–5, 108, 184 loans, 32–33, 42, 43, 74, 151–52, 306 local advantages, 64, 94–95, 143–44, 153–56, 173, 203, 280 Local/Global Flip, 153–56, 173, 280 locked-in software, 172–73, 182, 273–74 logical copies, 223 Long-Term Capital Management, 49, 74–75 looms, 22, 23n, 24 loopholes, tax, 77 lotteries, 338–39 lucid dreaming, 162 Luddites, 135, 136 lyres, 22, 23n, 24 machines, 19–20, 86, 92, 123, 129–30, 158, 261, 309–11, 328 see also computers “Machine Stops, The” (Forster), 129–30, 261, 328 machine translations, 19–20 machine vision, 309–11 McMillen, Keith, 117 magic, 110, 115, 151, 178, 216, 338 Malthus, Thomas, 132, 134 Malthusian humor, 125, 127, 132–33 management, 49 manufacturing sector, 49, 85–89, 99, 123, 154, 343 market economies, see economies, market marketing, 211–13, 266–67, 306, 346 “Markets for Lemons” problem, 118–19 Markoff, John, 213 marriage, 167–68, 274–75, 286 Marxism, 15, 22, 37–38, 48, 136–37, 262 as humor, 126 mash-ups, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 Maslow, Abraham, 260, 315 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 75, 93, 94, 96–97, 157–58, 184 mass media, 7, 66, 86, 109, 120, 135, 136, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 material extinction, 125 materialism, 125n, 195 mathematics, 11, 20, 40–41, 70, 71–72, 75–78, 116, 148, 155, 161, 189n, 273n see also statistics Matrix, The, 130, 137, 155 Maxwell, James Clerk, 55 Maxwell’s Demon, 55–56 mechanicals, 49, 51n Mechanical Turk, 177–78, 185, 187, 349 Medicaid, 99 medicine, 11–13, 17, 18, 54, 66–67, 97–106, 131, 132–33, 134, 150, 157–58, 325, 346, 363, 366–67 Meetings with Remarkable Men (Gurdjieff), 215 mega-dossiers, 60 memes, 124 Memex, 221n memories, 131, 312–13, 314 meta-analysis, 112 metaphysics, 12, 127, 139, 193–95 Metcalf’s Law, 169n, 350 Mexico City, 159–62 microfilm, 221n microorganisms, 162 micropayments, 20, 226, 274–75, 286–87, 317, 337–38, 365 Microsoft, 19, 89, 265 Middle Ages, 190 middle class, 2, 3, 9, 11, 16–17, 37–38, 40, 42–45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 60, 74, 79, 91, 92, 95, 98, 171, 205, 208, 210, 224–25, 239–43, 246, 253–54, 259, 262, 263, 280, 291–94, 331, 341n, 344, 345, 347, 354 milling machines, 86 mind reading, 111 Minority Report, 130, 310 Minsky, Marvin, 94, 157–58, 217, 326, 330–31 mission statements, 154–55 Mixed (Augmented) Reality, 312–13, 314, 315 mobile phones, 34n, 39, 85, 87, 162, 172, 182n, 192, 229, 269n, 273, 314, 315, 331 models, economic, 40–41, 148–52, 153, 155–56 modernity, 123–40, 193–94, 255 molds, 86 monetization, 172, 176n, 185, 186, 207, 210, 241–43, 255–56, 258, 260–61, 263, 298, 331, 338, 344–45 money, 3, 21, 29–35, 86, 108, 124, 148, 152, 154, 155, 158, 172, 185, 241–43, 278–79, 284–85, 289, 364 monocultures, 94 monopolies, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 Moondust, 362n Moore’s Law, 9–18, 20, 153, 274–75, 288 morality, 29–34, 35, 42, 50–52, 54, 71–74, 188, 194–95, 252–64, 335–36 Morlocks, 137 morning-after pill, 104 morphing, 162 mortality, 193, 218, 253, 263–64, 325–31, 367 mortgages, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 300 motivation, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 motivational speakers, 216 movies, 111–12, 130, 137, 165, 192, 193, 204, 206, 256, 261–62, 277–78, 310 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 23n MRI, 111n music industry, 11, 18, 22, 23–24, 42, 47–51, 54, 61, 66, 74, 78, 86, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95–96, 97, 129, 132, 134–35, 154, 157, 159–62, 186–87, 192, 206–7, 224, 227, 239, 253, 266–67, 281, 318, 347, 353, 354, 355, 357 Myspace, 180 Nancarrow, Conlon, 159–62 Nancarrow, Yoko, 161 nanopayments, 20, 226, 274–75, 286–87, 317, 337–38, 365 nanorobots, 11, 12, 17 nanotechnology, 11, 12, 17, 87, 162 Napster, 92 narcissism, 153–56, 188, 201 narratives, 165–66, 199 National Security Agency (NSA), 199–200 natural medicine, 131 Nelson, Ted, 128, 221, 228, 245, 349–50 Nelsonian systems, 221–30, 335 Nelson’s humor, 128 Netflix, 192, 223 “net neutrality,” 172 networked cameras, 309–11, 319 networks, see digital networks neutrinos, 110n New Age, 211–17 Newmark, Craig, 177n New Mexico, 159, 203 newspapers, 109, 135, 177n, 225, 284, 285n New York, N.Y., 75, 91, 266–67 New York Times, 109 Nobel Prize, 40, 118, 143n nodes, network, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 “no free lunch” principle, 55–56, 59–60 nondeterministic music, 23n nonlinear solutions, 149–50 nonprofit share sites, 59n, 94–95 nostalgia, 129–32 NRO, 199–200 nuclear power, 133 nuclear weapons, 127, 296 nursing, 97–100, 123, 296n nursing homes, 97–100, 269 Obama, Barack, 79, 100 “Obamacare,” 100n obsolescence, 89, 95 oil resources, 43, 133 online stores, 171 Ono, Yoko, 212 ontologies, 124n, 196 open-source applications, 206, 207, 272, 310–11 optical illusions, 121 optimism, 32–35, 45, 130, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons, 308 papacy, 190 paper money, 34n parallel computers, 147–48, 149, 151 paranoia, 309 Parrish, Maxfield, 214 particle interactions, 196 party machines, 202 Pascal, Blaise, 132, 139 Pascal’s Wager, 139 passwords, 307, 309 “past-oriented money,” 29–31, 35, 284–85 patterns, information, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 Paul, Ron, 33n Pauli exclusion principle, 181, 202 PayPal, 60, 93, 326 peasants, 565 pensions, 95, 99 Perestroika (Kushner), 165 “perfect investments,” 59–67, 77–78 performances, musical, 47–48, 51, 186–87, 253 perpetual motion, 55 Persian Gulf, 86 personal computers (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 personal information systems, 110, 312–16, 317 Pfizer, 265 pharmaceuticals industry, 66–67, 100–106, 123, 136, 203 philanthropy, 117 photography, 53, 89n, 92, 94, 309–11, 318, 319, 321 photo-sharing services, 53 physical trades, 292 physicians, 66–67 physics, 88, 153n, 167n Picasso, Pablo, 108 Pinterest, 180–81, 183 Pirate Party, 49, 199, 206, 226, 253, 284, 318 placebos, 112 placement fees, 184 player pianos, 160–61 plutocracy, 48, 291–94, 355 police, 246, 310, 311, 319–21, 335 politics, 13–18, 21, 22–25, 47–48, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 149–51, 155, 167, 199–234, 295–96, 342 see also conservatism; liberalism; libertarianism Ponzi schemes, 48 Popper, Karl, 189n popular culture, 111–12, 130, 137–38, 139, 159 “populating the stack,” 273 population, 17, 34n, 86, 97–100, 123, 125, 132, 133, 269, 296n, 325–26, 346 poverty, 37–38, 42, 44, 53–54, 93–94, 137, 148, 167, 190, 194, 253, 256, 263, 290, 291–92 power, personal, 13–15, 53, 60, 62–63, 86, 114, 116, 120, 122, 158, 166, 172–73, 175, 190, 199, 204, 207, 208, 278–79, 290, 291, 302–3, 308–9, 314, 319, 326, 344, 360 Presley, Elvis, 211 Priceline, 65 pricing strategies, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 printers, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 privacy, 1–2, 11, 13–15, 25, 50–51, 64, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 204, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–13, 314, 315–16, 317, 319–24 privacy rights, 13–15, 25, 204, 305, 312–13, 314, 315–16, 321–22 product design and development, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 236 productivity, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 progress, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 promotions, 62 property values, 52 proprietary hardware, 172 provenance, 245–46, 247, 338 pseudo-asceticism, 211–12 public libraries, 293 public roads, 79–80 publishers, 62n, 92, 182, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 punishing vs. rewarding network effects, 169–74, 182, 183 quants, 75–76 quantum field theory, 167n, 195 QuNeo, 117, 118, 119 Rabois, Keith, 185 “race to the bottom,” 178 radiant risk, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 Ragnarok, 30 railroads, 43, 172 Rand, Ayn, 167, 204 randomness, 143 rationality, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 149 real estate, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 193, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 298, 300, 301 reality, 55–56, 59–60, 124n, 127–28, 154–56, 161, 165–68, 194–95, 203–4, 216–17, 295–303, 364–65 see also Virtual Reality (VR) reason, 195–96 recessions, economic, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 record labels, 347 recycling, 88, 89 Reddit, 118n, 186, 254 reductionism, 184 regulation, economic, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 relativity theory, 167n religion, 124–25, 126, 131, 139, 190, 193–95, 211–17, 293, 300n, 326 remote computers, 11–12 rents, 144 Republican Party, 79, 202 research and development, 40–45, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 215, 229–30, 236 retail sector, 69, 70–74, 95–96, 169–74, 272, 349–51, 355–56 retirement, 49, 150 revenue growth plans, 173n revenues, 149, 149, 150, 151, 173n, 225, 234–35, 242, 347–48 reversible computers, 143n revolutions, 199, 291, 331 rhythm, 159–62 Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Kiyosaki), 46 risk, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 externalization of, 59n, 117, 277–81 risk aversion, 188 risk pools, 277–81, 284 risk radiation, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 robo call centers, 177n robotic cars, 90–92 robotics, robots, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 Roman Empire, 24–25 root nodes, 241 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129 Rousseau humor, 126, 129, 130–31 routers, 171–72 royalties, 47, 240, 254, 263–64, 323, 338 Rubin, Edgar, 121 rupture, 66–67 salaries, 10, 46–47, 50–54, 152, 178, 270–71, 287–88, 291–94, 338–39, 365 sampling, 71–72, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 San Francisco, University of, 190 satellites, 110 savings, 49, 72–74 scalable solutions, 47 scams, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 scanned books, 192, 193 SceneTap, 108n Schmidt, Eric, 305n, 352 Schwartz, Peter, 214 science fiction, 18, 126–27, 136, 137–38, 139, 193, 230n, 309, 356n search engines, 51, 60, 70, 81, 120, 191, 267, 289, 293 Second Life, 270, 343 Secret, The (Byrne), 216 securitization, 76–78, 99, 289n security, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 self-actualization, 211–17 self-driving vehicles, 90–92, 98, 311, 343, 367 servants, 22 servers, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 see also Siren Servers “Sexy Sadie,” 213 Shakur, Tupac, 329 Shelley, Mary, 327 Short History of Progress, A (Wright), 132 “shrinking markets,” 66–67 shuttles, 22, 23n, 24 signal-processing algorithms, 76–78, 148 silicon chips, 10, 86–87 Silicon Valley, 12, 13, 14, 21, 34n, 56, 59, 60, 66–67, 70, 71, 75–76, 80, 93, 96–97, 100, 102, 108n, 125n, 132, 136, 154, 157, 162, 170, 179–89, 192, 193, 200, 207, 210, 211–18, 228, 230, 233, 258, 275n, 294, 299–300, 325–31, 345, 349, 352, 354–58 singularity, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 Singularity University, 193, 325, 327–28 Sirenic Age, 66n, 354 Siren Servers, 53–57, 59, 61–64, 65, 66n, 69–78, 82, 91–99, 114–19, 143–48, 154–56, 166–89, 191, 200, 201, 203, 210n, 216, 235, 246–50, 258, 259, 269, 271, 272, 280, 285, 289, 293–94, 298, 301, 302–3, 307–10, 314–23, 326, 336–51, 354, 365, 366 Siri, 95 skilled labor, 99–100 Skout, 280n Skype, 95, 129 slavery, 22, 23, 33n Sleeper, 130 small businesses, 173 smartphones, 34n, 39, 162, 172, 192, 269n, 273 Smith, Adam, 121, 126 Smolin, Lee, 148n social contract, 20, 49, 247, 284, 288, 335, 336 social engineering, 112–13, 190–91 socialism, 14, 128, 254, 257, 341n social mobility, 66, 97, 292–94 social networks, 18, 51, 56, 60, 70, 81, 89, 107–9, 113, 114, 129, 167–68, 172–73, 179, 180, 190, 199, 200–201, 202, 204, 227, 241, 242–43, 259, 267, 269n, 274–75, 280n, 286, 307–8, 317, 336, 337, 343, 349, 358, 365–66 see also Facebook social safety nets, 10, 44, 54, 202, 251, 293 Social Security, 251, 345 software, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 software-mediated technology, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 South Korea, 133 Soviet Union, 70 “space elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 space travel, 233, 266 Spain, 159–60 spam, 178, 275n spending levels, 287–88 spirituality, 126, 211–17, 325–31, 364 spreadsheet programs, 230 “spy data tax,” 234–35 Square, 185 Stalin, Joseph, 125n Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 215 Stanford University, 60, 75, 90, 95, 97, 101, 102, 103, 162, 325 Starr, Ringo, 256 Star Trek, 138, 139, 230n startup companies, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 starvation, 123 Star Wars, 137 star (winner-take-all) system, 38–43, 50, 54–55, 204, 243, 256–57, 263, 329–30 statistics, 11, 20, 71–72, 75–78, 90–91, 93, 110n, 114–15, 186, 192 “stickiness,” 170, 171 stimulus, economic, 151–52 stoplights, 90 Strangelove humor, 127 student debt, 92, 95 “Study 27,” 160 “Study 36,” 160 Sumer, 29 supergoop, 85–89 supernatural phenomena, 55, 124–25, 127, 132, 192, 194–95, 300 supply chain, 70–72, 174, 187 Supreme Court, U.S., 104–5 surgery, 11–13, 17, 18, 98, 157–58, 363 surveillance, 1–2, 11, 14, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–11, 315, 316, 317, 319–24 Surviving Progress, 132 sustainable economies, 235–37, 285–87 Sutherland, Ivan, 221 swarms, 99, 109 synthesizers, 160 synthetic biology, 162 tablets, 85, 86, 87, 88, 113, 162, 229 Tahrir Square, 95 Tamagotchis, 98 target ads, 170 taxation, 44, 45, 49, 52, 60, 74–75, 77, 82, 149, 149, 150, 151, 202, 210, 234–35, 263, 273, 289–90 taxis, 44, 91–92, 239, 240, 266–67, 269, 273, 311 Teamsters, 91 TechCrunch, 189 tech fixes, 295–96 technical schools, 96–97 technologists (“techies”), 9–10, 15–16, 45, 47–48, 66–67, 88, 122, 124, 131–32, 134, 139–40, 157–62, 165–66, 178, 193–94, 295–98, 307, 309, 325–31, 341, 342, 356n technology: author’s experience in, 47–48, 62n, 69–72, 93–94, 114, 130, 131–32, 153, 158–62, 178, 206–7, 228, 265, 266–67, 309–10, 325, 328, 343, 352–53, 362n, 364, 365n, 366 bio-, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 chaos and, 165–66, 273n, 331 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 complexity of, 53–54 costs of, 8, 18, 72–74, 87n, 136–37, 170–71, 176–77, 184–85 creepiness of, 305–24 cultural impact of, 8–9, 21, 23–25, 53, 130, 135–40 development and emergence of, 7–18, 21, 53–54, 60–61, 66–67, 85–86, 87, 97–98, 129–38, 157–58, 182, 188–90, 193–96, 217 digital, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 economic impact of, 1–3, 15–18, 29–30, 37, 40, 53–54, 60–66, 71–74, 79–110, 124, 134–37, 161, 162, 169–77, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 218, 254, 277–78, 298, 335–39, 341–51, 357–58 educational, 92–97 efficiency of, 90, 118, 191 employment in, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 123, 135, 178 engineering for, 113–14, 123–24, 192, 194, 217, 218, 326 essential vs. worthless, 11–12 failure of, 188–89 fear of (technophobia), 129–32, 134–38 freedom as issue in, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 government influence in, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 human agency and, 8–21, 50–52, 85, 88, 91, 124–40, 144, 165–66, 175–78, 191–92, 193, 217, 253–64, 274–75, 283–85, 305–6, 328, 341–51, 358–60, 361, 362, 365–67 ideas for, 123, 124, 158, 188–89, 225, 245–46, 286–87, 299, 358–60 industrial, 49, 83, 85–89, 123, 132, 154, 343 information, 7, 32–35, 49, 66n, 71–72, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125n, 126, 135, 136, 254, 312–16, 317 investment in, 66, 181, 183, 184, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 limitations of, 157–62, 196, 222 monopolies for, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 50–51, 72, 73–74, 188, 194–95, 262, 335–36 motivation and, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 nano-, 11, 12, 17, 162 new vs. old, 20–21 obsolescence of, 89, 97 political impact of, 13–18, 22–25, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 199–234, 295–96, 342 progress in, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 resources for, 55–56, 157–58 rupture as concept in, 66–67 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 singularity of, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 social impact of, 9–21, 124–40, 167n, 187, 280–81, 310–11 software-mediated, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 startup companies in, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 utopian, 13–18, 21, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 see also specific technologies technophobia, 129–32, 134–38 television, 86, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 temperature, 56, 145 Ten Commandments, 300n Terminator, The, 137 terrorism, 133, 200 Tesla, Nikola, 327 Texas, 203 text, 162, 352–60 textile industry, 22, 23n, 24, 135 theocracy, 194–95 Theocracy humor, 124–25 thermodynamics, 88, 143n Thiel, Peter, 60, 93, 326 thought experiments, 55, 139 thought schemas, 13 3D printers, 7, 85–89, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 Thrun, Sebastian, 94 Tibet, 214 Time Machine, The (Wells), 127, 137, 261, 331 topology, network, 241–43, 246 touchscreens, 86 tourism, 79 Toyota Prius, 302 tracking services, 109, 120–21, 122 trade, 29 traffic, 90–92, 314 “tragedy of the commons,” 66n Transformers, 98 translation services, 19–20, 182, 191, 195, 261, 262, 284, 338 transparency, 63–66, 74–78, 118, 176, 190–91, 205–6, 278, 291, 306–9, 316, 336 transportation, 79–80, 87, 90–92, 123, 258 travel agents, 64 Travelocity, 65 travel sites, 63, 64, 65, 181, 279–80 tree-shaped networks, 241–42, 243, 246 tribal dramas, 126 trickle-down effect, 148–49, 204 triumphalism, 128, 157–62 tropes (humors), 124–40, 157, 170, 230 trust, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 Turing, Alan, 127–28, 134 Turing’s humor, 127–28, 191–94 Turing Test, 330 Twitter, 128, 173n, 180, 182, 188, 199, 200n, 201, 204, 245, 258, 259, 349, 365n 2001: A Space Odyssey, 137 two-way links, 1–2, 227, 245, 289 underemployment, 257–58 unemployment, 7–8, 22, 79, 85–106, 117, 151–52, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 “unintentional manipulation,” 144 United States, 25, 45, 54, 79–80, 86, 138, 199–204 universities, 92–97 upper class, 45, 48 used car market, 118–19 user interface, 362–63, 364 utopianism, 13–18, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 value, economic, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 value, information, 1–3, 15–16, 20, 210, 235–43, 257–58, 259, 261–63, 271–75, 321–24, 358–60 Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles (VALS), 215 variables, 149–50 vendors, 71–74 venture capital, 66, 181, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 videos, 60, 100, 162, 185–86, 204, 223, 225, 226, 239, 240, 242, 245, 277, 287, 329, 335–36, 349, 354, 356 Vietnam War, 353n vinyl records, 89 viral videos, 185–86 Virtual Reality (VR), 12, 47–48, 127, 129, 132, 158, 162, 214, 283–85, 312–13, 314, 315, 325, 343, 356, 362n viruses, 132–33 visibility, 184, 185–86, 234, 355 visual cognition, 111–12 VitaBop, 100–106, 284n vitamins, 100–106 Voice, The, 185–86 “voodoo economics,” 149 voting, 122, 202–4, 249 Wachowski, Lana, 165 Wall Street, 49, 70, 76–77, 181, 184, 234, 317, 331, 350 Wal-Mart, 69, 70–74, 89, 174, 187, 201 Warhol, Andy, 108 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 137 water supplies, 17, 18 Watts, Alan, 211–12 Wave, 189 wealth: aggregate or concentration of, 9, 42–43, 53, 60, 61, 74–75, 96, 97, 108, 115, 148, 157–58, 166, 175, 201, 202, 208, 234, 278–79, 298, 305, 335, 355, 360 creation of, 32, 33–34, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 62–63, 79, 92, 96, 120, 148–49, 210, 241–43, 270–75, 291–94, 338–39, 349 inequalities and redistribution of, 20, 37–45, 65–66, 92, 97, 144, 254, 256–57, 274–75, 286–87, 290–94, 298, 299–300 see also income levels weather forecasting, 110, 120, 150 weaving, 22, 23n, 24 webcams, 99, 245 websites, 80, 170, 200, 201, 343 Wells, H.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Instead, the approach has been to prop up bad debt, bad banks, and bad investments in the hope that reflation would wash away the underlying risks. This view is an expression not of financial bloodlust but, rather, of a desire for those taking and building risks to accept the consequences when things go wrong. There have been a few exceptions to this risk dodging. One I recall was the collapse of the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund. In the mid 1990s, LTCM was one of the world’s largest hedge funds, run by a team of high-profile bond traders and famous academics. It had a range of highly leveraged positions in fixed-income markets. In the face of market volatility, it was forced to unwind, in turn crashing financial markets and provoking the rescue of the fund by a consortium of investment banks.

Grandees, 82–83, 91, 93 historical context, 3, 13, 81–82, 92 importance, 92 as inspiration and example, 3–4, 12–13, 82, 83, 91–92, 103 Leviathan as concept, 168–169, 240, 306 parallels with today, 7, 92–97, 100 political thought, 89–91, 94 and politicians, 85–86, 87, 95–96 and productivity, 146–147 sentiments and demands, 81–82, 85–89, 94, 95–96, 103 shortcoming, 103 women in, 83, 87 See also “Agreements of the People” levelling and accountability, 79 Brexit and Global Britain, 246, 247–248 in contemporary situation, 75–80 definition and description, 20, 116, 212 and economy, 76–79, 212–213, 304–305 as framework and process, 71, 72–73, 304 and multipolar world, 20, 212–213, 239–240, 243 and new ideas, 76 next levelling, 77–79, 80, 116–119, 243, 303–306 poles of multipolar world, 238, 243 political example (fictional), 119–125 and political transition, 116–119 as replacement and transition, 8, 12, 20–21, 116 as solution, 12–16, 17–18, 19–21, 117 US in, 246 Leviathan concept, 124, 168–169, 240, 306 Leviathan (Hobbes), 124, 168 Leviathan Party (fictional), 124–125 liberty and freedom, 85, 168, 169 Lilburne, John, 85, 87, 88 Lilburne, Katherine, 87 Lindsay, A. D. “Sandie,” 94 Locke, John, 85 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund, 206 Loughlin, Martin, 95 MacKay, Charles, 173 Macron, Emmanuel, 117 macroprudential policy, 285 “made in” labels, 219–220 Mair, Peter, 52 Manchester United football club, 27–28 Mantega, Guido, 177 manufacturing, 34–35 marriage, 49–50 Marx, Karl, 156, 228 maskirovka, 296 Massie, Thomas, 128 Maudling, Reginald, 249 Mazarin, Jules, 240 McKinsey Global Institute, 7, 38 McMullin, Evan, 128 media, and politics, 107 medium-sized nations in multipolar world, 244, 245 Mian, Atif, 176 microlevel of countries, 163–164 Middle East, 212, 263 migration, 50, 217, 233–234, 237 Milanovic, Branko, 40, 41 Miller, Rory, 158 Moltke, Helmuthe von, 227 Monnet, Jean, 194 Montesquieu, 85 Morris, Ian, 151 Morris, Robert, 208, 209 Mulford, David, 191 Müller, Jan-Werner, 101 multinationals, 31–32, 214 multipolar world Britain and Brexit, 248–256 central banks, 266–267 characteristics, 218 debt conference, 17, 192–193 debt restructuring, 203 and economy, 185, 218 emergence, 8, 18–19 and globalization’s end, 238–239 and institutions, 262, 265–266, 304 and levelling, 20, 212–213, 239–240, 243 and medium-sized nations, 244, 245 next levelling, 77, 304 poles and regions (see poles in multipolar world) and small-sized nations, 244, 245–246, 259–262 transition to, 211–213, 215–219, 225, 238–239, 304 Napoleon III, 227 National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER), 66, 139 national development, 157–161, 164–165 nations.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

The fractal model of financial markets that Mandelbrot went on to develop has never caught on with finance professors, who still by and large cling to the efficient market hypothesis. If Mandelbrot’s analysis is right, reliance on orthodox models is dangerous. And so it has proved, on more than one occasion. In the summer of 1998, for example, Long-Term Capital Management—a hedge fund founded by two economists who had been awarded Nobel Prizes for their work in portfolio theory and staffed with twenty-five Ph.D.’s—blew up and nearly took down the world’s banking system when an unforeseen Russian financial crisis foiled its models. Mandelbrot resented being “pushed out of the economic mainstream.”

Lewis, David “Library of Babel, The” (Borges) Lichtenstein, Sarah life, absurdity of Life magazine Ligeti, György Linde, Andrei Lingua Franca linguistics Lobachevsky, Nikolai locality, principle of Locke, Don Locke, John Loewer, Barry logicism London Review of Books London School of Economics Long-Term Capital Management Look magazine Los Alamos National Laboratory Lovelace, Ada Byron Lovelace, Lord Love and Math (Frenkel) Lucretius luminiferous ether Lusitanian circle Luzin, Nikolai MacArthur, General Douglas MacFarquhar, Larissa Mackerel Plaza, The (De Vries) Mackie, J. L. Mac Lane, Saunders Maclean, Donald Major League Baseball Manchester, University of Mandelbrot, Benoit Mandelbrot, Szolem MANIAC (Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer) manic depression Manutius, Aldus Man in the White Suit, The (film) Man Who Knew Too Much, The (Leavitt) mapmaking, four-color conjecture for Marcus, Gary Marcus, Ruth Barcan “Marcus, Kripke, and the Origin of the New Theory of Reference” (Smith) Margalit, Avishai Marx, Groucho Marx, Karl Marx Brothers Marxism Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Materialism and Empiriocriticism (Lenin) mathematical biology “Mathematical Creation” (Poincaré) Mathematical Intelligencer, The Mathematician’s Apology, A (Hardy) “Mathematician’s Nightmare, The” (Russell) Mathematics Without Apologies (Harris) Mauchly, John Maudlin, Tim Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maxwell’s demon McAllister, James W.


pages: 416 words: 124,469

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet Archive, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, obamacare, pets.com, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, too big to fail, yield curve

It made American products cheaper overseas, which could stimulate exports and create jobs. But conservative critics of the Fed saw devaluation as near treasonous. The conservative author James Rickards published a book in 2011 called Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis. Rickards was a former lawyer for the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, which had nearly destroyed the financial system when it collapsed in the late 1990s. His book took fears of devaluation to their most extreme possible conclusion, warning that it would lead to coordinated efforts between Russia and China to dump American debt, devalue their own currency, and destabilize the American economy.

., 218 JPMorgan Chase, 66, 115, 191, 210, 244, 269, 271 junk bonds, 72, 143, 146, 156, 164, 176–78, 259, 271, 272, 281, 286, 299 defined, 347 Kansas, 55, 206 Kansas City Fed, see Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Kavanaugh, Brett, 151 Kelley, Kathleen, 35, 38 Keynes, John Maynard, 81, 347 Keynesian economics, 81, 100–101, 347 KFC, 193 KKR, 180 Kocherlakota, Narayana, 130 labor unions, 14, 61, 79, 110, 166, 194, 196–98, 344, 348 Rexnord and, 190, 194–96 Lacker, Jeffrey, 27, 30, 31, 128, 141 Lehman Brothers, 5, 6, 8, 23 Lemann, Nicholas, 81 leverage, 193n, 257, 262–63 deleveraging events, 247 leveraging up, 252, 253 leveraged loans, 142, 149, 155, 156, 162, 168, 170, 172–75, 178–80, 182, 199, 270–72, 277, 279, 281, 298, 305 collateralized loan obligation, see CLO coronavirus relief and, 288 defined, 347 downgrading of, 271 with covenants stripped out (Cov-lite), 179–81 variable rates in, 177 Liang, Nellie, 148 liberals, 16, 109–11, 257, 346 see also Democratic Party libertarians, 225 Liesman, Steve, 145 liquidity mismatch, 224–25 living wills, bank, 208–9, 269 LMR Partners, 254 loans, 27, 43, 53, 55, 88, 133 assets and, 49–51, 57–60 business development corporations and, 181 collateralized loan obligation, see CLO consumer, 43, 56 defaults on, 271, 279 demand for, 57, 61–62, 212 home (mortgages), 23, 56, 96, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 137–38, 147, 149 interest rates on, see interest rates leveraged, see leveraged loans loan-shark rates in, 251 overnight, 114, 238, 242, 243, 247–52, 254–57 by Penn Square, 63–65 repo, 243–58, 264, 265 risky, 14, 19–20, 27, 33, 49–51, 63, 91, 97, 105, 146–47 securitization and, 63 short-term corporate, 266 to small businesses, 279 zero bound and, 19–20 lobbyists, 206–7 Lockhart, Dennis, 130, 140 Logan, Lorie, 241–43, 245–47, 249, 250, 255, 263 Long-Term Capital Management, 111 LSAP (large-scale asset purchase), 132 Macy’s, 298 Maffei, Greg, 86 Main Street Lending Program, 279, 286–87, 297 Mallaby, Sebastian, 83, 87 Man Who Knew, The (Mallaby), 83, 87 McConnell, Mitch, 201–2, 276–77, 283 McDonald’s, 193 McKeon, Jon, 38, 39, 41, 206 McKinney, Stewart, 66–67 McKinsey Global Institute, 211, 216 McWilliams, Jelena, 230 media, 108–12, 144–45 Mellon, Andrew, 17–18 Meltzer, Allan, 60, 62 Mercatus Center, 257, 301 Mercury Asset Management Group, 157 Messonnier, Nancy, 262, 263 Mester, Loretta, 267–68 Mexico jobs moved to, 196–99 and search for yield, 216, 217 middle class, 295–96 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 191 Minerd, Scott, 262–63, 268, 269, 282 Mnuchin, Steven, 229, 282 career of, 275–76 coronavirus relief programs and, 273, 276–77, 283, 285–86, 299 Powell and, 275, 277–78, 299 Trump and, 275, 276 monetary base, 6, 102, 120 monetary policy, 9, 46, 56, 60, 88, 148 defined, 347 fiscal policy and, 78–79, 346, 347 Hoenig’s views on, 62–63, 68, 82, 94–96 inflation and, 61–62 quantitative easing’s role in, 127 short-term and long-term problems and, 62–63 Trump and, 233–34 money currencies, 45, 112, 217, 225, 350 Fed’s control of, 47 politics of, see politics of money value and quantity of, 4, 6, 46, 347 see also dollar money creation, 4, 6, 17, 19, 26, 27, 45, 46, 47, 50, 58, 60–63, 79–81, 84, 101–2, 113–16, 120–21, 170, 211, 223, 297, 305, 343, 348, 349 asset prices and, 224 deflation and, 223 quantitative easing and, 113, 115–16, 120–21, 177, 211 money markets, 242 monopolies, 348 Moody’s, 198, 271, 347 mortgage-backed securities, 214–16, 247, 254, 266, 268, 304, 349 mortgages, 23, 56, 96, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 137–38, 147, 149 Mozer, Paul, 158, 161 MSNBC, 109 mutual funds, 177 Nasdaq, 84, 86 National Bureau of Economic Research, 140 natural gas, 55 Navistar, 189, 295 Nebraska, 55 negative-interest-rate debt, 217–18, 347–48, 351 Nelson, Edward, 61 New Deal, 79–80, 204 defined, 348 New York Federal Reserve Bank, see Federal Reserve Bank of New York New York Times, 13, 14, 41, 86, 109, 218 Nixon, Richard, 41, 67 Nomura Securities International, 115 NPR (National Public Radio), 109, 120 Obama, Barack, 13–14, 100–101, 103, 108, 122, 126, 135, 159, 203, 204, 207, 229 Occupy Wall Street, 286 oil, 49–51, 55, 57, 61, 63, 64, 97, 117, 118, 235, 263, 345 embargo on, 344 fracking and, 213–14, 216 and search for yield, 213–14 Oklahoma, 55 OneWest, 276 Only Game in Town, The (El-Erian), 231–32 OPEC, 344 open market operations, 247–48, 349 defined, 348 Operation Twist, 127 defined, 348–49 Paul, Ron, 225 Paulson, Hank, 23 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), 284, 285 Pelley, Scott, 112 Pelosi, Nancy, 276, 283 Pence, Mike, 197 Penn Square Bank, 63–65, 67–69, 97, 98 pension funds, 119, 143, 173, 175, 177, 211, 271 Pentagon Papers, 41 Pets.com, 86–87 Pianalto, Sandra, 130, 140 Plosser, Charles, 12, 27, 30, 31, 112 Poland, 216, 217 politics, 16, 80, 202 see also Democratic Party; Republican Party politics of money, 9, 11, 46, 78 see also doves; hawks Poole, William, 85, 86 Popp, John, 174–76 populists, 46, 47 Portnoy, David, 288–90 Potter, Simon, 249–50 Powell, Jerome “Jay,” 121–22, 125–29, 132, 151–63, 199–200, 221–22, 224–29, 231–34, 236–38, 244, 246, 247, 250, 255, 256, 258, 275, 300, 305 career of, 125–26, 152–53, 163, 169, 272, 290 at Carlyle Group, 126, 161–63, 165–69, 185, 186, 229, 290 Catholic University speech of, 225–26 coronavirus crisis response and, 265, 267, 268, 272–73, 277–78, 280, 280n, 283, 290, 291, 296–97 at Dillon, Read & Co., 153–56, 161, 270 Duke and, 125, 127–28, 142–43 early life of, 126, 151–52 economics conference speech of, 256 Fed’s image and, 286 golfing of, 167 growth of influence of, 222 Hoenig compared with, 222 Hoenig’s meeting of, 200 listening tours of, 286, 290 Mnuchin and, 275, 277–78, 299 news conference of, 236–37 normalization process and, 221, 224–25, 233, 234, 236–37, 243, 245, 256 physical appearance of, 156 political alliances of, 233 political standing of, 298 as pragmatist, 153 quantitative easing and, 121–22, 127–29, 132, 141–44, 148–49, 221–22, 236 reversal of opinion on quantitative easing and ZIRP (Powell Pivot), 225–27, 236–37 Rexnord and, 163–70, 185, 186, 199 Salomon Brothers and, 159–61 speeches of, 225–26, 256, 290 at Treasury Department, 126, 156–61, 290 Trump and, 229, 233–34 warning of, 272 wealth of, 169 Williams and, 246 Powell, Patricia, 151 Power and the Independence of the Federal Reserve, The (Conti-Brown), 132 prices of assets, see asset prices and value controls on, 62 deflation of, 96n, 223–24, 237 of gasoline, 17, 50, 54, 72, 73, 83, 84 of gold, 235 of housing, 92, 93, 100 inflation of, see inflation spread in, 268–69 of stocks, 84, 119, 131, 212, 235 primary dealer(s), 26, 101, 115–16, 285, 350 defined, 349 Salomon Brothers as, 159, 160 private equity firms, 97, 116, 122, 149, 156, 161–64, 166, 168–70, 174, 178–82, 187, 202, 221, 291 Apollo Management, 168–70, 173–74, 180, 186, 191 Carlyle Group, 126, 161–63, 165–69, 174, 178–80, 182, 185, 186 put contracts, 345–46 Fed Put, 237, 257, 272, 279, 345–46 Qualcomm, 86 quantitative easing (QE), 8–11, 114–15, 126–49, 154, 170, 173, 182, 225, 247, 249, 251, 252, 262, 292, 295, 302, 304n, 305, 344, 350–52 allocative effect of, 27, 28 asset price inflation and, 119, 132, 148, 182, 300 basic mechanics and goals of, 26 Beck on, 110 Bernanke and, 10, 25–34, 105, 112–13, 118n, 121, 126–30, 132–34, 136, 140–46, 148, 182, 247 bonds in, 101, 110, 139, 227, 231–34, 236, 267, 280 coronavirus pandemic and, 267, 279–80, 297 defined, 349 developing nations and, 216–17 difficulty of undoing, 32–33, 128, 130, 140, 143, 258 Duke and, 127–28, 141–44 end of, 147–48, 227 European Central Bank’s version of, 235 excess bank reserves and, 248 Fed’s research on, 30 Feldstein on, 133 in financial crisis of 2008, 25, 101 FOMC debates on, 9, 10, 16, 27–34, 112, 121, 126–30, 132, 134, 137, 140, 142, 143 FOMC presentation on, 136–39 FOMC voting on, 3, 8–11, 18, 21, 29, 32–34, 105, 107–9, 112, 113, 134, 136–37, 141, 148 forecasting errors and, 138–40 growth-boosting channels of, 148 Hoenig’s critiques of, 27–28, 31–33, 62, 112, 120 Hoenig’s predictions about, 34, 200 Hoenig’s public condemnation of, 29, 34 Hoenig’s vote on, 3, 8–11, 18, 21, 32, 34, 105, 107–9, 112, 258, 280 inflation and, 33, 112–13, 119–20 interest rates and, 116–19, 133, 137–39 job creation and, 119, 139, 182 media and, 108–12, 144–45 money supply and, 113, 115–16, 120–21, 177, 211 negative-interest-rate bonds and, 218 normalization (reversal) of, 221, 223–25, 227–29, 231, 233–37, 243, 245, 249, 256 as normal tool of monetary policy, 127 NQE (non-QE) program, 256–57 open-ended program of, 136, 141 open market operations and, 247–48 Operation Twist, 127, 348–49 policy options in, 128–29, 132, 136, 141 political backlash against, 144 Powell and, 121–22, 127–29, 132, 141–44, 148–49, 221–22, 236 Powell’s reversal of opinion on (Powell Pivot), 225–27, 236–37 public perceptions of, 119–20, 136 risk seesaw and, 145–46 risks of, 32–33, 130, 132, 143, 226 risky loans and, 27, 33 second round of, 32, 114–15, 118n, 144, 173, 349 stock prices and, 119, 212 Taper Tantrum and, 145–47, 217 unemployment and, 121 Yellen and, 130 quantitative tightening, 233, 237 defined, 349–50 Quarles, Randal, 229, 230, 280n Reagan, Ronald, 80, 156, 158–59 real estate, 50, 51, 55, 91, 92, 262 in Florida, 54–55, 86 quantitative easing and, 117–19 and search for yield, 214–16 see also housing real estate investment trusts (REITs), 147 recessions, 8, 22, 24, 50, 56, 60, 72, 73, 75, 80, 81, 136, 186, 225, 236, 302, 347 reconciliation, 158–59 Reddy, Sudeep, 34 Reifschneider, David, 148 relative-value funds, 253–54 repo market, 243–58, 264, 265 Republican Party, 21, 80, 101, 103, 135, 197, 201, 203, 233, 276, 304 Tea Party movement in, 14, 103, 109, 135, 206, 286 see also conservatives reserve accounts, 26 defined, 350 reserve currency, 350 revolving credit facility, 170 Rexnord, 163–70, 171–73, 176–79, 183, 185–99, 281 Adams at, 186–88, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198 Apollo Management and, 168–70, 172, 173, 186, 191 Carlyle Group and, 163, 165–69, 185, 186 closure of factory and move of production to Mexico, 196–99 Feltner at, 188–91, 196–99, 293, 295 labor unions and, 190, 194–96 Powell and, 163–70, 185, 186, 199 Rexnord Business System (RBS), 186–87 SCOFR plan of, 195–96, 198, 199 stock buyback of, 193–94 ZIRP and, 187–88 Rickards, James, 111 Riksbank, 218 risk parity funds, 265 risk seesaw, 145–46, 304, 305 Robinhood, 289, 290, 300 Roblox, 297–98 Romney, Mitt, 133 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 79–80, 100, 204 Rubenstein, David, 161 Russia, 85, 111, 238 Sahm, Claudia, 267, 286 Salomon Brothers, 157–61 SARS epidemic, 261, 263 Saudi Arabia, 263 Saxton, Jim, 76, 78 Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), 281 Secrets of the Temple (Greider), 47 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 155, 159, 160, 162, 175, 215, 348 securitization, 63 September 11 attacks, 88, 91 S.


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

They talk solemnly of the importance of “stabilizing” the system and “recapitalizing” it. Roughly translated, this means saving the assets—and the asses—of bankers. We were told in 1994 that Mexico’s “peso crisis” required financial rescue; in 1997, that East Asia’s crisis demanded capital infusions; in 1998, that Long-Term Capital Management had to be bailed out; that after the dot-com crash and the financial anxieties set off by Enron’s majestic plunge, capital markets needed additional coddling. Financial officials viewed all these rescues (Lehman Brothers’ death notwithstanding) as necessary and regrettable exceptions to the heroic assumption that rational, privately interested investors are never threatened by financial crises because they are smart enough to effectively evaluate all relevant information and properly weigh all risks beforehand.


pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

“Of course I’m embarrassed,” Greenspan later told a reporter. “I don’t want to say I’m distressed but the truth is I really am.” (It was language he’d repeat after the 2008 financial crisis, when he told Congress he was “very distressed” by the failure of the market to discipline itself.) After the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Greenspan again insisted government should not tighten regulation of the banks that funded the hedge fund’s bets nor the derivatives that allowed the hedge fund to lose so much money so quickly. After Citicorp announced its merger with Travelers in 1998, Weill lobbied Congress and the Clinton administration—particularly Treasury secretary Robert Rubin—to repeal what remained of Glass-Steagall.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

They don’t always work out, and some of the clashes Google has had—with book publishers and the AP, or with ad agencies and governments—resulted from an inability to hear. In the 1990s a coterie of math whizzes that included Nobel Prize winners Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes crafted formulas they were certain would allow Long-Term Capital Management to consistently out-perform the stock market; they failed spectacularly because their computer programs lacked common sense. This is the same mechanical thinking that often overlooks the needs of workers when designing assembly lines. In the same way, Google’s engineers can get too wedded to their algorithms.

Makes Official Complaint to China over Internet Censorship,” Financial Times, June 22, 2009. 331 “What Google should fear”: author interview with Yossi Vardi, February 28, 2008. 331 When Marissa Mayer said: author interview with Mayer, August 21, 2007. 331 “What separates us”: author interview with Stacey Savides Sullivan, August 21, 2007. 331 “are utopians”: author interview with Terry Winograd, September 25, 2007. 332 In the 1990s: an excellent exploration of long-term capital’s demise is contained in Roger Lowenstein’s When Genuis Failed: The Rise and Fall of f Long-Term Capital Management, Random House, 2000. 332 “’Google returned links”: Nat Ives, “Media Giants Want to Top Google Results,” Advertising Age, March 23, 2009. 333 when Eric Schmidt envisioned: Miguel Heft, “Google Ends Its Project for Selling Radio Ads,” New York Times, February 13, 2009. 333 “They have no experience”: author interview with Danny Sullivan, March 20, 2008. 333 “a great company”: author interview with Fred Wilson, January 22, 2008. 333 “Google is like that fourteen-year-old”: author interview with Strauss Zelnick, January 9, 2008. 334 Although Mary Meeker believes Google is a great company: author interview with Mary Meeker, January 23, 2009. 334 “There is nothing about their model”: author interview with Clayton Christensen, April 17, 2009. 335 “There is no end in sight”: author interview with Fred Wilson, January 22, 2008. 335 “to the falsehood that you can grow”: author interview with Clayton Christensen, April 17, 2009.


pages: 369 words: 128,349

Beyond the Random Walk: A Guide to Stock Market Anomalies and Low Risk Investing by Vijay Singal

3Com Palm IPO, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, correlation coefficient, cross-subsidies, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, junk bonds, liberal capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, prediction markets, price stability, profit motive, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

For example, Dimensional Fund Advisors, which manages more than $30 billion in assets, is associated with Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago, Ken French of Dartmouth College, and two of their former students, David Booth and Rex Sinquefield. LSV Asset Management, which manages about $8 billion, is owned by Josef Lakonishok of the University of Illinois, Andrei Shleifer of Harvard, and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago. Long Term Capital Management, whose failure shook world financial markets in 1998 and which had to be rescued by a group of large banks prodded on by the Federal Reserve, was advised by Nobel laureates Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. 2 The January Effect and the New December Effect Small loser stocks are known to appreciate considerably in January, giving rise to the so-called January effect.

Morgan, 250 January effect, 23–38 alternative explanations, 32 capital gains and, 19, 32, 33 closed-end funds, 317n3 described, 12, 15–16, 23–24 evidence supporting, 24–32 explanations for, 14, 32 key points, 38 persistence of, 33 summarized, xii tax-gain selling and tax-loss selling, 32, 33 trading strategies, 37 Johnson and Johnson, 217 Journal of Finance, ix Kahneman, Daniel, 292 Keim, Donald, 15 Lakonishok, Josef, 22n3 Lehman Brothers, 165, 174 Lipper Merger Fund, 231n6 liquidity, 165, 169–72, 248, 251 loads and fees back-end loads, 115, 321 front-end loads, 115, 321 no-load funds, 133n2 redemption fees, 36, 114, 127–31, 128, 321 Long Term Capital Management, 22n3 long term investing, 232, 249 long-term price drift after dividend initiations and omissions, 315 initial public offerings, 311 mergers, 314–15 seasoned equity issues, 312 share repurchases, 309 spin-offs, 313 stock splits, 316 tender offers, 309 loss-aversion, 287, 293 LSV Asset Management, 22n3 Lucent Technologies, 141, 313 Lynch, Peter, 242, 293 market capitalization defined, 24 insider trading, 143, 150 large caps, 13, 25, 26–27, 27, 38, 42, 47, 145, 164 merger targets, 216 small cap firms, 12, 13, 25, 26, 26–27, 33, 104, 112, 145, 164 weighting returns based on, 24–26 market efficiency, 1–20 administrative, 1 cause and effects of, 20 defined, 1–2 forward rate bias, 268–69 importance, 2–4 industry momentum, 82 information, 1–2, 4, 22n1, 169–70 Index informational, 1 international investing and home bias, 248 limitations, 4–7, 20 operational, 1 semi-strong form, 2 social welfare, 7, 20 strong form, 2 structural, 1 summarized, xii–xiii trading, 4 market indexes, 241.


pages: 457 words: 143,967

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market by Philip Augar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business logic, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, family office, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, light touch regulation, loadsamoney, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Sloane Ranger, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, vertical integration, wikimedia commons, yield curve

In the end Taylor decided to believe Diamond, but emerging markets activity would have to be curtailed, proprietary trading groups disbanded and credit limits cut.3 He told him that it was his responsibility to ensure that people in his division stuck to the rules. One more instance of Barclays Capital breaching its limits or breaking the rules in any other way would be the end of Diamond’s career at Barclays. ‘And probably mine too,’ he thought. Three weeks later there was more bad news. One of Wall Street’s most prestigious funds, Long Term Capital Management, which boasted a roster of smart investment bankers, Nobel Prize-winning economists and rocket-scientist traders among its principals, became insolvent. They used computer models to predict market movements and borrowed huge amounts of money to leverage their bets. Barclays and other banks had been falling over themselves to provide LTCM credit, taking a small fee while LTCM’s investors made huge returns.

This figure excluded BZW’s operating losses prior to completion, which took the total to £688 million. 2. Martin Taylor, ‘I too fell for the Diamond myth’, Financial Times, 8 July 2012 3. ‘Consequences of Russia’, 22 September 1998, board note 4. Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, Fourth Estate, London, 2002, p. 198; Statement regarding Long Term Capital Management, 24 September 1998, Barclays press release 5. Martin Vander Weyer, Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2000, pp. 15–18 6. ‘Consequences of Russia’ 7. Barclays Annual Report 1999, p. 92. ‘Andrew Large relinquished his duties as an Executive Director on 31 December 1998.’


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

It recruited the smartest guys in the room, as a 2005 documentary on the company put it, hiring up to 250 MBAs a year at the height of its fame. It applied a “rank-and-yank” system of evaluation, showering the alphas with gold and sacking the gammas. And it promoted raw talent much faster than boring old experience. Another corporate disaster, Long-Term Capital Management, was even more talent-heavy than Enron, boasting not only MBAs but Nobel Prize winners among its staff. There is clearly much more to good management than brainpower. Among other things, it requires rewarding experience as well as talent, cultivating judgment as well as IQ, and applying strong ethical and internal controls.

See also Chief executive officer platform versus product, 264 Leading Minds (Gardner), 132 Leading the Revolution (Hamel), 11, 261 Leahy, Terry, 310 Leamer, Edward, 384–385 Leavitt, Harold, 166 Lecerf, Olivier, 258 Leeson, Nick, 165 Legislation Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 280 Sarbanes-Oxley, 166, 297 Lehman Brothers, xv, 2, 11, 134, 149 Lennon, John, 195 Lessig, Lawrence, 156–157 Lev, Baruch, 366 Levine, Mark, 156 Levi Straus, 216 Levitt, Theodore, 88, 271 Lewis, John, 329 Lewis, Michael, 299 The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman), 116 Li, Robin, 184–185 Liberation Management (Peters), 97 Life expectancy, 341 LifeSpring, 224 Li & Fung, 213, 224, 265 Light, Dean, 3 The Limited, 172 Limited Brands, 36 LinkedIn, 359 Linkner, Josh, 235, 239, 353 Linus, 157 Linux, 247 Lishui Economic Development Zone, 220–221 Litan, Robert, 173, 192 Live Life in Crescendo (Covey), 391 Local Motors, 242 Locked in the Cabinet (Reich), 128 Logos, 216, 244 London Business School, 11, 56, 61 The Long Tail (Anderson), 67–68, 121–122 Long-Term Capital Management, 364 Los Angeles Times, 76, 396 Lublin, Nancy, 48 M&A. See Mergers and acquisitions Ma, Jack, 185 MacArthur, Douglas, General, 4 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 146 Mackey, John, 262 Macrae, Norman, 169–171. See also Capitalism Macrowikinomics, 67 Macrowikinomics (Tapscott and Williams), 326–327 Madigan, Charles, xiii Mahindra, Anand, 230 Mahindra & Mahindra, 229 Make a Wish, 48 The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy (Stewart), xiii Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Drucker), xi–xii Management theory boardroom and, 291–311 commitment, 21 contradictions and, 18–22 corporate-bashing films, 35 criticisms of, 16–17 culture and, 161–164 decentralization, 157–158 empowerment, 157–158 evolution of, 225–226 fads and, 14–15 humanistic, 20–21 importance of, 63–68 industry, 49–72 instincts and, 6–7 management by objectives, 85–86 “management by objectives,” 76 modern, 12–13 networking and, 161 niche markets and, 122 paradox, 8–9 planning, 251–268 pseudotheories, 16 reengineering, 29–48 renewal, 160–161 scientific, 20 site visits, 409–410 social responsibility and, 38 strategies, 251–268 success of, 111–139, 413 writing and, 15 Management Today, 70 Mangapati, Mallipudi Raju Pallam, 53 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 310 The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC), 65 Markides, Costas, 67 Marks & Spencer, 155, 264 Marlboro, 272 Marshall, Alfred, 22, 198, 278 Martin, Roger, 293–294 Martin Prosperity Institute, 130 Marx, Karl, 91, 92, 342–343, 347 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 175 Mattel, 274 Maxwell, Robert, 189 Mayo, Elton, 79 McCallum, Eden, 361 McCartney, Paul, 195 McDonald’s, 34, 66, 158, 272, 275, 283, 376, 404 McGill University, 13 McGregor, Douglas, 107 McKinsey, James O., 49–50 McKinsey & Company, 4, 10, 50, 253, 364 McKinsey Global Institute, 63, 265–266 McKinsey Quarterly, 10–11, 63–64 McNamara, Robert, 106, 253, 402–403 McNerney, James, 53, 299 Mead, Walter Russell, 136 Meckling, William, 292 Medtronic, 198 Memeorandum, 188 Mercedes-Benz, 209 Merck, 66 Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), 221 Meritocracy, 386–390 Merrill Lynch, 2, 11, 299 Messier, Jean-Marie, 298 Metro Cash and Carry, 217 Michaels, Ed, 365 Micklethwait, John, xviii, 17, 386, 413 Microsoft, 151, 172, 195, 205, 244, 383 Milken, Michael, 153–154 Mill, James, 376 Mill, John Stuart, 262, 376 Mindray, 213 Minnow, Nell, 297–298, 300 Mintzberg, Henry, 9, 13–14, 60, 253, 266, 307, 323, 332–333 MIT.


pages: 537 words: 144,318

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

I was both short and long bonds that year. Being long would not have been very good at certain times during 1987. The whole year, yields went up and then crashed. I was not long bonds before the crash, but was able to get long just after, which worked. (See Figure 6.2.) What about 1998 when both LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) and Russia blew up? That was also a very interesting time to be running a prop desk. We definitely saw accidents coming as the sizes transacting and liquidity being offered across most markets was extremely high compared to prior years. I felt there was a possibility that liquidity would come off at some point.

See also Hyper-Great Macro Experiment explanation (Drobny) success Great Moderation Bernanke opinion Greenspan, Alan actions blame Conundrum speech Gunslinger fund manager Hang Seng, shorting Harvard University, endowments annual long-term performance assets, decline equity returns, contrast portfolio (2010) problems Headline inflation, core inflation (contrast) Hedge funds assets, growth business, Equity Trader outlook downside protection managers cash, availability prop trader, contrast transportation money allocation lending loss management, Commodity Trader perspective one-dimensional managers Plasticine Macro Trader complaint playing problems (2008) prop desk, contrast real money, differentiation redemptions running, worries space, Professor perspective stocks, contrast usage, Plasticine Macro Trader perspective Hedges, purchase Hendry, Hugh HFRI Macro Index Historical asset class, indicator Historical correlations, usage Historical events, examination Hoover, Herbert House, The business entry Human bias, impact Human Development Index (HDI) Hyper-Great Macro Experiment Hyperinflation impact risk scenario worry Hypothecation Hypotheses falsification, absence running Hypothesis testing, preference Ideas source trading Illiquid assets allocation avoidance inexpensiveness overinvestment Illiquid investments Illiquidity appearance cost, calculation increase needs, consideration premium, Pensioner measurement process risk premium, exposure Illiquidity assets risk value Illiquidity risk hedge process location mitigation recognition Illiquid positions, ownership Illiquid private deals, impact Illiquid strategies, investor engagement Incentive structures, change (process) India FDI GDP investment change Industrial production (IP) Inflation approach Commodity Trader perspective control deflation, contrast feeding, absence fiscal stimulus, impact hedge active commodity manager, impact impact increase persistence presence pressure psychological element quantitative easing, impact risk, increase risk premium volatility, reduction Inflation (1980-2000) Inflation-linked bonds Inflation-linked investment Inflation protected government bonds, purchase Inflection points, awareness Information arbitrage definition filtration flow, absence inundation Inside the House of Money (Drobny) Institutional investors impact leverage, usage (preclusion) money, loss outside advisors, usage Institutional money management, change Institutional real money mandates, Plasticine Macro Trader advice Insurance protection Intellectual property, anchor Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Interest rates (1980-2000) increase trades weakness zero level International diversification, importance Investment account, volatility flow alternatives approach, defense committees, challenge human bias, impact hypotheses/positions, running losses rear view mirror process vehicles, usage Investment grade bonds (IG8) Investment Management Association (IMA) Investors base, impact complacency decisions, manager track record basis losses mistakes purchases, crisis risk management IOU papers/obligations Japan bullishness (Plasticine Macro Trader) economic malaise inflation-protected bonds inflation scenario performance (1990) rolling 10-year inflation stagnation Jobs, saving/creation (Obama phrase) Jones, Paul Tudor (success) JPMorgan Chase (2009) Keynes, John Maynard commodity belief Knowledge gap, reduction Latam-type bond defaults Latam-type financial crisis Latin America, performance Lehman Brothers government bond leverage change saving Leitner, Jim analysis, awareness interview lessons Leitner Center for International Law and Justice Leverage cash, relationship contrast efficient frontier, relationship function impact presence reduction usage Pensioner prediction Limited partnerships, leverage Liquidity crisis crisis (2008), leverage impact excess focus importance management, problem measurement process overvaluation perspective Predator definition premium provider risk excess scarcity valuation quantitative models, usage value example lesson Liquid markets mentality Livermore, Jesse London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) basis, problem futures, ownership increase (2007) LIBOR-OIS basis (2008) three-month LIBOR Long-dated out-of-the-money equity index call options, purchase Longer-dated nominal bonds Long-only investments Long-term bonds, usage Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis problem Long-term fair value, departure Long-term fixed income assets Long-term historical correlations impact usage Long-term historical returns, usage Long-term horizon, irresponsibility Long-term inflation hedging investor nervousness Long-term money Long-term time horizon, advantage M2 (money supply measurements) Macroeconomics environment, creation imbalances pricing Macro factors examination risk Macro fund, running Macro hedge fund community Macro principles Macro risk management Macro scenario, preparation Macro traders, profits Macro trading Major Market Indices (2007) Managers, investor base (impact) Margin-to-equity, limits Markets Bond Trader viewpoint change conditions, improvement environment, identification functioning, understanding fundamentals/psychology, impact outguessing positioning, importance psychological game psychology, understanding zero-sum game Markets to fundamentals Marshall Plan Maximum Sharpe Ratio (MSR) portfolio construction goal Medium-term bonds, usage Medium-term theme projects Merrill Lynch saving (Thundering Herd) Microeconomic imbalances Mines, Commodity Investor purchase Minsky moment Misery index, peak Mishkin, Frederic S.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

To understand the demand for safe assets, and the extent to which our banking system as presently constituted can respond to that demand, requires a deeper analysis of the nature of uncertainty. 4 RADICAL UNCERTAINTY: THE PURPOSE OF FINANCIAL MARKETS And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not. T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, The Four Quartets ‘You’ve got to expect the unexpected.’ Paul Lambert, Aston Villa manager, press conference, 22 November 2013 Are we really capable of expecting the unexpected?1 In 1998, the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) failed, although its senior management team comprised two Nobel Laureates in Economic Science, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, and an experienced practitioner in financial markets, John Meriwether. Their strategy, successful at first, was to create a highly leveraged fund that bought large amounts of one asset and sold equally large amounts of a slightly different asset (for example, government bonds of slightly different maturities), so as to exploit anomalies in the pricing of those assets.

., 163–4 leverage ratios (total assets to equity capital), 24, 25, 33, 36, 95–6, 110–11, 257, 276, 280, 307, 323; as regulatory heuristic, 139–40, 259 limited liability status, 98, 107–9, 254–5 liquidity, 119, 149, 163, 202–3, 208, 259, 269–81; and bank balance sheets, 97, 255, 257–8, 259; ‘Chicago Plan’ (1933), 261–4, 268, 273, 274, 277–8; coverage ratio, 256, 259; crisis (2007-8), 35–8, 64–5, 76, 110; demand for during crises, 65–6, 76–7, 86, 106, 110, 148, 182, 187–92, 194, 201–7, 253–4, 367; illusion of, 149–55, 253–4; liquidity regulation, 163, 187–92, 208, 259, 272, 276; ‘liquidity trap’ theory, 298–302; and money, 64–6, 76, 85, 86, 106, 119, 287 Lloyd George, David, 193, 195, 197–8, 199–200, 368 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 120–1, 125 Lord’s cricket ground, 92 Lucas, Robert, 303 Macdonald, James, 350 Madoff, Bernie, 101 Magna Carta (1215), 286 Malthus, Thomas, 128 Mansfield, Lord, 260 market economy, 4–5, 10, 13, 17, 42–3, 50, 353–7; hypothetical grand auction, 79–81, 83, 128–9, 144, 149, 295, 297–8, 315; linking of present and future in, 11–12, 23, 46, 84–5, 325–6, 367; Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, 79–80 ‘marking to market’ valuing, 147 Marshall, Alfred, 79 Martin, McChesney, 166 Marx, Karl, 19, 365 mathematics, 7, 12, 16, 93–4, 99–100, 121, 130, 143, 153, 293, 310 Max Planck Institute, Berlin, 123 McAdoo, William, 195, 196–7, 200, 201 McCain, John, 157 McCulloch, Hugh, 88 Meriwether, John, 121 Merkel, Angela, 224, 227 Merton, Robert, 120–1 Mesopotamia, 55–6 Mexico, 100, 367 Middle East, 56, 337 Mill, John Stuart, 214 Minsky, Hyman, 262, 306–8, 323 Mitchell, Andrea, 157 monetarism, 78 monetary policy, 45, 78, 167–72, 180–6, 247, 288, 315, 327–8, 352; and aggregate demand, 30, 41–9, 167, 184–5, 212–13, 221, 229–31, 291–2, 294–302, 319–24, 329–32, 335, 358; alternative strategies for pre-crisis period, 328–33; exhaustion of, 48, 347–8; and fiscal policy, 184, 347–8; and Great Depression (early 1930s), 76; and Great Stability, 22, 25, 30, 46–7, 315, 328–33; ‘helicopter drops’, 283, 358; intervention in asset markets, 172, 173–5, 265; and Keynes, 78, 298–302; and Diego Maradona, 176–7; and market expectations, 176–8; in post-crisis period, 48, 49, 168–9, 183–4, 291, 319–24, 335, 356, 358; short-term stimulus during crisis, 39, 41, 118–19, 182–3 monetary unions, 212–18, 238–49; see also European Monetary Union (EMU, euro area) money: acceptability criterion, 53, 54, 59–60, 61, 63, 64–6; and American colonists, 57–8, 68; central bank creation of, 65–6, 70–1, 160–1; commodities as, 55, 58, 68, 286–7; counterfeiting, 56, 57; definitions of, 53; and economists, 78–80; electronic transfers, 53, 281, 282–5; first paper banknotes, 57–8, 74; future of, 281–7; gold versus paper debate, 71–7; government monopoly on banknote issue, 62, 160; government printing of, 70, 85–6, 163–4, 358; history of, 4–5, 18–19, 54–8, 64, 67–8, 71–7, 160–1, 163–4, 187–202; history of (alternative view), 59–63; in Iraq (1991-2003), 218, 238–42; and liquidity, 64–6, 76, 85, 86, 106, 119, 287; ‘monetary base’, 291; and nation state, 211–12, 214, 215–18, 238–49; quantity theory of, 163; role and function of, 4–5, 8, 51–4, 57, 58–63, 65–6, 83–6, 281; role of precious metals, 55–7, 58, 59, 60, 62, 66, 71–7, 86, 216; and Scottish independence referendum (2014), 243–5, 248; share of bank deposits in total money, 62–3; single unit of account, 285–7; St Paul’s Epistle to Timothy, 51, 52; stability criterion, 53, 54, 60, 61, 63, 66–71, 163; standardised coinage, 56; and trust, 8, 55, 57, 66–71, 82–3, 155; UK Currency and Bank Notes Act (1914), 198 money market funds, 112–13 money supply, 62–3, 76, 77, 78, 85–7, 162, 327; and central banks, 63, 65–6, 76, 86–7, 162, 163, 180–4, 192, 196–201; ‘monetary base’, 65–6 Monti, Mario, 225 Moore, John, 51, 82 moral hazard, 192, 268, 274–5, 344 Morgan, John Pierpont (J.P.), 161, 196 Morgan Stanley, 98 mortgage-backed securities (MBS), 35, 64, 99, 113, 142, 143, 144, 150 mortgages, 32, 138, 139, 173, 174, 258, 335–6; sub-prime, 35–6, 99, 100, 143 Mundell, Robert, 212 Muth, John, 303 mutual funds, 102, 112–13 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 282 Napoleon Bonaparte, 28, 68, 159 nation states, 211–14, 215–18, 238–49; post-war expansion in numbers of, 214–15; sovereignty and economic integration, 212–13, 348–9, 351 neoclassical economics, 293, 294, 302–3, 304, 306; ‘New Keynesian’ models, 305–6; ‘optimising’ model, 129–31, 132, 134, 138, 309, 311; ‘rational’ expectations concept, 303–5, 310, 314; stability heuristic, 312–14, 319–21, 323, 331, 332 Netherlands, 49, 230 New Zealand, 92, 167, 170, 179, 348 Nixon, President Richard, 73 Norman, Montagu, 13 North Korea, 68 Northern Rock, 107, 139, 205 Obama, Barack, 334 oil market, 21, 295–6, 306, 318, 362 Olympic Games, London (2012), 227 O’Neill, Onora, 81 Overend, Gurney & Co, 189–90, 191 Panama, 246, 287 Pascal, Blaise, 123 Paulson, Hank, 37–8 pawnbroker for all seasons (PFAS) approach, 270–81, 288, 368 pension funds, 32, 103, 112, 183, 204 Pitt, William (the Younger), 75 Portugal, 221, 222, 224, 229, 363–4 Prince, Chuck, 90 prisoner’s dilemma, 25, 81, 89–90, 255, 302, 332, 333, 368; central banks and interest rates, 335; definition of, 9–10; escaping, 347–8, 352–3 privatisation, 41 probability theory, 121, 123, 302–3, 311 productivity (output per head), 17–19, 42, 318–19, 354, 359–62; see also economic growth Prudential Regulation Authority, UK, 260 quantitative easing (QE), 47–8, 182–3, 270, 275, 358 radical uncertainty, 9, 11–12, 126–31, 247, 257–9, 304–5, 306, 308; and Arrow–Debreu grand auction, 80, 83, 128–9, 144, 149, 295, 297–8, 315; and banking sector, 42–3, 106–10, 125, 136–40, 191, 257–8, 264–5, 269, 281; and central banks, 166–7, 171, 179, 180, 259; and coordination problem, 295–303, 310, 315–16, 332, 333; coping behaviour, 130–40, 150, 153–5, 170, 270–1, 288, 310–15, 316–17, 330–1, 352–3; and financial markets, 140, 143, 144–5, 149–55; heuristics, 130–1, 134–40, 170, 208, 278, 310–11, 312–14, 319–21, 323, 331, 332; illusion of certainty, 121–6; illusion of liquidity, 149–55; and Keynes, 293–302; and money, 42–3, 83–6; and narrative, 136, 137, 150, 153, 257, 310–16, 319–21, 323–4, 328, 332–3, 356, 357; narrative revision downturns, 328, 332–3, 356, 357, 358–9, 364; neoclassical rejection of, 302; as precondition of capitalist economy, 145; and ‘rational’ expectations concept, 304–5, 310, 314; and risk weights, 138–9, 258–9, 277; role of expectations, 310–17, 323, 331–3 rating agencies, 146, 224 ‘rational’ expectations concept, 302–4, 310, 314 regulation, 10, 17, 62, 112–13, 114, 137–9, 255–61, 280; Basel Committee, 255, 276; deregulation from late 1970s, 22, 23–4, 98, 174, 255; and extreme complexity, 259–61, 275–6; lax, 6, 33; PFAS approach, 270–81, 288; post-crisis reforms, 40–1, 255–6, 257–61; reintroduction of ring-fencing, 256, 264 Reinhart, Carmen M., 308 resolution mechanisms, 256, 279 Richardson, Gordon, 176 risk, 84, 121–2, 123, 124, 126–9, 143, 254; implicit taxpayer subsidy for, 191–2, 207, 254–5; maturity and risk transformation, 104–15, 117–19, 250–1, 254–5; ‘optimising’ model, 129–31, 132, 134, 138, 309, 311; risk premium, 32–3, 115, 183; risk weights, 138–9, 258–9, 277 Robinson, Joan, 12, 292–3 Rodrik, Dani, 348 Rogoff, Kenneth, 44, 308 Rome, ancient, 59, 164, 216 Roosevelt, President Franklin, 91, 316 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 37, 89, 118, 206, 243 Russia, 121, 159 saving, 101–2, 155, 308–17, 362–3; in emerging economies, 22–3, 27–8, 29, 30; ‘paradox of thrift’, 297, 326; ‘savings glut’, 28, 29, 30, 46, 319, 325; as source of future demand, 11, 46, 84–5, 185, 325–6, 356 Schacht, Hjalmar, 341–2, 343 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 211 Scholes, Myron, 120–1 Schumpeter, Joseph, 152 Schwartz, Anna, 192, 328 Scotland, 218, 243–7, 248 Second World War, 20, 21, 219, 242, 317, 342 secular stagnation theory, 44, 291–2, 355 Seneca, 123–4 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, 124 ‘shadow’ banking system, 107, 112–14, 256, 262, 274 Shiller, Robert, 151 Silber, William, 206 Simons, Henry, 262 Sims, Christopher, 79 Slovakia, 216 Smith, Adam, 17–18, 54–5, 79–80, 163 Smith, Ed, 124 sovereign debt (government bonds), 32, 65, 92, 138, 182–4, 196–7, 203, 258, 259, 338–40; bond yields, 29, 183–4, 224, 227, 228, 231, 299, 336; in euro area, 162, 190, 224, 226–31, 258, 338, 339–40, 342–4; framework for restructuring, 346–7; need for export surplus before payment, 339–40, 341–3; WW1 reparations, 340–2, 343, 345–6 Soviet Union, 27, 68, 216 Spain, 47, 93, 159, 216, 221, 222, 227–8, 229, 257–8, 355, 363–4 special purpose vehicles, 113–14 stock markets, 102, 125–6, 133, 151–4, 194, 195, 200, 347 Stresemann, Gustav, 219 Summers, Larry, 44 Sweden, 159, 166, 173, 179, 216–17, 279, 335 Swift, Jonathan, ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’ (1703), 250, 290 Switzerland, 33, 70, 100, 118, 184, 216, 335 Syed, Matthew, 124 Taylor, John, 168 technological change, 83–4, 127, 129, 153–4, 281, 291, 354, 355, 365 Tequila crisis (1994), 367 Thaler, Richard, 132 Thornton, Henry, 188 Tobin, James, 262 trade surpluses and deficits, 33, 34, 46, 319, 321–2, 329, 352, 356, 364; in emerging economies, 27–8, 30, 329; in EMU, 222, 232–3, 236, 363–4; and exchange rates, 22–3; and interest rates, 23, 30, 46, 319–20; likely re-emergence of, 48–9 trading, financial, 3, 24, 64, 99–100, 257; bonuses, 99, 101, 117, 144, 147; erosion of ethical standards, 100–1, 288; ‘front-running’, 153–4, 284 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 361 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 361 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 225 trust, 10, 81–3, 106; and monetary unions, 220, 232, 237; and money, 8, 55, 57, 66–71, 82–3, 155 Tsipras, Alexis, 230, 231 Tuckett, Professor David, 133–4 Turner, Adair, 324 Tversky, Amos, 132 unemployment, 38, 292, 293, 294, 297–9, 302, 326–7, 329, 330; in euro area, 45, 226, 228, 229–30, 232, 234, 345; and inflation targeting, 168, 169; and interest rates, 169, 298–300; ‘stagflation’ (1970s), 5, 302–3, 318 United Kingdom: Acts of Union (1707), 215; alternative strategies for pre-crisis period, 328–32; Banking Act (2009), 40; Banking and Joint Stock Companies Act (1879), 109; Banking Reform Act (2013), 40; ‘Big Bang’ (1986), 23; City of Glasgow Bank failure (1878), 108–9; commercial property market, 47, 118; Currency and Bank Notes Act (1914), 198; Labour government (1964-70), 20; as monetary union, 215; need for export sector support, 357, 364; return to gold standard (1920s), 76; Scottish independence referendum (2014), 218, 243–5, 248; trade deficits, 30, 321, 322, 329, 364; tradition of national branch banking, 116; see also Bank of England United Nations, 214–15 United States: 1914 financial crisis, 192–201, 206; Aldrich-Vreeland Act (1908), 196, 206; Bureau of War Risk Insurance (1914), 200; Constitution, 286; Dodd-Frank Reform (2010), 40, 260; dollar and gold link, 73, 195, 200–1; dollar as world’s reserve currency, 25, 28, 34; ‘double liability’ (1865-1934), 107–8; ‘free banking’ era, 60–2, 77, 161; Glass-Steagall Act (1933), 23, 98, 260; gold reserves, 74, 77; Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999), 23, 98; history of money in, 57–8, 67, 68, 160–1, 187, 188, 212, 215; as monetary union, 212, 215, 234; need for export sector support, 357, 364; New York becomes world money centre, 194–5, 200–1; notes and coins in, 281; Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, 137, 206; trade deficits, 30, 34, 46, 49, 319, 321, 329, 364 Van Court’s Counterfeit Detector and Bank Note List, 61 Vietnam War, 5, 20, 73, 306 Viniar, David, 123 Volcker, Paul, 176, 288 Voltaire, 126 Wall Street Crash (1929), 347 Walpole, Horace, 369 Walras, Léon, 79 Washington, George, 286 Weatherstone, Sir Dennis, 136–7, 278 weights and measures, 212, 286, 287 Wheeler, Judge Thomas C., 162 wholesale funding, 97 Willetts, David, 83 Wilson, Brigadier-General Henry, 89 Wimbledon tennis championships, 142, 187–8 Wolf, Martin, 96, 262 World Bank, 21, 350 World Trade Organisation, 361 Yellen, Janet, 176, 287 Yugoslavia, break-up of, 216 Zimbabwe, 68, 69–70 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mervyn King was Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013, and is currently Professor of Economics and Law at New York University and School Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.


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A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

mathematical ideas to guide investment strategies: The evolution of quantitative analysis from an academic specialty to a force in the modern market is ably told by Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street (New York: Harper Business, 2011); Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005); David Leinweber, Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2009); Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007); Jeff Madrick, Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Scott Patterson, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010); and of course, Roger Lowenstein’s superlative When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000). a fully computerized stock market: This was Mark B. Garman, “Trading Floor/1: A Prototype of an Automated Securities Exchange,” Working Paper No. 7, Research Program in Finance, Institute of Business and Economic Research, University of California at Berkeley, July 1972.

In September 1998 a giant hedge fund in Connecticut that owed billions of dollars to giant Wall Street firms had to be rescued from the brink of default after private derivatives that were supposed to insure its counterparties against market losses backfired. (See Bruce I. Jacobs, “Risk Avoidance and Market Fragility,” Financial Analysts Journal 60, no. 1 [January/February 2004],” pp. 26–30. For details of the collapse of the fund Long Term Capital Management, see Diana B. Henriques, “Billions and Billions: Fault Lines of Risk Appear as Market Hero Stumbles,” New York Times, September 27, 1998, p. 1.) On May 6, 2010, an estimated $1 trillion was lost during a mysterious twenty-minute “flash crash” that saw blue-chip stock prices dive down to pennies a share in just a few seconds, before rebounding.


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Brazil became the latest victim of the malaise, and Rubin and Summers spent most of September working with the IMF to craft a rescue. Meanwhile Bill McDonough, the head of the New York Fed, took on the challenge of coping with the implosion of one of Wall Street's largest and most successful hedge funds, Long-Term Capital Management. Hollywood could not have scripted a more dramatic financial train wreck. Despite its boring name, LTCM was a proud, high-visibility, highprestige operation in Greenwich, Connecticut, that earned spectacular returns investing a $125 billion portfolio for wealthy clients. Among its principals were two Nobel-laureate economists, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, whose state-of-the-art mathematical models were at the heart of the firm's money machine.

As first a bank director (at JPMorgan), and then a bank regulator for eighteen years, I was acutely aware of how much better situated and staffed banks were to understand what other banks and hedge funds were doing as compared with the "by-the-book" regulation done by government financial regulatory agencies. As good as some bank examiners are in promoting sound banking practice, they have little chance of uncovering most fraud or embezzlement without the aid of a whistle-blower. A major failure of private counterparty surveillance was the nearcollapse of Long Term Capital Management, the 1998 financial train wreck described in chapter 9. LTCM's founders, who included two Nobel Prize winners, were held in such awe that they could, and did, refuse to offer collateral to their lenders—a fatal concession on the lenders' part. Before long, LTCM ran out of opportunities to earn niche profits, as imitators followed the firm's lead and glutted the market.

., 8, 172, 270n, 394n labor unions, 15, 72, 149, 282, 283, 284-85, 287, 318,381,400 Labour Party, British, 265, 266, 281, 283, 499 La Follette Progressive movement, 480 laissez-faire capitalism, 40, 52, 57, 6 1 , 273, 278-79, 323, 368, 504 land, 253-54, 304, 309, 321, 337 Larson, Robert, 116 Latin America, 80, 189, 313 debt crisis in (1982), 157, 250 immigrants to United States from, 279-80 income in, 260, 314, 336 populism and, 255, 280, 334-35 Lebanon, 469 Leblang, David, 376 Lee Kuan Yew, 312 Lefevre, Edwin, 28 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 496 Lenin, 306, 504 Leonowens, Anna, 312-13 Leontief, Wassily, 128 Level 3, 200 Levey, Stan, 27 Levittown, 33-34 Lewinsky, Monica, 187 libertarianism, 40, 87, 208 life expectancy, 263, 268, 278, 301, 363, 454 retirement and, 409, 4 1 0 - 1 1 , 419 Limbaugh, Rush, 158-59 Lincoln, Abraham, 208 Lincoln Savings, 115-16 Lindsey, Larry, 7, 9, 166, 241 Li Peng, 297, 435 Lisbon Agenda, 288-89, 500 Liu Guoguang, 299 Liu Mingkang, 308 Livermore, Jesse, 28 loans, 117, 137, 187, 191, 358, 360 in China, 307, 308, 309 see also mortgages Locke, John, 140n, 251-52, 502 logical positivism, 39, 4 1 , 52 London, 24, 130,369n, 499 Long, Huey, 344 Long, Russell, 344 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 193-95, 371 523 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. INDEX Lopez Obrador, Andres Manuel, 341 Los Angeles, Calif, 8 1 , 406 Lott, Trent, 7 Lynn, Jim, 67, 73 MacArthur, Douglas, 38 McCain, John, 115,244 McCarthy, Joseph, 34 McDonald's, 402 McDonough, Bill, 193,194 McFarlane, Ian, 292 Mackey, Judith, 74 McTeer, Bob, 212 Maddison, Angus, 335 Maestro (Woodward), 224 Mahathir Mohamad, 312 Malan, Pedro, 334-35, 341 Malaysia, 188, 260, 312, 330 Mandel, Johnny, 27 Mandela, Nelson, 153 manufacturing, 314, 383, 486, 493 in China, 304-5 in India, 320, 322 in United States, 5-6, 46, 49-50, 62, 77-78, 103, 306n, 395-96, 470, 475-76, 495n Mao Zedong, 299, 302, 504 market economies, market capitalism: accurate accounting in, 432-33 central planning in, 62 central planning vs., 12, 123, 125, 127-28, 129, 131-34, 139, 141 conflicted attitudes toward, 261, 268-72 creative destruction and, see creative destruction Fed's orientation toward, 373 French vs.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

A Nigerian scam artist once told The New York Times that he felt guilty for hurting others, but “poverty will not make you feel the pain.”¹³ What Gupta and Madoff did is something different. They already had everything: unimaginable wealth, prestige, power, freedom. And they threw it all away because they wanted more. They had no sense of enough. They are extreme examples. But there are non-criminal versions of this behavior. The hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management was staffed with traders personally worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars each, with most of their wealth invested in their own funds. Then they took so much risk in the quest for more that they managed to lose everything—in 1998, in the middle of the greatest bull market and strongest economy in history.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Then there was Citigroup, which set up structured investment vehicles (SIVs) to shift assets and risks off its balance sheet, away from investors’ and regulators’ eyes, and whose collapse hit US taxpayers with two multi-billion-dollar bail-outs. ‘And from where were the SIVs launched?’ Gensler asked. ‘London. And incorporated? The Cayman Islands.’ A decade earlier there had been the saga of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the Connecticut-based hedge fund with $1.2 trillion in derivatives contracts which went sour and almost triggered a gigantic US bail-out. ‘We had no idea what the ramifications would be in our financial system, and where, because these trades were booked in the Cayman Islands,’ Gensler said.

122, 136–7 Cadbury’s 113 Cameron, David 48 Capital Group 84 capital requirements 148–63 Careline Homecare Limited 190–3, 202–5, 206, 216, 220 care sector 4, 190–4, 202–9, 216–17, 220, 228, 229, 234 Carillion 46, 231, 237 Carlyle Group 214 Carvalho, Arnaldo Lago de 233 Cassano, Joe 161 Cayman Islands 1, 2, 3, 59–60, 62, 63–7, 93, 125, 136, 140, 141, 145, 150, 151, 152, 153–4, 157, 162, 179, 188, 200, 211, 228, 242 Cayman Trust Law (1967) 62 Celtic Tiger (Ireland economy) 4, 115, 116–39 Central Bank of Ireland 129, 136 Cheney, Dick 244 Cherwell, Lord 53 Chicago School 28, 29, 30, 46, 71, 74, 98, 110, 197, 209, 253 China 13, 23, 50, 55, 84, 85, 87, 92, 104, 108, 110, 117, 138, 200, 258, 262–7, 272, 274 China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN) 262–3 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 258, 264, 265, 266, 267, 272 Christensen, John 5, 11, 48, 67–8 Christensen, Professor Clayton 197, 198 Citibank/Citigroup 11, 59, 83, 129, 140, 159 City of London 37, 38, 84, 92–3, 183, 185, 252, 271, 272, 273; Big Bang 104, 143–4; capture of British establishment 13, 142, 166–7, 257–60, 265, 266; Chinese influence upon 262–7; evidence machine/lobbying and 257–60; financial brain drain and 6, 108, 259; global financial crisis and see global financial crisis; monopolies and 84; neoliberalism and 37, 38; organised crime and other abusive activities linked to 11–12, 93, 97, 141–6, 154, 166, 167, 168; penetrated and captured by reckless global finance (London loophole) 140–68; rebirth as global financial centre after fall of British empire 4, 10, 50–69; tax havens and see tax havens; Third Way and 92–3, 97, 98, 102, 104, 108, 109, 113; UK economy and growth in size of 5–14, 108, 218–40, 257–61, 262–74 City of London Corporation 257–8 Clearing House Group 130–1 Clinton, Bill 91, 97, 101, 114, 115, 122, 159 Clinton, Hillary 91, 100 Coase, Ronald: The Problem of Social Cost 72–4, 79 Coelho, Tony 98–9 Cohen, Benjamin J. 57 Cohen, Sheldon 254 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 165, 235 collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) 165, 200 Commodity Futures Modernisation Act (CFMA) (2000) 159–60 Community Mental Health Fund, Missouri 44 comparative advantage concept 105, 108 Competition and Markets Authority 70 competitiveness of nations/competitiveness agenda 8–9, 13–14, 23, 28–49, 62, 68, 70–1, 73, 80, 95, 97–8, 100–15, 130, 131, 132–3, 136, 142, 143, 149, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165, 180–1, 184–5, 207, 218, 241–3, 246–7, 250, 252–3, 258, 266, 267, 270, 271, 273 Conservative Party 37, 53, 71, 78, 102, 157, 165, 168, 220, 229 consultants 40, 41, 42–3, 66, 117, 230, 232, 233 controlled foreign company (CFC) reforms, U.K. 249–50 Cook Islands 177, 186, 272 Cornfield, Bernie 93 corporation: complexity of 3, 205–6; concept of 196–7 credit, control of 21 credit default swap (CDS) 128, 141, 147, 155–9, 165 Credit Suisse 11, 180, 183 crime/criminal money 12, 56, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64–5, 93–4, 142–3, 144, 145, 153, 154, 167–8, 175, 180, 187, 223, 264, 272, 273 Cromwell, William 22 Daily Mail 113, 251, 252 Darling, Alistair 257 Davidson, Charles 182, 189 Davidson, Kenneth 81, 252 Davies, Will 36, 39, 102 Deaton, Angus 181 debt 7, 34, 58, 69, 121, 152, 160, 165, 169, 186, 190, 193–6, 198–201, 205, 206–7, 208, 210, 215, 221, 234, 235, 244, 248, 262 Delaware, U.S. 181 Deloitte 235, 237 Delors, Jacques 100 Democratic Party, U.S. 39, 97, 98–100, 102, 141, 245 Deng Xiaoping 117 Depfa 133 deregulation, financial 13, 31, 35, 64–5, 68–9, 91, 97, 104, 107, 109, 117–18, 138, 142, 143, 146, 152, 159–60, 164, 165, 260 derivatives 12, 140–1, 142, 144, 146–7, 149, 151, 155, 158–60, 161, 164, 193 Desmond, Dermot 129–30 de Tocqueville, Alexis 75–6 Deutsche Bank 83, 95, 111, 160 Devereux, Professor Mike 243 Director, Aaron 71–2, 78, 79 DIRT (Deposit Interest Retention Tax) 136 Down’s Syndrome North East Association (UK) (DNSE) 169–70, 174 Drexel Burnham Lambert 161, 195 drugs: gangs/money 12, 61, 64–5, 92, 142–3, 145, 167, 185–6; pharmaceutical/Big Pharma 85–6, 126, 247 Dunbar, Nicholas 152, 161 dynamic scoring/dynamic modeling 253–4 East India Company 50, 75 Eddy, Bruce 44 Efficient Markets Hypothesis 150 Elf Affair 94, 187 Enron 46, 141, 165, 235–6 Epstein, Professor Gerald 10–11, 259; Overcharged: The High Costs of Finance 10– 11 Ernst & Young 163, 235, 238 Espino, Ovidio Diaz: How Wall Street Created a Nation 23 Essilor 82; EssilorLuxottica 82 Eurodollar markets/Euromarkets 55–9, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69, 77, 91, 93, 104, 142 European Central Bank (ECB) 137 European Commission (EC) 84, 94, 100, 111, 137; Liikanen Report (2012) 135 European Economic Community (EEC) 77, 98, 118, 123, 124–5 European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) 100 European Union (EU) 98, 109–10, 111, 124, 132, 147, 238 Export Profits Tax Relief 118 Facebook 23, 71, 84, 88, 171, 173, 185, 226, 271, 274 fallacy of composition 107–8, 247 Fallon, Padraic 124 Fanning, John 126 Fantus Factory Location Service 40 Farm Aid 87–8 Federal Reserve Bank of New York 57 Ferguson, Niall: The Ascent of Money 242 Fiat 250 Finance Acts, Ireland: (1968) 120; (1987) 131 finance curse, concept of 3–14, 15, 18, 19, 22, 31, 37, 48, 68, 71, 103, 108, 111, 132, 136, 174, 184–5, 193, 198, 216, 228, 239, 257, 261, 265, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274 financial capture 13, 68, 96, 153, 257, 259, 265, 266 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) 25–6, 246 financial crisis, global (2007–8) 4, 6, 25, 83, 90, 99, 109, 113, 114, 116, 128, 130, 133–4, 135–6, 140–68, 169, 195, 202, 224–5, 233, 235, 236, 240, 257 financialisation 2–4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 37, 68–9, 71, 88, 90, 174, 180, 185, 190, 191, 194, 198, 205, 217, 224, 225, 226, 228, 232, 259, 267, 274 Financial Services Authority (FSA) 104, 160, 161, 166, 167 Financial Stability Board (FSB) 83 Financial Times 68, 84, 94, 107, 146, 214, 218, 226, 232, 243, 256 Finger, Bernd 168 Fischel, William 38 Fordism 80 foreign direct investment (FDI) 110, 118–19, 123, 124, 132, 250 Fox News 71, 253 Franks, Oliver 52 Fraser, Ian: Shredded 227 free markets 18–19, 71–2, 99, 126, 128, 241 free-rider problem 30–1, 43, 47, 38 free trade 31, 50–1 Friedman, Milton 28, 30, 37, 59, 72, 73–4; ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’ 196–7, 198, 209 Friedmaniacs 28, 30 FTSE 100 228, 238 Gapper, John 232–3 Gash, Tom 230 Gates, Bill 127, 185 Gauke, David 249 Gaydamak, Arkady 186 Gazprom 84 GDP (gross domestic product) 6, 8, 111, 112, 123, 147, 153, 174, 241, 245, 254, 256, 260, 266 General Electric (GE) 86–7 Gensler, Gary 140–1 Gibraltar 60, 63 Giddens, Anthony: The Third Way 105 Gilbert, Martin 83 Gilead 85–6 Giles, Chris 218 Glasman, Baron 258 Glass-Steagall Act (1933) 76, 147, 158–9 globalisation 10, 35, 59, 93, 94–5, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 165, 177, 251, 254 Golden Age of Capitalism 34, 69, 91, 92, 118, 196, 251, 254–5 Goldman Sachs 113, 159, 160, 183, 213, 235, 242 Google 71, 88, 226, 271 Graphite Capital Partners VIII A LP 191–2, 205, 206 Great Depression (1929–39) 31, 98 Greenspan, Alan 75, 159, 160 gross national income (GNI) 112, 119, 122–3, 134 Guernsey 60, 181, 191, 220, 222 Hahneman, Daniel 181 Haldane, Andrew 225 Hands, Guy 181 Hansen, Lee 28 happiness, wealth and 181–3, 189 Harlech, Lord 34 Harrington, Brooke 186, 188 Hartnett, Dave 113 Harvard Business School 101, 196, 197 Harvie, Alicia 87–8 Harvoni 86 Haughey, Charles 114–15, 120–3, 129–30, 136 Hayek, Friedrich 35–6, 37, 59, 76; The Road to Serfdom 36, 37 Hayes, Jerry 229 Heaton, David 234 hedge funds 6, 13, 83, 104, 108, 128, 130–1, 140–1, 154, 164, 177, 178, 189, 193, 200, 209, 213, 214–15, 217, 233 Henry, James 166, 260 Hewlett-Packard 39–40 Hinkley C 262–3 HMRC 62, 104, 113, 168, 173, 234, 241, 242, 245, 246, 249, 252–4; Computable General Equilibrium model 241, 252–4 HNWI (high net worth individuals) 180; ultra-HNWI 180 Hodge, Margaret 168, 239 Hofri-Windogradow, Adam 180 Hong Kong 50, 130, 138, 171–2, 266 HSBC 12, 54, 83, 107–8, 167, 266 Hundred Group 242 Hunt Companies 221 HypoVereinsbank 133 Industrial Development Authority (IDA), Ireland 118, 124–5, 126, 129, 131, 135 inequality 4, 11, 31, 34, 36, 47, 48, 59, 90, 109, 138, 179, 187, 225, 251, 255, 256, 257, 259, 267–8, 270, 272, 274 inflation 34, 80, 107, 129 Innes, Abby 229 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) 247 Intel 125 internal rate of return (IRR) 198, 211 International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), Dublin 128–35, 251 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 137, 164, 219, 250, 251, 257 International Public Partnerships Limited (INPP) 220–1 International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) 158 Intruders 113 Investec Wealth & Investment Limited 220 investment funds 2, 88, 110, 140 Investors Overseas Services (IOS) 93 Iran 53–4 Ireland: Celtic Tiger economy in 4, 114–15, 116–39 Isle of Man 60, 136 Jackson County, Missouri, U.S. 44 Jenkins, Robert 11 Jensen, Professor Michael 196, 197, 198, 209, 215 Jersey 1, 2, 3, 5, 60, 63, 67–8, 131, 136, 169, 171, 173, 174, 202, 221, 222, 223, 228, 258 Jiang Zemin 117 Johnson, Boris 218, 219, 222 Johnson County, Kansas, U.S. 41–4 Johnson, Paul 247 Johnson, Simon 257 Joly, Eva 187 Journal of Political Economy 29, 46 JP Morgan Chase 83, 95, 141, 146, 147, 155, 158, 160, 214 Juncker, Jean-Claude 94–5, 97, 102, 103, 104, 111, 114, 122 Kansas, U.S. 41–4, 244–5, 255–6 Kay, John 9 Kennedy, Edward 78–9 Keynes, John Maynard 31–2, 34, 37, 38, 52, 59, 68, 251 KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) 2, 3, 195, 214 Koch, Charles 74 Kohlberg Junior, Jerome 194, 195, 199 Kohl, Marius 95 KPMG 114, 235, 237, 238–9 Kraft Heinz 81, 113 Kravis, Henry 2, 195 Kroes, Neelie 110 Krugman, Paul: ‘Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession’ 105 Labour Party 77, 97, 102–5, 132, 192, 220, 247, 257 Lack, Simon 214; The Hedge Fund Mirage 214 Laffer, Arthur/Laffer curve 244–5, 254 Lazonick, Bill 225, 226 Leaver, Professor Adam 207, 224–5, 234 Lehman Brothers 140, 162–4 Leigh-Pemberton, Robin 145 LeRoy, Greg 40–1 leveraged buyout (LBO) 195–6 Levin, Carl 134 Liberty Global 250 Libor (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate), manipulation of 12, 85, 109, 166 Linares, Adolfo 185, 188 Linklaters 163 Lloyds Bank 52 Local Government Association (LCA) 224 Loch Alpine Economics 253 London School of Economics (LSE) 37, 105, 229 London Stock Exchange (LSE) 167, 220 London Whale 141 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) 140–1 Luxembourg 1, 2, 3, 13, 55–6, 92, 93–7, 98, 111–13, 125, 130, 138, 142, 166, 201, 211, 221, 222, 228, 243 Luxleaks scandal (2014) 95, 109 Luxottica 82 Lycamobile 168 Lydian Capital Partnership 202 Lynn, Barry 87, 88 Macdonald, Ken 168 Macmillan, Harold 34, 53–4 MacSharry, Ray: The Making of the Celtic Tiger 118, 127 Madoff, Bernie 94, 96 Madrid, Miguel de la 58 Major, John 220 Maloney, Carolyn 141 Manafort, Paul 183 Manne, Henry 74 Marchant, David 157 Marx, Karl 15, 18 Masters, Blythe 158 Maugham, Jolyon 156 Maurer, Ueli 45–6 Mazerov, Michael 255 McAlpin, Clovis 62 McCarthy, Joseph 29 McCarthy, Justine 119 McCreevy, Charlie 132 McDonald, Duff 197 Mellon, Tamara 208 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) 26, 71, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 99, 110, 155, 225, 226, 251 Metcalf, Stephen 36 Microsoft 125, 185 Midland Bank 34, 54–5 Milken, Michael 195 Missouri, U.S. 41, 43, 44, 244–5, 255 money laundering 12, 145–6, 167, 168, 183 Money Trust Investigation, U.S.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

Is it any wonder that the research business remains dominated by the subsidized ranks of analysts at large broker-dealers? Operational Risk Operational risk accounts for a significant category of investor losses; it is fraud or more often the case plain old mismanagement (think of the preposterous assumptions of Long-Term Capital Management). We are told it is hard to guard against it and that there are no software packages that can avert it. Of course, the disinfectant of transparency goes a long way, but common sense is the most effective tool at our disposal to avoid being sucked into such schemes. The centerpiece of operational risk for our time has to be the Bernie Madoff scandal, which broke in December 2008.

The assumptions of linearity and normally distributed outcomes are perhaps the most worrisome and limiting of thought, particularly because in the discipline of finance it has been almost unquestionably shown that six sigma events are happening with all too much regularity to be assumed random. (Two sigmas denote that in 95 percent of outcomes results will be within a stated boundary. A six sigma event is extremely rare; normally it would occur just 3.4 times in a million instances). The principals of Long-Term Capital Management, who had PhDs in economics, assumed away the possibility of rare outcomes with ruinous results for their investors. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has gained notoriety for reminding the investment community of this uncomfortable point. Linearity is another problem. As Einstein’s work in the area of physics revealed, the human preference to regard the world in terms of three dimensions restricts comprehension.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

There was a problem in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a solution brewing to that problem at the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that would transform investors' perception of risk and kick-start the age of debt. The decomposing composers 24 September 1998, Global There appear to have been some problems at Mr Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). According to the newswires, emergency credit lines have had to be extended. LTCM is no ordinary fund management company. Let Bloomberg explain: Many of Meriwether’s partners, including Lawrence Hilibrand and Eric Rosenfield, helped Salomon earn billions of dollars trading bonds.

The pantheon fills up but the music goes on forever and as the Monty Python team once reminded us, "you can still hear Beethoven, but Beethoven cannot hear you" (The Decomposing Composers: Jones, Palin, Tomlinson). On the night of 21 September 1998, a cross-section of US commercial banks had been called into the offices of the New York Federal Reserve and told that they need to work out a rescue plan for a company called Long-Term Capital Management. The tale of the collapse of this investment company has been well told elsewhere, but it had become simply too big to fail given the likely consequences had it been forced to unwind its highly leveraged positions in financial markets quickly. The bailout allowed an orderly unwinding of the company’s positions, but even more importantly there followed, in quick succession, three cuts in US interest rates.


pages: 1,042 words: 266,547

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham, David Dodd

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, full employment, Greenspan put, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, prudent man rule, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, secular stagnation, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, zero-coupon bond

If the modern reader were asked, what did the junk bonds of the 1980s, the dot-com stocks of the late 1990s, and, more recently, the various subprime mortgage portfolios of the 2000s all have in common, the first correct answer is that each of them took a nosedive from a highly inflated price to one rather closer to zero. You can throw in, for good measure, the net asset value and reputation of the world’s most intelligent hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). The second right answer is that each was an investment disaster whose perils could have been avoided by a patient reading of Security Analysis. Graham and Dodd wrote the first edition in 1934 and first revised it in 1940—some four decades before Michael Milken became a household name and three score years in advance of the frenzy for no-documentation, adjustable-rate mortgages.

Graham and Dodd used the example of a mythical roulette wheel in which the odds had been reversed to 19 to 18 in favor of the customer. “If the player wagers all his money on a single number, the small odds in his favor are of slight importance,” the authors note. In fact, the investor would be ill advised to risk his all on a single spin even if the odds were strongly in his favor. The Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund made just such a bet, or a series of bets, in 1998. Each of its trades had been mathematically calculated (the fund had a pair of Nobel Prize winners in residence), and its previous experience suggested that on each of its trades the odds were in its favor. However, LTCM, which was highly leveraged, risked far more than it could afford to lose.

., 233n Lincoln Motor Company, 636n Liquidating value: buying below, 540–541 definition of, 559 stocks selling below (see Subliquidating value common stocks) Liquidations, 268 examples of coups in distressed investing in, 270–273 Listing applications, as information source, 95 Litigation, market exaggerations due to, 680–683 Liz Claiborne, 543 Loew’s, Inc., 203n, 224, 225 Lone Star Gas, 147n Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 39, 48–49 Loose-Wiles Biscuit, 94 Losses: by buyers of low-priced common stocks, 521–523 financial position and, checking on, 600–607 from inventory, reserves for, in income account, 426–428 nonconsolidated, allowance for, in income account, 445–446 from sale of fixed assets, in income account, 414–416 of subsidiaries, significance of, 449–452 Lotte Confectionery, 718–719 Louis K.


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close,” as described by James G. Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad.


pages: 274 words: 60,596

Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School by Andrew Hallam

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, diversified portfolio, financial independence, George Gilder, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mary Meeker, new economy, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, random walk, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Those who don’t, are, according to Miller, setting an irresponsible policy. I have a global index fund with all-in expenses at eight basis points.6 Robert Merton, 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics In 1994, Merton, a University Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, probably thought he could beat the market. After all, he was a director of Long Term Capital Management, a U.S. hedge fund (a type of mutual fund I will explain in Chapter 8) that reportedly earned 40 percent annual returns from 1994 to 1998. That was before the fund imploded, losing most of its shareholders’ money, and shutting down in 2000.7 Naturally, a Nobel Prize winner such as Merton is a brilliant man—and he’s brilliant enough to learn from his mistakes.


pages: 218 words: 62,889

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

Street Fighters, a bestselling story of the bank’s collapse, describes Bear as a bank that ‘cared little for appearances’.2 Bear seemed to have enjoyed its reputation as the bad boy of Wall Street, proudly hiring castoffs from other firms, providing ‘geisha girls’ to escort visitors to meetings and refusing to follow the crowd in its business conduct.3 In one version of events, the collaborative sabotage that ultimately pulled down Bear Stearns began long before the summer of 2007. This story begins on 17 August 1998, the day the Russian government defaulted on all its outstanding debt, exposing foreign investors to losses in the multimillions. The Russian default amplified panic in the world financial markets. One of its most significant casualties would be the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) fund, a boutique hedge fund run by two Nobel Prize winners in economics.4 The Nobel Prizes were awarded for the partners’ work on the Black–Scholes formula, used until today for calculating the prices of financial derivatives. But Russia’s default unleashed volatility on a scale far beyond what the model was designed for.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

On August 17, 1998, the country defaulted on its domestic debt, and declared a moratorium on repaying foreign debt. Canyon had invested in Russia, so not only did it lose a good amount of money during the so-called “Russian Flu,” but those losses shook investors’ confidence to the point that numerous started withdrawing their money. The biggest hedge fund at the time, Long-Term Capital Management, heavily involved in the Russian treasury bond market and leveraged over twenty times, was hemorrhaging almost $4 billion in losses and facing the unthinkable: bankruptcy. The fund’s prospective failure could be so perilous to global financial markets and investors worldwide that it had to forcefully be gobbled up by another hedge fund in a deal hastily arranged by the Federal Reserve Bank.


pages: 554 words: 168,114

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century by Tom Bower

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, bonus culture, California energy crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Global Witness, index fund, interest rate swap, John Deuss, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, land bank, LNG terminal, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, megaproject, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, passive investing, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, price stability, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game, éminence grise

But in the remaining markets, although speculators were borrowing increasingly huge sums to trade swaps on the OTC market — much more than permitted by Nymex — this was beyond the regulator’s supervision except in cases of fraud and manipulation. “It’s so opaque,” Born told her staff as they watched helplessly from the sidelines. “No one knows anything about this market, and we don’t have any tools to police it.” Multibillion-dollar investment funds like Long Term Capital Management in New York were speculating with unknown amounts in OTCs. Born wanted to reform the CFTC into a savvy, independent regulator, but her task was complicated. To reverse Wendy Gramm’s liberalization required congressional approval for new regulations. Although the CFTC was only answerable to Congress and not the Treasury, Born circulated a “concept release” in April 1998 on OTC derivatives to several Washington politicians, including Bob Rubin, the Treasury secretary, and Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Alan Greenspan, ideologically committed to free markets, successfully urged Rubin to initiate legislation to prevent Born’s proposed reintroduction of controls. Greenspan’s influence was marginal compared to the intense lobbying of Congress and the administration by John Damgard on behalf of the Futures Industry Association. In September, Born’s premonition of disaster unfolded. Long Term Capital Management, a $4.7 billion fund, famous for employing mathematical geniuses, began crashing, notionally owing $1.5 trillion after reckless speculation on OTC financial derivatives. Ignoring the threat this posed to financial stability, Congress passed Rubin’s legislation in October 1998. In June 1999 Born retired.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

In 2005, with the help of Democrats like Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and Hillary Clinton, Congress passed a law restricting the right to file for bankruptcy. It was a huge win for the business lobby. She learned something about the ways of Washington. And the second story continued. In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management collapsed and almost took the investment banks with it, showing that this increasingly autonomous financial world was perilously linked together around the globe. A few years later, Enron fell, revealing that the books were dirty. And the White House and Congress kept unraveling the fabric.

But she was already gone, back to Massachusetts, to run for a seat in the chamber where the voices of Fighting Bob and the Happy Warrior had once stirred the souls of ordinary men and women. WALL STREET Kevin Moore1 was born and raised in Manhattan, and he went to work at a top American bank right out of college, in 1998. That was the year Long-Term Capital Management went down, almost taking Wall Street with it, the year before Glass-Steagall was repealed. None of it meant much to Kevin then; it was years before he understood the significance. He was the last person hired for his training class—he only got the job because most of the competition out of college was flocking west to the gold rush in Silicon Valley—and he was voted most likely to be cut loose first.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

At a hearing in July, Summers told Congress that Born had “cast the shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market.” He had a sympathetic audience: Phil Gramm. “I see no evidence whatsoever to suggest that this is a troubled market,” Gramm said.38 Less than two months later, a fresh batch of evidence landed with a thud. Long-Term Capital Management, a massive hedge fund led by some of the very professors whose theories underpinned the case for deregulation, collapsed in spectacular fashion. The lack of regulation, rather than its prospect, had once again caused a crisis. Born described it as a “wake-up call,” but no one else stirred.

He added, “I don’t think any new policies have to be implemented.”70 After the first round of wipeouts in credit derivatives in 1994, Greenspan described the damage as educational. “As a consequence,” he said, “firms’ models and judgments should be sounder today than those that prevailed in early 1994.”71 After the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Greenspan again insisted the government should not tighten regulation of the banks that funded the hedge fund’s bets, nor of the credit derivatives that allowed the hedge fund to burn so much money so very quickly. It was a view Greenspan carried right up to the 2008 crisis. “In today’s world, I fail to see how adding more government regulation can help,” he wrote in his 2007 memoirs.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

This helped to tip the Blair government’s decision not to apply a brake to East European immigration. In 2013, the ONS estimated that the actual figure was about 50,000. By 2014, there were nearly 1.5 million workers from Central and Eastern Europe living in the UK.9 A succession of corporate disasters and scandals raised questions about the cult of pure intelligence. Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, was supposed to be the perfect advertisement for brainpower, including the Nobel Prize-winning duo Myron Scholes and Robert Merton on its board. But in 1998 it made such a catastrophically wrong bet that the Federal Reserve had to organize a rescue. Enron famously prided itself on being run by ‘the smartest guys in the room’.

D. 70 Lippmann, Walter 201, 206 Liu, Weihua 360–61 livery companies, and schools 104 Locke, John 114, 145 Some Thoughts Concerning Education 120 and nature–nurture debate 120 Lombard League 105 London Bethnal Green 296 relations with provinces 331 schools 171 London School of Economics 169, 171 London University 152, 171 University College 211 women graduates 268 Long, Howard Hale 285 Long Term Capital Management, scandal 337–8 lottery, proposed for university places 9–10 Loughlin, Lori 315 Louis the Pious, king of France 42 Louis XIII, king of France 42, 125 Louis XIV, king of France 39, 42, 43, 125 patronage 49–50, 126 Louis XV, king of France 39, 42 Louis XVI, king of France 36–8, 41 and sale of offices 53 Louvain, University of 33 Lovelace, Ada 266 Lowe, Robert, MP 165, 392 Lowell High School, San Francisco 198, 304, 305 Lowell, Lawrence 224 Lowell, Robert 233 Luckman, Thomas 293 Luther, Martin 111, 112 Macartney, Lord 85 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 68, 152–5, 258, 352 on examinations 154–5 and India 153–5, 158 Macaulay, Zachary 152 MacDonald, Ramsay 14–15, 173, 340 McDougall, William, Is America Safe for Democracy?


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

It is no surprise, then, that the creation of a formal safety net for banks led to higher levels of indebtedness.22 In addition to these explicit subsidies, an implicit subsidy created by a string of ad hoc bailouts has further incentivized financial institutions to ramp up their leverage. Continental Illinois in 1984, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the peso crisis of 1994, the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, Long Term Capital Management in 1998, and of course the financial crisis of 2007–09—again and again the US government has intervened with emergency assistance to prop up American financial institutions deemed too big or too important to fail. This implicit safety net has extended far beyond the traditional banks covered by deposit insurance to include investment banks, the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, hedge funds, money market mutual funds, and insurance companies.


pages: 224 words: 64,156

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Computationally Enhanced Corruption Corruption has always been possible without computers, but computers have made it easier for criminals to pretend even to themselves that they are not aware of their own schemes. The savings and loan scandals of the 1980s were possible without extensive computer network services. All that was required was a misuse of a government safety net. More recent examples of cataclysmic financial mismanagement, starting with Enron and Long-Term Capital Management, could have been possible only with the use of big computer networks. The wave of financial calamities that took place in 2008 were significantly cloud based. No one in the pre-digital cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to him-or herself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation used to put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion.


pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

His colleague and Nobel laureate Robert Solow compared Kindleberger to Darwin on the Beagle: “collecting, examining, and classifying interesting specimens . . . it was Kindleberger’s style as an economic historian to hunt for interesting things to learn, not pursue a systematic agenda.”2 The culmination of Kindleberger’s massive data collection on bubbles—Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises—is one of the most influential books written in economic history. The book is a tour de force: it covers bubbles going back to the tulip mania in the seventeenth-century Netherlands to the commercial real estate boom before Japan’s “Lost Decade,” to the 1998 financial crisis spurred by the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. It represents one of the most systematic and large-scale explorations of bubbles and financial crises ever written. The Science of Bubbles Even though Kindleberger didn’t set out to prove any one theory, his close examination of the historical data led him to strong conclusions. First, he noticed that the main driver of asset-price bubbles was almost always an expansion in credit supply, that is, an increased willingness by creditors to lend to borrowers with no discernible improvement in income growth.


pages: 202 words: 66,742

The Payoff by Jeff Connaughton

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, naked short selling, Neil Kinnock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, too big to fail, two-sided market, uptick rule, young professional

He blamed Congress for repealing Glass-Steagall, thereby bringing to an end an era of responsible banking regulation and the beginning of an emerging laissez-faire consensus that markets could do no wrong. Over the past decade, inaction allowed derivatives markets to remain unregulated (even after the Fed had to orchestrate a multi-billion-dollar bailout of a hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, which had used derivatives to leverage a relatively small amount of capital into trillions of dollars of exposure). The Fed and other banking regulators had ignored widespread instances of predatory lending and deteriorating standards for mortgage-origination. The Fed had been slow to write consumer protection rules.


Day One Trader: A Liffe Story by John Sussex

algorithmic trading, Boris Johnson, credit crunch, fixed income, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, statistical arbitrage

‘It can be done in the short-term. But eventually it will lead to serious mistakes. It usually results in arrogance and a loss of touch with the underlying market structure, both technically and structurally,’ said Kovner in an interview in the late eighties. Meriwether went on to found the Greenwich, Connecticut-based Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1994. The hedge fund commanded more than $ 100 billion in assets at its peak. But LTCM’s bets on the financial market in the late nineties would blow up spectacularly – resulting in $ 4.6 billion of losses in less than four months after the Russian financial crisis – and almost bring down the entire global financial system. 5 The Royal Exchange Days N ot everyone in the City may have wanted to see Liffe become a permanent part of life in the square mile.


pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

But when the financial world is in a fragile place, defaults can have damaging and unanticipated consequences. The shock waves from Russia’s default prompted investors to pull back from risk, triggering declines in the prices of financial securities around the world. And these dynamics helped bring the overleveraged U.S. hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management to the brink of failure, raising fears of broader damage to its Wall Street creditors and other institutions with similar risks. Bill McDonough, the head of the New York Fed, helped arrange a private-sector solution even neater than the one we had arranged in Korea. The major Wall Street institutions—with the notable exception of the investment bank Bear Stearns—agreed to inject cash into LTCM until its trades could be safely unwound.

I said probably, but the markets would need to see that we were working on a solution. Hank said he’d reach out again to Bank of America, even though Ken Lewis had previously sounded dubious about Lehman. I mentioned that Merrill’s John Thain and a few other market types had raised the possibility of a Long-Term Capital Management–style consortium of private firms helping out, even though I was doubtful that could work. Lehman was much larger than LTCM, and it would need much more money than LTCM had needed a decade earlier; the firms that would have to step up were also in much worse shape in a much worse economy.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

Further, there is convincing evidence that a PhD in economics or finance causes people to build vastly more fragile portfolios. George Martin and I listed all the major financial economists who were involved with funds, calculated the blowups by funds, and observed a far higher proportional incidence of such blowups on the part of finance professors—the most famous one being Long Term Capital Management, which employed Fragilistas Robert Merton, Myron Scholes, Chi-Fu Huang, and others. CHAPTER 15 History Written by the Losers The birds may perhaps listen—Combining stupidity with wisdom rather than the opposite—Where we look for the arrow of discovery—A vindication of trial and error Because of a spate of biases, historians are prone to epiphenomena and other illusions of cause and effect.

Assuming he thinks that the correlation ρA,B, is 0, he will be overallocated by 1⁄3 for extreme events. But if the poor investor has the illusion that the correlation is −1, he will be maximally overallocated to his A and B investments. If the investor uses leverage, we end up with the story of Long-Term Capital Management, which turned out to be fooled by the parameters. (In real life, unlike in economic papers, things tend to change; for Baal’s sake, they change!) We can repeat the idea for each parameter σ and see how lower perception of this σ leads to overallocation. I noticed as a trader—and obsessed over the idea—that correlations were never the same in different measurements.


pages: 1,073 words: 302,361

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

True, the occasional analyst did wonder why the public should buy if Goldman Sachs was selling—“These guys are very smart, the best on Wall Street, and they are saying it is time to sell shares,” one analyst observed. “Is this the top? If anybody knows, they would”—but most people on Wall Street seemed to be caught up in the euphoria over the Goldman IPO. —— WHAT A SHAME, then, that a little crisis—in the form of the blowup of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, or LTCM as it was known—would come along at just this moment to spoil Goldman’s coming-out party. LTCM was the brainchild of John Meriwether, a famed Salomon Brothers bond trader and one of Corzine’s trading heroes. Meriwether started LTCM in 1994. Corzine had considered having Goldman make an investment in LTCM and even considered buying the firm itself.

“At a multiple of two times book”: NYT, June 6, 1998. 13. “I went from being the object”: Author interview with Jon Corzine. 14. “I believed we were going to need”: Author interview with Henry Paulson Jr. 15. “the firm’s prospects were steadily dimming”: Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 112. 16. “Maybe if we hold”: Author interview with Henry Paulson Jr. 17. “Minute by minute”: Lowenstein, p. 145. 18. “We’ve had a serious markdown”: Ibid., p. 147. 19. “We aren’t getting”: Ibid., p. 152. 20. “The end of August”: Ibid., p. 151. 21.

Rothschild, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 Liberty Bonds Libya Li Ka-shing, 14.1, 17.1 Lincoln, Abraham, 3.1, 3.2 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Lindsay, John Lindsey, Lawrence lira Litterman, Robert Litton Loan Servicing Loeb, Jeanette E. Loeb, John Loeb, Rhoades, 4.1, 6.1 Loeb, Solomon, 1.1, 1.2 London, 2.1, 8.1 Long Beach Mortgage Company Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4 Lott, Trent Loudcloud Lowenstein, Roger, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 16.6 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Loyola University Lucien Leuwen (Stendhal), 12.1 Lybrand, Ross Brothers & Montgomery McAdoo, William G., 1.1, 1.2 McCain, Charles McCartney, Linda McDaniel, Raymond, Jr.


pages: 246 words: 74,341

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

A hero had been born. With Greenspan at the helm, the Fed used the same modus operandi whenever crisis loomed: quickly cut the benchmark rate and pump liquidity into the economy. That is what it did at the time of the Gulf War, the Mexican peso crisis, the Asian crisis, the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund, the worries about the millennium bug, and the dot-com crash-and on each occasion, commentators were surprised by the mildness of the subsequent downturn. In someone with Greenspan's clear-cut opinions about the importance of free markets, this readiness to throw money at all problems was surprising.


pages: 192 words: 75,440

Getting a Job in Hedge Funds: An Inside Look at How Funds Hire by Adam Zoia, Aaron Finkel

backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, merger arbitrage, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, rolodex, short selling, side project, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, systematic trading, two and twenty, unpaid internship, value at risk, yield curve, yield management

Margin of Safety: Risk Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor. 2000, Paperback Beard Books. Lewis, Michael. Liar’s Poker. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Lowe, Janet. Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000. Lowenstein, Roger. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2000. Lynch, Peter. Beating the Street, New York: Fireside, 1994. Lynch, Peter and Rothschild, John. Learn to Earn. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996. Malkiel, Burton G. A Random Walk Down Wall Street. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.


pages: 244 words: 76,192

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy

Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, business process, complexity theory, financial engineering, Iridium satellite, Long Term Capital Management, megaproject, NetJets, old-boy network, shareholder value, six sigma, social software, Socratic dialogue, supply-chain management

There is no reward without risk, but the failure to understand and guard against those risks jeopardizes the ability to reap the reward. Wall Street has shown us that understanding risks is much more than simply devising sophisticated mathematical models. Such models have their uses, but so does common sense. No doubt the Nobel laureates who devised Long-Term Capital Management’s mathematical models a decade ago and the rocket scientists who devised, sold, or invested in the toxic collateralized mortgage obligations—CMOs—that nearly brought down the global financial system in 2008 were smart, but they couldn’t see the overall risks that were enveloping them. Once the risks are recognized and analyzed, consider a hedging strategy or limiting your participation in an area in which the risks are great.


pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

Before the main crisis broke, the low-income African-American population of the United States was already estimated to h ave lost somewhere between $71 and $93 billion in asset values through predatory sub- prime practices.3K The disposses­ sions came in two waves-one mini-wave between the announcement of the Clinton initiative of 1 995 and the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1 9 9 8, and the other after 200 1 . Contemporaneously with the latter period, the b onuses on Wall Street and the earnings in the mortgage- in itiating industry were soaring, with unheard- of profit rates from pure financial manipulations, particularly those associated with the securitization of h igh-cost but risky mortgages.


pages: 253 words: 79,214

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Even if Winslow Jones was a very good stock-picker, his long positions might only beat his shorts by 4–5 per cent a year. That differential would not be enough to attract outside investors. The same is true today of a lot of hedge fund strategies. So the fund uses borrowed money to enhance returns. But this is a double-edged sword; leverage enhances losses as well as profits. In 1998, the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), run by trading legends from the Salomon Brothers investment bank and backed by two Nobel-prize winning economists, needed rescuing after its bets on bond markets went wrong. It had levered up thirty times; in other words, its capital was just 3 per cent of the assets it controlled.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

I know they’re moving flats, but it always annoys me when people decide to work from home if they know I’m on the road. My annoyance comes through in my tone. I’m going to need to keep this a bit shorter than usual due to my meeting schedule. Today’s topic is the GFC. The crisis was ten years ago, when Jerry was still in school. I tell him that the GFC was my third crisis. My first was Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) and the Asian crisis in ‘98. My second was the tech meltdown in 2000. But I can’t look at the markets now without thinking about 2008. It was a game changer. It was all about greed, capitalism run amok. It ended with massive bailouts and something called quantitative easing (QE).


pages: 670 words: 194,502

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

It simply means being patient, disciplined, and eager to learn; you must also be able to harness your emotions and think for yourself. This kind of intelligence, explains Graham, “is a trait more of the character than of the brain.”2 There’s proof that high IQ and higher education are not enough to make an investor intelligent. In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management L.P., a hedge fund run by a battalion of mathematicians, computer scientists, and two Nobel Prize–winning economists, lost more than $2 billion in a matter of weeks on a huge bet that the bond market would return to “normal.” But the bond market kept right on becoming more and more abnormal—and LTCM had borrowed so much money that its collapse nearly capsized the global financial system. 3 And back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England.

Lessons for Investors (Graham) letter stocks Leuthold Group leverage leveraged buyouts Levin, Gerald M. LexisNexis liabilities. See also specific company Lichtenberg, G. C. life insurance Lilly (Eli) Linear Technology Ling-Temco-Vought Inc. Lipper, Inc. liquidations liquidity LJM Corp. load funds Lockheed Martin “long run”: how long is Long-Term Capital Management L.P. Longleaf Partners Loomis, Carol Lorie, James H. losses; “carrying forward,” cost of; and Graham’s definition of investment; importance of avoiding; and margin of safety; and per-share earnings; “really dreadful,”; and taxes. See also specific company low-multiplier stocks Lowe’s Companies LSI Logic Corp.


pages: 237 words: 72,716

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels, Chris Wimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, fear of failure, financial innovation, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, offshore financial centre, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, rent-seeking, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, time value of money, very high income

For the first time since double-entry bookkeeping, you have an expense that is dragged through the profit-and-loss statement, and if the value of the options goes south, you never reverse the entry. That’s never been done. The thing that bothers me about it is that the man who came up with this formula is one of the architects of Long-Term Capital Management, so I’m not sure I really have a lot of confidence in this valuation formula. I think the reporting of these huge option values – which are going to be taxed at whatever the top marginal tax rate is so you take that off the top, then you have the purchase of the option – vastly overstates the compensation, and there’s no canceling out on the other side if the option is “under water” and never exercised.


pages: 302 words: 86,614

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes, Mohamed El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, high-speed rail, impact investing, interest rate derivative, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, NetJets, oil shock, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, two and twenty, zero-sum game

Interesting things began to happen. Just before Weinstein joined Deutsche, there was the 1997 Asian financial crisis, where Korean banks verged on collapse. Then Thailand couldn’t pay its debts. Then a few months later, Russia defaulted on its debt, indirectly leading to the collapse of the colossal hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, threatening American, European, and Japanese banks with catastrophe. Suddenly the availability of credit around the world was very limited. Having earlier bought credit derivatives on the cheap, Weinstein was able to monetize those positions as the crisis unfolded, rewarding Deutsche with significant profits.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

From the mid-1930s to the early 1980s, when financial markets were more regulated, serious financial panics were few and far between. In recent decades, however, as governments deregulated finance, we have witnessed one crash after another: the Latin American debt crisis, the savings and loan collapse, the Mexican “Tequila” crisis, the Asian meltdown, the Russian default, the implosion of Long-Term Capital Management, the bursting of the tech bubble, and the global financial crisis. More open, more dynamic, more unstable. We have created a world that is always in overdrive. Human development in every sense has dramatically accelerated over the last two centuries, and that pace has quickened further in the last few decades.


pages: 321

Finding Alphas: A Quantitative Approach to Building Trading Strategies by Igor Tulchinsky

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, data science, deep learning, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, merger arbitrage, natural language processing, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, systematic trading, text mining, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Factors negatively correlated with future returns include: •• Higher net sales than free cash flow •• Low book to price •• High sales growth •• Low cash flow from operations to price Financial Statement Analysis147 •• Acquisition in past five years •• Equity issuance > industry average over two years Nissim and Penman (2003) show that high financial leverage, defined as net financing debt over common equity, is negatively correlated with operating profitability; the definition of financial leverage excludes operating liabilities. High long-term financial leverage can be a signal of pending liquidity issues or even insolvency. A well-known case study of the misguided application of financial leverage is the history of the hedge fund firm Long-Term Capital Management. Also, the Enron Corporation accounting scandal was based on the use of special-­ purpose vehicles to keep long-term debt off the balance sheet, and the corrected accounting of debt led to the company’s insolvency. Generally, additional leverage adds risk that can lead to either higher profits or the risk of ruin.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

In Chapter 12, I make the case that were it not for the extreme rescue efforts he initiated in 1987, the stock market crash of that year would have precipitated a serious recession, but one far milder than that we are now experiencing. Instead, that rescue and the many others in the crises that followed – the Savings and Loans crisis, the Long Term Capital Management crisis, and finally the DotCom crisis – encouraged the speculative excesses of Wall Street to continue. The ultimate result was the subprime crisis, the fallout from which was so big that a further rescue was impossible. The key indicator here – and the key reason that I and the others Bezemer identified as having predicted the crisis could tell that one was coming – is the ratio of private debt to national income (known as GDP, which stands for ‘gross domestic product’).

land: as factor of production; as source of value Law of Demand; applicability of; non-applicability of Leeson, Robert Leijonhufvud, Axel leisure time, and income lemmings, fluctuation of populations of Leontief input–output matrix leverage, responsible levels of Levy Institute liability structures of financial institutions liquidity; of firms liquidity preference liquidity trap Ljungqvist, L. loan-to-value ratio (LVR) logical contradiction long run average cost curve Long Term Capital Management Crisis Lorenz, E. N. Lorenz, Hans-Walter Lucas, Robert; critique of IS-LM model Maastricht Treaty, impact on Europe machinery; depreciation of; role of; value of macroeconomics; and anticipation; and reductionist fallacy; as applied microeconomics; as Keynesian invention; methodology of; modeling of Malthus, T.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Lichtenstein, Nelson, ed. Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism. New York: The New Press, 2006. Lindsey, Brink. The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Lowenstein, Roger. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House, 2000. Lynch, Michael. True to Life: Why Truth Matters. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 2004. Marin, Peter. Freedom and Its Discontents: Reflections on Four Decades of American Moral Experience. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth, 1995. Marsh, Peter, and Peter Collett.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In reality, though, the period was punctuated by a series of rolling bubbles and crises: the 1987 stock market crash, the 1990 collapse of the junk bond market, the 1994 great bond market massacre, the 1994 Tequila economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, the 1998 default of Russia, and the 2000 dot-com crash. These one-in-ten-thousand-years events seemed to occur every year or so. In 1989, Japan, considered an economic poster child, fell into a prolonged recession following the collapse of a credit-fueled real estate and stock boom. Apologists for the new economic model argued that the experience of Japan confirmed the superiority of the more flexible, competitive, and dynamic market models of the US, and others like them, for delivering growth.


pages: 335 words: 94,657

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing by Taylor Larimore, Michael Leboeuf, Mel Lindauer

asset allocation, behavioural economics, book value, buy and hold, buy low sell high, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endowment effect, estate planning, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Mensa is an exclusive society whose membership is restricted to persons scoring in the top 2 percent on IQ tests. During a 15-year period when the S&P 500 had average annual returns of 15.3 percent, the Mensa Investment Club's performance averaged returns of only 2.5 percent. 3. In 1994, a hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was created with the help of two Nobel Prize-winning economists. They believed they had a statistical model that could eliminate risk from investing. The fund was extremely leveraged. They controlled positions totaling $1.25 trillion, an amount equal to the annual budget of the U.S. government.


pages: 327 words: 91,351

Traders at Work: How the World's Most Successful Traders Make Their Living in the Markets by Tim Bourquin, Nicholas Mango

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, backtesting, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, Credit Default Swap, Elliott wave, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, paper trading, pattern recognition, prediction markets, risk tolerance, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, zero-sum game

My wife and I married in 1998, and we had a small amount of savings and no debt, which was a big advantage. We decided to invest our savings to build a nest egg, and because we were very young, we felt we could really get ahead of the curve, in terms of building wealth over time. We met with a local broker and invested in some mutual funds in the summer of 1998, right before the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management collapsed in August. That drove the entire market lower, and with our mutual funds exposed to that weakness, we lost some of our savings as a result. That didn’t sit well with me, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I started going to Barnes & Noble practically every night and read every investing and trading book and magazine I could get my hands on.


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

And the equations often are vulnerable to unrealistic assumptions. Most recently, the financial crisis was caused in part by overreliance on statistical models that didn’t take into account the chances of declines in housing prices. But that was just the most recent iteration: the collapse of Enron, the implosion of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, the billions of dollars lost by rogue traders Kweku Adoboli, Jerome Kerviel, Nick Leeson, and others—all of these fiascos have, at their heart, a mistaken reliance on complex math. Nassim N. Taleb has written widely and wisely about the deception in financial models, most notably in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007).


pages: 299 words: 92,782

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

Overbetting occurs when the size of an investment is too large for the opportunity that it represents and therefore introduces the possibility of failure. Using debt does enhance returns assuming the trade goes as expected. But debt can also lead to buying too much and can be ultimately disastrous in cases when the stock does poorly. Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, provides one of the best-documented cases of overbetting.30 At the height of its borrowing and betting, LTCM enjoyed returns of more than 40 percent. But through a variety of complex factors, it went on to lose $4.6 billion in not quite four months in 1998. The fund had vanished by the year 2000.


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Antti Ilmanen Bad Homburg, November 2010 Abbreviations and acronyms AM Arithmetic Mean ATM At The Money (option) AUM Assets Under Management BEI Break-Even Inflation BF Behavioral Finance B/P Book/Price, book-to-market ratio BRP Bond Risk Premium, term premium B-S Black–Scholes C-P BRP Cochrane–Piazzesi Bond Risk Premium CAPM Capital Asset Pricing Model CAY Consumption wealth ratio CB Central Bank CCW Covered Call Writing CDO Collateralized Debt Obligation CDS Credit Default Swap CF Cash Flow CFNAI Chicago Fed National Activity Index CFO Chief Financial Officer CMD Commodity (futures) CPIyoy Consumer Price Inflation year on year CRB Commodity Research Bureau CRP Credit Risk Premium (over Treasury bond) CRRA Constant Relative Risk Aversion CTA Commodity Trading Advisor DDM Dividend Discount Model DJ CS Dow Jones Credit Suisse DMS Dimson–Marsh–Staunton D/P Dividend/Price (ratio), dividend yield DR Diversification Return E( ) Expected (conditional expectation) EMH Efficient Markets Hypothesis E/P Earnings/Price ratio, earnings yield EPS Earnings Per Share ERP Equity Risk Premium ERPB Equity Risk Premium over Bond (Treasury) ERPC Equity Risk Premium over Cash (Treasury bill) F Forward price or futures price FF Fama–French FI Fixed Income FoF Fund of Funds FX Foreign eXchange G Growth rate GARCH Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity GC General Collateral repo rate (money market interest rate) GDP Gross Domestic Product GM Geometric Mean, also compound annual return GP General Partner GSCI Goldman Sachs Commodity Index H Holding-period return HF Hedge Fund HFR Hedge Fund Research HML High Minus Low, a value measure, also VMG HNWI High Net Worth Individual HPA House Price Appreciation (rate) HY High Yield, speculative-rated debt IG Investment Grade (rated debt) ILLIQ Measure of a stock’s illiquidity: average absolute daily return over a month divided by dollar volume IPO Initial Public Offering IR Information Ratio IRP Inflation Risk Premium ISM Business confidence index ITM In The Money (option) JGB Japanese Government Bond K-W BRP Kim–Wright Bond Risk Premium LIBOR London InterBank Offered Rate, a popular bank deposit rate LP Limited Partner LSV Lakonishok–Shleifer–Vishny LtA Limits to Arbitrage LTCM Long-Term Capital Management MA Moving Average MBS (fixed rate, residential) Mortgage-Backed Securities MIT-CRE MIT Center for Real Estate MOM Equity MOMentum proxy MSCI Morgan Stanley Capital International MU Marginal Utility NBER National Bureau of Economic Research NCREIF National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries OAS Option-Adjusted (credit) Spread OTM Out of The Money (option) P Price P/B Price/Book (valuation ratio) P/E Price/Earnings (valuation ratio) PE Private Equity PEH Pure Expectations Hypothesis PT Prospect Theory r Excess return R Real (rate) RE Real Estate REITs Real Estate Investment Trusts RWH Random Walk Hypothesis S Spot price, spot rate SBRP Survey-based Bond Risk Premium SDF Stochastic Discount Factor SMB Small Minus Big, size premium proxy SR Sharpe Ratio SWF Sovereign Wealth Fund TED Treasury–Eurodollar (deposit) rate spread in money markets TIPS Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, real bonds UIP Uncovered Interest Parity (hypothesis) VaR Value at Risk VC Venture Capital VIX A popular measure of the implied volatility of S&P 500 index options VMG Value Minus Growth, equity value premium proxy WDRA Wealth-Dependent Risk Aversion X Cash flow Y Yield YC Yield Curve (steepness), term spread YTM Yield To Maturity YTW Yield To Worst Disclaimer Antti Ilmanen is a Senior Portfolio Manager at Brevan Howard, one of Europe’s largest hedge fund managers.

Yet a sequence of papers from the late 1980s to Shleifer–Vishny (1997), dubbed the limits-to-arbitrage literature, argue convincingly that arbitrage is both risky and costly, so that arbitrageurs, at least in many cases, do not have enough capacity to fully counter the impact of irrational (“noise”) traders. The Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis in 1998—more than a year after the Shleifer and Vishny article came out—followed the script so closely that it showered real-world credibility on these arguments. If further supportive evidence was needed, the next decade provided it in spades. Noise trader models assume two types of traders—rational arbitrageurs (“smart money”), and noise traders (mere mortals) whose sentiment and asset demands can irrationally change over time.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

A precipitous withdrawal of funds ensued, currencies took a nose-dive, corporations and banks found themselves bankrupt, and the economies of the region collapsed. Thus was born the Asian financial crisis, which spread first to Russia, then to Brazil, and eventually to Argentina, bringing down with it Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the formidable and much-admired hedge fund, along the way. I might have congratulated myself for my prescience and timing. My book eventually became a top seller for its publisher, the Washington-based Institute for International Economics (IIE), in part, I suppose, because of the IIE’s reputation as a staunch advocate for globalization.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Among the big resource-rich economies, Russia (ranked a lowly 143 out of 182 countries on Transparency International’s 2011 corruption perceptions index), Brazil (ranked 73), Mexico, and Indonesia (both ranked 100) continue to see their share of crony capitalists, government ministers, and officials with snouts in the public trough. In the United States (ranked 24, well behind Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom), corruption in government and big business is almost an art form—think Enron, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, financier Bernie Madoff, hedge funds Long-Term Capital Management and Galleon, and former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, to name just a few. But the United States has a number of redeeming features, including its ability to renew itself in the face of adversity or threats to its position, and its willingness to shine a light on corporate and political skulduggery.


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Knight, Phil. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike. New York: Scribner, 2016. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor, 1995. Lowenstein, Roger. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House, 2000. Martinez, Antonio Garcia. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. Mezrich, Ben. The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook; A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal. New York: Anchor Books, 2010.


pages: 305 words: 98,072

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely by Andrew Craig

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business cycle, collaborative consumption, diversification, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Future Shock, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, passive income, pensions crisis, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, smart cities, stocks for the long run, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Lieven, Anatol, and John Hulsman. Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World. New York: Pantheon, 2006. Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Lowenstein, Roger. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House, 2000. Lynch, Peter, and John Rothchild. Beating the Street. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. ———. One Up on Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Lyons, Gerard. The Consolations of Economics: How We Will All Benefit from the New World Order.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Then, inevitably, came a shrug of the shoulders, a sigh, and a moving on to the next cycle. Future cycles included Reagan’s bailout of the Continental-Illinois Bank, Citibank, and the Bank of New England as well as Clinton’s rescue of the Wall Street holders of Mexican bonds in 1994–1995, Asian securities in 1997, and the 1998 intervention to prevent the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund. It is no surprise that the expanding finance sector has drawn in bright, ambitious, and creative people who a few decades earlier might have gone into other businesses. Their talents were well utilized by the nature of financial speculation. Financial markets became a frenzied search for arbitrage: buying an item in a market where the price was low and selling it in a market where the price was higher.


pages: 306 words: 97,211

Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond by Bruce C. N. Greenwald, Judd Kahn, Paul D. Sonkin, Michael van Biema

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, business logic, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, naked short selling, new economy, place-making, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, Telecommunications Act of 1996, time value of money, tulip mania, Y2K, zero-sum game

While this dampening might not have had a major impact on a stock with a less inflated share price, for SCCX it was the start of a severe downward correction. By the end of August 1998, the shares were selling at around $7. They continued a ragged decline until they fell below $3 in September 1998, a time in which the whole market was tumbling thanks to Russian debt default, the Long Term Capital Management fiasco, and general malaise. SCCX recovered somewhat, to the point where it closed the year at around $4.70. This IPO was definitely broken. The worst was not over, however, and in the first months of 1999 the stock fell even more (see Figure 16.2). Sonkin spotted it on his daily scan of the new lows list, and after he did some research on the company, he came to believe that the bad news had been overblown.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

And even if Weinberg hadn’t hired from HBS at the rate that Whitehead did, he nonetheless cultivated close ties to the School, and received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1966 in appreciation of his having raised several million dollars for the School.12 John Whitehead and John Weinberg—“the two Johns”—also established a scholarship fund at HBS to honor Sidney Weinberg and in 1983 recommended that every partner, whether or not they had attended HBS, donate money to the School’s annual fund drive.13 After retiring in 1984, Whitehead embarked on a career in public service, the first in what would become a long line of Goldman executives to do so. (Among the others: Hank Paulson [’70].) He worked as Ronald Reagan’s deputy secretary of state. He was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1995 to 2000, during which time he orchestrated the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management. And he later chaired the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and headed the foundation that raised $130 million for a memorial to rescue workers and victims.14 In 1985, Whitehead donated more than $200,000 to the School, with Goldman donating an equal amount, to establish the John C.

., 197 Lewis, Jeanne, 333 Lewis, Ralph, 296 Light, Jay (dean), 502, 545, 546, 547, 549; “Change Is in the Offing,” 551 Lindsey, Lawrence, 522 Lineback, Kent, 314 Linsalata, Linda, 332 Lippmann, Walter, 36, 57 Litton Industries, 192, 292, 456 Livernash, E. Robert, 232 Livingston, J. Sterling, 290–92 Locke, Robert, 232–33, 447–48, 451 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 16 Loeb, Dan, 534 Lombard, George, 118, 137, 355 London Business School, 226, 232, 539 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 184, 185–86, 350 Long-Term Capital Management, 475 “Long Term Value Creation Principles” (Aspen Institute), 541–42 Lords of Strategy, The (Kiechel), 36, 258 Lorsch, Jay, 355, 502, 572 Love, George H., 96 Lovell, James A., 157 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 11, 44, 55, 121; ethics and, 433; as Harvard president, 18, 81; HBS as graduate school and, 11; HBS building fund, 67; letter to Taussig, 16–17 Lowell Institute, 111 Luce, Henry, 295 Lufkin, Dan, 128, 467–68, 469 Lying (S.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Instead, the Fed watched while stock prices continued rising in the dot-com boom, as companies without earnings or even revenues sold shares at astronomical prices based on the number of “eyeballs” they attracted to their websites. The Fed even cut rates following the Russian debt default in 1998 and the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, and raised interest rates mildly starting only in 1999. When the stock market eventually crashed in 2000, the dramatic initial response by the Fed ensured that the recession was mild even if job growth was tepid. In a 2002 speech at Jackson Hole, Alan Greenspan now argued that although the Federal Reserve could not recognize or prevent an asset-price boom, it could “mitigate the fallout when it occurs and, hopefully, ease the transition to the next expansion.”19 This speech seemed to be a post facto rationalization of why Greenspan had not acted more forcefully on his prescient 1996 intuition: he was now saying the Fed should not intervene when it thought asset prices were too high but that it could recognize a bust when it happened and would pick up the pieces.


pages: 368 words: 32,950

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile by Alexander Davidson

accounting loophole / creative accounting, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Exxon Valdez, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, information security, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, pension reform, Piper Alpha, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk free rate, shareholder value, short selling, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In Europe, funds are typically managed from London because of the commercial clout that derives from being regulated by the FSA. London is the largest hedge fund management centre in Europe, and second in size only to the United States. A hedge fund can fail as well as succeed, and it may be on a spectacular scale. Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) demonstrated the point with its high-profile failure in 1998. It was a hedge fund headed by John Meriwether, who had previously run the bond trading operations of Salomon Brothers. The fund was highly geared and used derivatives, taking positions in bonds. The mathematical model on which the fund manager relied failed to take into account the flight to liquidity in the debt markets after Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt in August and September 1998.


pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

“For instance, the performance during the 2008 financial crisis suggests that our equity markets are resilient and robust even during times of stress and dislocation.” McCarthy submitted the letter on April 27, 2010. One week later, the market crashed. CHAPTER TWENTY PANIC TICKS Thomas Peterffy had seen it all. The Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987, the 1998 collapse of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, the implosion of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and 2001, the credit crisis of 2008. But this was different. This was fast. This was high-speed trading. Peterffy was keeping track of the market from the seclusion of an oak-lined private study on his luxurious estate in Greenwich, Connecticut.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Clarida read the statement to the assembled ministers as soon as the Fed released it, and a soft gasp filled the room. Since Alan Greenspan had begun announcing Fed rate changes in 1994, the FOMC had approved rate cuts in between scheduled meetings on only four other occasions—during the collapse of the gigantic hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, ahead of the 2001 recession, and twice during the 2008 financial crisis. Steven Englander, a Yale-trained PhD economist who headed research on currency-market trading at Standard Chartered, was on the Asian investment bank’s New York trading floor when the announcement hit the newswires.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

acknowledgments xv L IST O F ABBR EV IATIONS ABCP AfD AIB AIG ARRA BBC BDI BIS BNP BOE BOJ BRRD CAP CDU CSU D-​mark EBA EC ECB ECJ ECSC ECU EDC EEC Asset-​backed commercial paper Alternative für Deutschland Allied Irish Bank American International Group American Recovery and Reinvestment Act British Broadcasting Corporation Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (Federation of German Industries) Bank for International Settlements BNP Paribas Bank of England Bank of Japan Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive Common Agricultural Policy Christian Democratic Union Christian Social Union Deutschmark European Banking Authority European Community (see also EEC) European Central Bank European Court of Justice European Coal and Steel Community European Currency Unit European Defense Community European Economic Community EFSF EFSM ELA EMS EMU EONIA ERM ESM ESRI EU EURIBOR FDIC FDP FOMC GDP GFSR IKB IMF KfW LIBOR LREM LTCM LTROs MEP MPS NATO NPL OECD OIS OMTs PASOK PISA QE R&D S&P SEA SGP SMP SPD xviii   l i s t European Financial Stability Facility European Financial Stability Mechanism Emergency Liquidity Arrangement European Monetary System European Monetary Union Euro Overnight Index Average Exchange Rate Mechanism European Stability Mechanism Economic and Social Research Institute European Union European Interbank Offered Rate Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Free Democratic Party Federal Open Market Committee Gross Domestic Product Global Financial Stability Report IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG International Monetary Fund Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau London Interbank Offered Rate La République En Marche Long-​Term Capital Management Longer-​Term Refinancing Operations Member of the European Parliament Monte dei Paschi di Siena North Atlantic Treaty Organization Non-​Performing Loan Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Overnight Index Swap Outright Monetary Transactions Panhellenic Socialist Movement Programme for International Student Assessment Quantitative easing Research and development Standard and Poor’s Single European Act Stability and Growth Pact Securities Markets Programme Social Democratic Party of abbreviations SRB SRM SSM TAF TARP UKIP VIX WAMU WEO Single Resolution Board Single Resolution Mechanism Single Supervisory Mechanism Term Auction Facility Troubled Asset Relief Program UK Independence Party Measure of expected volatility in the US stock market Washington Mutual “World Economic Outlook” list of abbreviations xix Introduction Europe Ends Up Someplace Else T he euro—​the single currency shared by nineteen European nations—​ is unique in human history.

Geithner’s professed concern that if creditors bore losses, “cascading defaults” would follow had no evident factual basis. He said that such defaults had occurred in emerging markets in the 1990s. But the only major default then was by the Russian Federation in August 1998. The panic that followed was hard to isolate from the disruption caused by the collapse of the hedge fund Long-​Term Capital Management (LTCM), which had made unwise bets on emerging markets. More important, the panic had been quickly contained. The New York Federal Reserve had persuaded a consortium of financial institutions that it was in their interest not to let LTCM collapse entirely and, instead, to provide emergency funds to allow for an orderly unwinding; simultaneously, the FOMC aggressively eased its policy to support the macroeconomy.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Since the 1980s the investment banks had built their businesses on navigating uncertainty. As asset market booms they leveraged up.33 But sometimes uncertainty bites back. Between 1994 in Mexico and 1998 in Russia the globalized American banks faced a series of major crises. In September 1998, but for concerted action by the major Wall Street firms, the implosion of Long-Term Capital Management triggered by the uncertainty spreading from Russia might have brought down the entire hedge fund industry.34 That was followed by the dot-com boom and bust in 1998–2001—a creation of the new Wall Street as much as of Silicon Valley. Finally there was the spectacular accounting scandal at Enron, which took down once legendary accountants and management consultants Arthur Andersen.

., 129 King, Mervyn, 89, 146, 192, 272, 349, 438, 541 Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de, 2, 269 Kissinger, Henry, 30–31 KKE, 428–29 Koch-Weser, Caio, 261 Kohl, Helmut, 44, 93, 119, 386 Komorowski, Bronislaw, 489 Krämer, Jörg, 415 Kravis, Henry, 183 Krugman, Paul, 41, 161, 191, 350, 372, 373, 452, 459–60, 523 Kudlow, Larry, 68 Kudrin, Alexei, 130, 131–32 Kuwait, 160 Kyrgyzstan, 506 Labour Party, 190, 191–92, 349, 553 Lafazanis, Panagiotis, 533 Lagarde, Christine, 186–87, 266, 383, 401–2, 405, 479, 550 Larosière committee, 314–15 Latvia, 121, 126, 127–28, 227, 232, 234–36, 491 Law and Justice, 538 Left Bloc, 536 Lehman Brothers, 1, 9, 55, 59–60, 62, 63–64, 88, 207 collapse of, 149, 176–77 Fed/Treasury unwillingness to help, 176 takeover rejected by other banks, 175–76 Lenihan, Brian, 365 Le Pen, Marine, 513, 561, 562 Lerner, Abba, 612 leverage Basel III provisions, 314 of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 172 in SIV-ABCP model, 61 of US versus European banks, pre-crisis, 87–88 repo as a mechanism for building, 61–62 Lew, Jack, 523–24 Lewis, Ken, 175, 199–200 Libya, 373, 488 Lighthizer, Robert, 593 Lippmann, Greg, 70 Lipsky, John, 344, 345, 383–84 liquidity crisis, 202–19 Bank of England and, 203 criteria for receiving Fed’s swap line, 220–21 dollar-based financial system, impact on, 218–19 dollar funding shortage of European banks, 8, 154–55, 203–6 ECB and, 144–45, 203 evaporation of, in US securitization market, 144 Fed liquidity mechanisms, 9–10, 11–12, 202–3, 206–21 Fed swap lines provided to central banks, 9–10, 11–12, 210–15, 220–21 liquidity swap lines ECB swap lines with Sweden and Denmark, 229–30 Fed’s swap lines provided to central banks, 9–10, 11–12, 210–15, 220–21 legitimacy of, 483–84 temporary central bank bilateral swaps converted to standing arrangements, 482–83 Lisbon Treaty, 114–15, 188, 329–30 Lithuania, 121, 126, 229, 234, 491 living wills Basel III requirements, 311–12 Dodd-Frank Act requirements, 303–4 Lloyds Bank (Lloyds-HBOS), 171, 189–90, 191, 193, 198, 541 London, City of. See City of London Long-Term Capital Management, 53–54 Long-Term Refinancing Operation, 286 long-term refinancing operation (LTRO), 286, 334, 420–21, 442 LTRO. See long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) Lukoil, 223, 505 M15 movement, 374 McCain, John, 3, 175, 182, 183, 498, 499–500 McConnell, Mitch, 392 McFadden, Pat, 549 McNulty, Mike, 181–82 macrofinancial economics, 9, 12–13 Macron, Emmanuel, 531, 562, 594, 595 macroprudential supervision, 13, 309 Magyar Hírlap, 230–31 Malaysia Asian financial crisis and, 32, 255–56 financial crisis of 2008 and, 257–58, 259–60 stimulus program, 259–60 Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, 502 market-based model of banking, 76 Martin, Paul, 261, 262 Mason, Paul, 182 Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, 170 May, Theresa, 556, 557–60 Mayer, Thomas, 332 MBS.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Science 302, no. 5649 (2003): 1338–39. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Macmillan, 2011. Lewis, Michael. “Obama’s Way.” Vanity Fair, September 11, 2012, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama. Lowenstein, Roger. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House, 2000. Mayhew, Bruce H. “Structuralism versus Individualism: Part 1, Shadowboxing in the Dark.” Social Forces 59, no. 2 (1980): 335–75. McFadden, Daniel. “Rationality for Economists?” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 19, no. 1–3 (1999): 73–105. Meehl, Paul E. “Why Summaries of Research on Psychological Theories Are Often Uninterpretable.”


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

These include: • Developing Country Debt Crisis (1983) • US Savings and Loan Crisis (1980s) • Resolution Trust Company, which created REITS (Real Estate Investment Trusts) (late 1980s) • The 1988 Basel Capital Accord (1988) • The beginning of derivatives (early 1990s) • Proliferation of derivatives and Special Purpose Entities (SPEs) (1990s) • Asian Financial Crisis (1997–1998) • Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) (1998) • The repeal of Glass-Steagall (1999) and the adoption of Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act (GLBA) (1998) • The failure of dot-coms (2000) Causes of the Global Financial Crisis after SOX and Prior to September 18, 2008 It is also important to understand the events and economic climate after the July 31, 2002, passage of SOX and prior to September 18, 2008.


pages: 416 words: 118,592

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

But as enthusiasm for the New Economy continued to grow, the prices of these stocks rose even further—many of them doubling and then doubling again. Only in retrospect do we know that the bubble burst during 2000. In the meantime, many traders lost their shirts. The market can remain irrational longer than the arbitrageur can remain solvent. This is especially true when the arbitrageur is credit constrained. Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund in which Nobel laureates devised the strategies, found itself in an unbearable position when the prices of its hedges moved against it and it had insufficient capital to keep them afloat. The natural players in the game of selling overpriced securities short and buying underpriced ones are global hedge funds, with trillions of dollars to invest.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Wilson’s groundbreaking study of anthills and the development of his socio-biological ideas of the super-organism. Complexity Theory became central to the development of the packet-switch method that underpins the internet. The theory has also been the driving force behind the Black-Scholes algorithm that raised Long-Term Capital Management to the peaks of financial success in the 1990s, and its eventual collapse in 2000; as well as James Lovelock’s theory of the earth as a self-organised structure, Gaia. It has even been used to study the power of social networks as well as an exciting new means to map the brain. Jane Jacobs was one of the first people to connect the ideas of complexity and the city.


pages: 358 words: 119,272

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

The new Wall Street may have created products for the management of risk, but it could not eradicate the risk of human greed and stupidity, as the citizens of California’s Orange County and the shareholders of Gibson Greetings discovered. [4] In 1998, the acolytes closest to the shrine felt the tremors as Long Term Capital Management, perhaps the ultimate creation of the new Wall Street, imploded. Picking through the wreckage, there was evidence in the boom and bust of 1995 to 2002 that the new Wall Street was no more successful in protecting clients’ interests than the failed “improvised strategies” of 1974. Whatever the truths inherent in the ascendant orthodoxy, was it really so wise to discard the lessons of those who had gone before?


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

As we stripped back the old regulations, we did nothing to address the new challenges posed by 21st-century markets. The most important challenge was that posed by derivatives. In 1998 the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born, had called for such regulation—a concern that took on urgency after the Fed, in that same year, engineered the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose trillion-dollar-plus failure threatened global financial markets. But Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, his deputy Larry Summers, and Greenspan were adamant—and successful—in their opposition. Nothing was done. NO. 3: APPLYING THE LEECHES Then along came the Bush tax cuts, enacted first on June 7, 2001, with a follow-on installment two years later.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

This move slashed the real value of all U.S. corporate debts by 31 percent overnight. • Since the 1970s, there have been many state and federal bailouts of U.S. corporations that were considered “too big to fail,” including Conrail, Chrysler, Continental Illinois, Citibank in the late 1980s, and Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. On the horizon, we should anticipate a similar “non-free market” response if Ford or General Motors are threatened with bankruptcy. • As for sovereign country borrowers, in 1953, under the impact of the Cold War and the desire to see Western Europe recover, the U.S. helped to arrange a generous debt restructuring for West Germany, including a 50-percent debt write-off and a thirty-year repayment schedule for the balance owed.


Unknown Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

3D printing, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, diversification, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, fixed income, forward guidance, index fund, Jim Simons, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Nick Leeson, performance metric, placebo effect, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short squeeze, side project, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs

His reasoning was straightforward: If the euro came into existence, which seemed a very high probability, European interest rates had to converge. It was a mathematical certainty. The implied trade was to buy the bonds of high-yielding countries, such as Italy, and sell the bonds of low-yielding countries, such as Germany. Because this convergence trade seemed like such a sure thing, all the smart guys on Wall Street, including Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) and Salomon Brothers, put the trade on in as much size as they possibly could. Another trade that LTCM and other hedge funds had sizable positions in at the time was long Russian bonds because of their extremely high interest rates. In August 1998 Russia defaulted on its bonds.


pages: 1,164 words: 309,327

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris

active measures, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, compound rate of return, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, job automation, junk bonds, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fragmentation, market friction, market microstructure, money market fund, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, Nick Leeson, open economy, passive investing, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, price discovery process, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, search costs, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, the market place, transaction costs, two-sided market, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Finally, if the arbitrage is a speculative arbitrage, the fair value of the basis also depends on any instrument-specific valuation factors. Changes in instrument-specific valuation factors by definition affect only the value of the specific instrument, and therefore must change the fair value of the basis. * * * ▶ Wrong Way to Be Right Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund that engaged in many pure arbitrages and highly mean-reverting speculative arbitrages. Most of their positions were in the bond and swaps markets, where it is possible to create very highly leveraged positions. LTCM employed substantial leverage to create very large positions in arbitrages whose bases it thought were not particularly risky.

See utilitarian traders liquid markets, 70, 205, 214–16 Liquidnet trading system, 390 listed stocks, 48 listing fees, 47, 494 listing standards, 47, 63 Livermore, Jesse, 136 local basis, 185 locals, 279, 356 London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE), 43, 57, 334, 543 London Stock Exchange, 331, 543 long hedger, 349 long position, 32, 373 long-short portfolio, 349 long-side bluff, 259, 260–65 Long-Term Capital Management, 369 look-back options, 506 Los Angeles Stock and Oil Exchange, 47 lotteries, 216 Lucent (co.), 364 luck, 445, 454, 455, 461–64, 478 lunchtime recess, 92 Lynch, Peter, 455 macroeconomic factors, 443 Madoff Investment Securities, 290, 537, 543–44, 553 magicians, 330 maintenance margin, 156 Major Market Index (MMI), 485 making a new market, 74 making the market, 74, 280 manager(s), 453–60 active, 197, 442, 443, 458 Buffet as most skilled, 463 choosing among, 460–62 closet indexers, 465 decisions about, 457 and horse race handicapping, 479 and insider trading, 595–97 in liquid markets, 466 luckiest, 462, 464 market-adjusted returns, 464 performance, 451, 453–57, 462, 477 skilled, 478–79 manager allocation problem, 211–12 manager timing, 437 Manne, Henry, 595–96 Manning Rule, 217 margin agreement, 169 marginal benefit, 207, 208 margin call, 156 margin requirements, 572, 575–76 margins, 36, 156 market(s) brokered, 90, 95–96 consolidated, 524, 526–30, 533–35, 538–40 corrections, 559 definition of, 5 efficiency, 223, 240, 243, 250–51, 254 exposure costs, 389 fragmented, 524, 526, 530–35, 539–40 good, 202–19 hedging, 188–89 innovative, 527–28 international, 50, 51 liquid, 70, 205 manipulation, 259–75 objectives for evaluating, 216–17 “pinging,” 92 quote-driven dealer, 90, 92, 93 regulation, 59–66 segmentation, 533–35 in similar instruments, 539 as statistical calculator, 226 trading, 44–59 Treasury, 54 U.S. by instrument class, 45 U.S. equity, 49 volume figures, 48 See also market information systems; market structures; order-driven markets; specific markets, e.g., bond(s) marketable limit orders, 73, 87 marketable orders, 126 market-adjusted returns, 448, 462, 464, 468 market ask.


pages: 992 words: 292,389

Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Burning Man, California energy crisis, computerized trading, corporate raider, currency risk, deal flow, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, forensic accounting, intangible asset, Irwin Jacobs, John Markoff, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, Negawatt, new economy, oil shock, price stability, pushing on a string, Ronald Reagan, transaction costs, value at risk, young professional

The elite of the financial world worked here, and Skilling thought they had good reason to be terrified. A global economic depression was on the way; Skilling was sure of it. Russia had defaulted. The Asian financial crisis was still digging into world economies. The Fed had been forced to engineer a bailout of Long-Term Capital Management LP, a hedge fund, on concern its collapse would trigger a market meltdown. Skilling feared the gathering financial storm would swamp Enron itself. Banks were ruthlessly tightening credit. If they shut off the spigot to Enron, the consequences could be dire. So he had ordered Fastow to fly to Paris, Düsseldorf, Brussels, and London, seeking reassurances from the banks.

“We’re hoping all the bad stuff’s out, and if it is, maybe we’ll start stabilizing.” O’Neill reflected for a moment. “I think the perfect person to monitor this will be Peter Fischer,” he said. Fischer was one of his top people at Treasury and had helped manage the government’s response to the collapse a few years back of Long-Term Capital Management, a giant hedge fund. Probably the best contact for dealing with Fischer was Greg Whalley, Lay said. He knew all about trading. It was afternoon, and Skilling had finally sobered up when the phone rang. Rebecca again. He made a comment about her return to Houston. “I’m still in Miami,” she said.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The ruble plummeted in value, and the Russian stock market fell by an astounding 93 percent. The new Russian oil majors could not pay their workers and suppliers. Salaries were slashed; some of the most senior managers were down to $100 a month. Wall Street teetered on the edge when the highly levered hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management collapsed. Panic in the United States was averted by fast action by the New York Federal Reserve. In early 1999 the contagion seemed about to sweep over Brazil, threatening what U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin called an “engulfing world crisis.” An immense rescue effort, mobilizing very large financial resources, was mounted to prevent Brazil from going down.

U.S. at Kyoto Protocol labor unions in Venezuela Ladoucette, Philippe de Lane, Ray Langen, Eugene La Orchila Larijani, Ali Latin America see also specific places Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lay, Kenneth lead Lebanon, Hezbollah in LEED (the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program) Lee Kuan Yew Lehman Brothers Lemoine, Reiner Lenin, Vladimir Leviathan field LG Chem Libya civil war in oil of U.S. relations with Lieberman, Joseph light lightbulbs lighting light-water reactors lignin Limits of Growth, The Linde, Carl von Lindmayer, Joseph Lindzen, Richard liquefied natural gas (LNG) Arun project business model for cost of demand for pipeline politics and in Russia security and suppliers of trains for trucks liquids production Liu Zhenya “Live Better Electrically” campaign Liveris, Andrew loans-for-shares London Callendar in electricity in killer fog in stock exchange in terrorism in Tyndall in Lonely Planet guides Long Island, Shoreham plant in Long Island Power Authority Long-Term Capital Management Los Alamos, N. Mex. Los Angeles, Calif. smog in Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Los Angeles International Airport Lott, Trent Louisiana natural gas of offshore oil in Louis XV, King of France Lovins, Amory LSF (light sand fraccing) Lugar, Richard Lukoil Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio Lutz, Robert MacArthur, Douglas McCain, John MacDonald, Gordon McKee, Rob Macondo (Mississippi Canyon Block 252) Maguire, Robert Mahoney, James Major, John Major Economies (formerly Major Emitters) Makovich, Lawrence Malacca Dilemma Malacca Strait Malaysia as LNG supplier Manabe, Syukuro Manchuria MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer) manufacturing American system of Chinese Indian solar see also factories Mao Tse-tung Maracaibo basin marijuana Marines, U.S.


pages: 589 words: 128,484

America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve by Roger Lowenstein

bank run, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, corporate governance, fiat currency, financial independence, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Ida Tarbell, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, off-the-grid, old-boy network, quantitative easing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair, walking around money

ALSO BY ROGER LOWENSTEIN The End of Wall Street While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2015 by Roger Lowenstein Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

In reality, however, at least three such statistically “impossible” events occurred during just twenty years when EMH was the dominant financial orthodoxy: in the stock market during the 1987 crash, in bonds and currencies in 1994, and in interest rate arbitrage in 1998, when Russia defaulted and the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund sensationally collapsed. And all these earlier upheavals were nothing compared to the events of 2007-09. By August 2007, David Viniar, the chief financial officer of Gold man Sachs, claimed to be seeing “twenty-five standard deviation events,” which in a normal distribution ought to occur only once every trillion years, “happening several days in a row.”10 And that was more than a year before the collapse of Lehman, when the financial markets really went wild.


pages: 430 words: 140,405

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by Lawrence G. Mcdonald, Patrick Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, diversification, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, naked short selling, negative equity, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, value at risk

A big hedge fund tipped him off, and the rest was like a wildfire. The three-month LIBOR ripped upward from 5.36 percent to 5.95 percent. It doesn’t sound like much, but this was the biggest move in years. Gatward instinctively warned his traders, “Guys, this is the biggest move in three-month LIBOR since Long-Term Capital Management bit the dust back in 1998, take down risk now. I want to see all your long positions trimmed down before the close.” You could feel the tension growing. I’ll never forget how much louder it was becoming on the trading floor that summer. I hadn’t heard anything quite like it in my entire time with the firm up to that point.


pages: 483 words: 141,836

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, Eric Kim

Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Basel III, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, central bank independence, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, fail fast, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, global macro, illegal immigration, implied volatility, independent contractor, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, pre–internet, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Bayes, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

Where Did the Money Go? So how did these three great ideas—massive free capital, improved capital allocation, and better price discovery—lead to disaster? Not just the one big disaster in 2007, but the many others: the Drexel Burnham bankruptcy, the Bankers Trust scandal, the Kidder Peabody crash, and Long-Term Capital Management’s failure, to name only four. These were among the most advanced firms in these techniques. I haven’t included the collateral damage from Wall Street abuses such as the Orange County bankruptcy, nor the non–Wall Street financial firms like Enron, nor the damage overseas as with the Asian financial crisis, nor the ones that entered more people’s homes like the Internet stock collapse and the mutual fund timing scandal.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Gains in living standards accumulated through several decades of growth melted away in one year. In the late summer of 1998 the crisis spilled over to Russia, which defaulted on its debt on August 17, and then Brazil and elsewhere. Investor panic caused the American and other stock markets to plunge. The U.S. hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, which had invested heavily in Asia, collapsed and required a $4-billion bailout from other Wall Street firms. Fearing a global meltdown, Clinton urged the major powers to stimulate their economies to restore growth. As was the case in the Carter years, the other powers were not enthusiastic, so the United States acted alone.


pages: 493 words: 139,845

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

If we couldn’t meet that deadline, they would have to find another buyer. Dominic Ng, the East West CEO, and I went to Wall Street and we raised $238 million in two weeks and closed the deal in one month. That was June of 1998, and the timing turned out to be so great, because by August or September, the market shut down because of the failure of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund following the Russian financial crisis. Had we missed that window of opportunity, we would not have been able to raise any capital. Ghaffari: How did the company fare after the IPO? Gouw: Most of our growth came after we went public. We’ve had compounded growth of assets, loans, and capital increasing by 18 to 20 percent annually since then.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

* * * You may be skeptical. That’s fine; we were, too. We both started covering the markets in the 1990s. We saw the dot-com boom, and the dot-com bust. We saw the housing boom, and the housing bust. We saw the financial crisis, and the global recession, and the euro crisis, and Lehman Brothers, and Long-Term Capital Management, and Cyprus. We interviewed any number of true believers from the tech world who thought they had the next big thing. You go through enough of that, and you’re instinctively skeptical. So we were both doubters when we first heard of bitcoin. Money that isn’t backed by a government? That’s crazy!


pages: 454 words: 134,482

Money Free and Unfree by George A. Selgin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disintermediation, Dutch auction, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Y2K

Although the FDIC claimed, in the course of congressional hearings following the rescue, that the holding company’s failure would have exposed 179 small banks to a high risk of failure, subsequent assessments by the House Banking Committee and the Government Accountability Office placed the number of exposed banks at just 28. A still later study by Kaufman (1990: 8) found that only two banks would have lost more than half of their capital. The 1990 failure of Drexel Burnham Lambert had no systemic consequences, and there is no evidence, also according to Kaufman (2000: 236), that the failure of Long-Term Capital Management eight years later “would have brought down any large bank if the Fed had provided liquidity during the unwinding period through open market operations” while also backing the counterparties’ unwinding plan. During the subprime crisis, financial enterprises far larger than either Continental or Drexel Lambert either failed or were threatened with failure.Yet there are doubts concerning whether even these cases posed systemic risks that could only be contained by direct support of the firms in question.


pages: 892 words: 91,000

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tim Koller, McKinsey, Company Inc., Marc Goedhart, David Wessels, Barbara Schwimmer, Franziska Manoury

accelerated depreciation, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, ASML, barriers to entry, Basel III, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, discounted cash flows, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, energy security, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, p-value, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two and twenty, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In the past 30 years, the world has seen at least six financial crises that arose largely because companies and banks were financing illiquid assets with short-term debt: the U.S. savings and loan catastrophe in the 1980s, the East Asian debt crisis in the mid-1990s, the Russian government default in 1998, the collapse in that same year of the U.S. hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, the U.S. commercial real estate crisis in the early 1990s, and the Japanese financial crisis that began in 1990 and, according to some, continues to this day. SHORT-TERMISM RUNS DEEP One of the causes of these economic calamities is the short-termism of many companies. What is most relevant about Stout’s argument and that of others 12 WHY VALUE VALUE?

See Taxes Index membership, 85–86 Inflation, 473–486 distortion of financial indicators, 479–480 effect of passing on to customers, 475–479 extreme, historical analysis of, 479–480 and financial projections, 479–486 in forecasting, 232–234 and lower value creation, 473–479 Informed investors, 66–68 Initial public offerings (IPOs), 639, 640 Interest expense/income, 241–242 Interest expenses, 197 Interest tax shield (ITS), 307–308 Internal rate of return (IRR), 450–453 International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), 507–509 Internet bubble, 10–11, 72–73, 297–298, 302 Intrinsic investors, 685–686, 687–693 Intrinsic value, 682–684 Invested capital, 172 case illustration (UPS/FedEx), 174–180 defined, 29, 170 forecasting, 540 goodwill and acquired intangibles, 179–180 investments in, 193–195 key concepts, 170–171 in multiple business units, 387 multiples of, 369 operating working capital, 176–178 other assets and liabilities, 178–179 production equipment and facilities, 178 Investment-grade debt, 325–326 Investment rate (IR), 30 Investments, option to defer, 789–790, 792 Investor communications, 681–701 and consensus earnings forecasts, 697–700 earnings guidance, 694–697 and intrinsic investors, 687–693 intrinsic value vs. market value, 682–684 listening to investors, 693 objectives of, 682 targeting by segment, 687–689 transparency, 689–690, 692–693 understanding investor base, 682, 684–689 Investor funds, forecasting, 248–250 Investors: classification of, 684–689 closet indexers, 687, 688–689 intrinsic, 685–686, 687–693 opinions of, 693 segmentation of, 684–687 traders, 686–687 J Japanese financial crisis, 11 Johnson & Johnson, 40 Joint ventures, 641 K Kaplan, Robert, 583 Key value driver formula, 260–263 L Leases. See Operating leases Leverage, 223, 653–657, 847–849 and beta, 838–839 capital structure and credit ratings, 654–662 and cost of equity, 768–769 and the price-to-earnings multiple, 841–842 INDEX 865 Line item analysis, 212, 237 Long-Term Capital Management, 11 Lowe’s, 691 Lucent, 631 M Mackey, John, 7 Managing for Stakeholders (Freeman), 7 Market access, accelerating, 609 Market bubbles, 68–69 Market implied cost of equity, 290–292 Market return, estimating, 286–292 Market risk, 779 Market risk premium, 501–502, 722, 849–854 Market share performance, defined, 118 Market value, 330 Mathematical formulas in value creation, 29–33 Mechanical investors, 687 Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), 599–626 best-acquirer characteristics, 623–626 priority themes, 623–624 reputation management, 624–625 strategic vision, 625 buying cheap, 613–614 consolidation, 608–609, 612 defined, 118 earnings from, 75–76 effects on revenue growth, 217–219 empirical research on success of, 602–607 estimation of operating improvements, 614–618 cost and capital savings, 614–617 implementation issues, 618 revenue improvements, 617–618 payment method (cash/stock), 617–620 performance improvement reassessment, 625–626 roll-up strategies, 611–612 transformational mergers, 612–613 value creation and, 600–602 value creation strategies for, 607–614 value creation vs. accounting focus, 621–623 Merton, Robert, 165 Miller, Merton, 37, 156 Modigliani, Franko, 37, 156 Molson Coors, 699 Multibusiness companies.


pages: 516 words: 157,437

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, cognitive bias, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, financial engineering, follow your passion, global macro, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, microcredit, oil shock, performance metric, planetary scale, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, yield curve

I remembered how clearly it had seemed to me that the debt bust I’d been expecting in 1982 would sink the economy—and how painfully wrong I had turned out to be. That experience also drove me to learn a lot more about debt crises and their effects on the markets, and I researched and traded through a number of them, including the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s, the Japanese debt crisis of the 1990s, the blowup of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, and the fallout from the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. With the help of my teammates at Bridgewater, I took history books and old newspapers and went day by day through the Great Depression and the Weimar Republic, comparing what happened then with what was happening in the present.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

They learn why other central bankers are following particular policies. They become personal friends. That is especially helpful in crisis management, of which I had quite a lot when I was president of the New York Fed. For example, I spent a good portion of the night before the meeting with the private sector of Long Term Capital Management informing the central bankers of Europe what was happening and why. Being able to call them by their first names, as friends, made those conversations much easier.” Richard Darman, senior adviser at the Carlyle Group and chairman of AES Power, has observed from high atop the system the changes that have taken place, first in the public sector during the Reagan administration.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

He sometimes couldn’t walk63 from the stress such huge and highly leveraged risks caused, Soros confessed to The New Yorker in 2004. In another gamble64, he lost $2 billion in equity investments in Russia when the ruble unexpectedly collapsed in August 1998. Nonetheless, though similar losses in Russia’s long-term debt crash bankrupted a famous rival, Long-Term Capital Management (whose two Nobel Prize–winning economists believed they had a foolproof way to make money), Russian bear Soros managed to finish the year up 12 percent for his investors. “I don’t play the game66 by a particular set of rules; I look for changes in the rules of the game,” Soros once said.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

I had witnessed serious market disturbances and the collapses or near collapses of Continental Illinois Bank, Drexel Burnham Lambert, and Salomon Brothers, among others. With the exception of the savings and loan debacle, these disruptions generally focused on a single organization, such as the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. The crisis that began in 2007 was far more severe, and the risks to the economy and the American people much greater. Between March and September 2008, eight major US financial institutions failed – Bear Stearns, IndyMac, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia – six of them in September alone.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Confidence in the sector fell. Japan has never really recovered from this setback. Mastered by the universe In 1997 and 1998, there was a crisis in emerging markets, which involved South-East Asia and a Russian debt default. Caught in the middle of all this was a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), run by some of Wall Street’s best-known bond traders and advised by two Nobel prize-winners in economics, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. The fund followed a policy of risk arbitrage, buying less liquid assets with borrowed money. At one point, it borrowed 30 times its capital.36 This proved disastrous when markets fell, so banks refused to keep lending the fund money.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Before the world recession of 2008–2009, the market’s stumbles had grown ever more frequent and painful, starting with the crash of 1987, followed by the junk bond crisis of the late 1980s, the 1989 sinking of the savings and loan industry, the Japanese depression, the Asian fiscal crisis of 1997, the Long-Term Capital Management near default of 1998, the bursting of the dot-com bubble of 2000, the Enron and WorldCom debacle of 2001, climaxing with the rippling losses from the mortgage-based securities debacle in 2008. Mounting foreclosures, beginning in 2007, put the brakes on the subprime mortgage joyride, but the problems went deeper.


Analysis of Financial Time Series by Ruey S. Tsay

Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, discrete time, financial engineering, frictionless, frictionless market, implied volatility, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Long Term Capital Management, market microstructure, martingale, p-value, pattern recognition, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve

Tsay Copyright  2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 0-471-41544-8 CHAPTER 7 Extreme Values, Quantile Estimation, and Value at Risk Extreme price movements in the financial markets are rare, but important. The stock market crash on Wall Street in October 1987 and other big financial crises such as the Long Term Capital Management have attracted a great deal of attention among practitioners and researchers, and some people even called for government regulations on the derivative markets. In recent years, the seemingly large daily price movements in high-tech stocks have further generated discussions on market risk and margin setting for financial institutions.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

They contended that the mere release of her concept paper on derivatives regulation would trigger a market collapse. Born, seeing unregulated derivatives as a greater danger, released her paper anyway. Wall Street bankers were apoplectic, but nothing dire happened. In September 1998, Born was vindicated when Long Term Capital Management, a huge hedge fund deeply invested in derivatives, collapsed. Born told Congress that the hedge fund’s disaster “should serve as a wakeup call about the unknown risks that the over-the-counter derivatives market may pose to the U.S. economy….” But instead of hailing Born’s prescience, Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers cut off her regulatory arms.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The change was requested by banks made bigger and riskier by previous deregulation (one supplicant was Hank Paulson, then at Goldman Sachs and soon to become Treasury secretary, where he arranged a bailout in the same buildings in which the banks had recently begged to be free of Washington). While the media ignored the changes, some banks did not and expanded risk sharply through direct leverage and/or balance-sheet fiddling.16 Meanwhile, in the realm of alternative finance, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) had collapsed in 1998, the victim of large, levered derivative transactions. LTCM, in short, wagered too much backed up by too little, and the wager went the wrong way. Its three masters were Boomers (one of the Canadian variety) and two had won the Nobel Prize for—of all things—a pricing model for derivatives.


pages: 575 words: 171,599

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, delayed gratification, estate planning, Etonian, glass ceiling, high net worth, junk bonds, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, McMansion, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, technology bubble, too big to fail

Every man in the room knew that Wall Street rivals would rush to exploit the news of Rajaratnam’s arrest even as they feigned sympathy on the phone. Competitors would make a calculated bet that Galleon would have to dump stocks at fire-sale prices; then, as they did in 1998 when high-flying hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management got in trouble, they would hammer stocks they suspected were in Galleon’s portfolio, making money as the stocks tumbled amid Galleon’s indiscriminate selling and creating a death spiral that fed upon itself. Galleon had not capsized amid the financial tsunami of 2008, but the arrest of its founder was sure to torpedo it.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Moore, 2015, “Changes in the Distribution of After-Tax Wealth: Has Income Tax Policy Increased Wealth Inequality?” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2015–058, Washington Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, http://dx.doi.org/10.17016/FEDS .2015.058. Lowenstein, R., 2000, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York, NY: Random House). Bibliography 413 Lucas, Robert, 1990a, “Supply Side Economics: An Analytical Review,” Oxford Economics Papers 42, pp. 293–316. 1990b, “Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?” The American Economic Review 80, pp. 92–96. Lustig, Nora, editor, 2001, Shielding the Poor: Social Protection in the Developing World (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution and Inter-American Development Bank).


Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David Aronson

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, Black Swan, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mental accounting, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, retrograde motion, revision control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Sharpe ratio, short selling, source of truth, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, systematic trading, the scientific method, transfer pricing, unbiased observer, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Behavioral finance expert Andre Shleifer says even an arbitrage trade that looks nearly perfect from the outside is in reality quite risky so the number of investors who go after it will be limited. The bottom line is arbitrage activities cannot always enforce rational pricing. Noise trader risk was a factor in the blow-up of the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund in the fall of 1998. The fund’s crash nearly took the entire financial market with it. Ultimately, the mispricings that LTCM had identified were corrected, but because they had overleveraged their positions, the fund lacked the staying power to hold its positions through a short-term period of even greater mispricing.


pages: 612 words: 179,328

Buffett by Roger Lowenstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cashless society, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, Jeffrey Epstein, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-coupon bond

His first rule (“Never lose money”) was expressed so glibly that it may have been taken for a lighthearted quip; with the perspective of more time, it emerges as one of the keys to his success. The last dozen years, in particular, have seen more than their share of investment folly. We need only recall the ill-fated rush to lend to the teetering, newly capitalist Russia of the 1990s, or the collapse of the meteoric hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), or the madness of the dot-com bubble. During the last of those episodes, shares of companies with no prospect of realizing earnings soared while Berkshire’s stock, confounding all logic and despite steadily rising earnings, was cut in half. The public became obsessed with twenty-something website promoters, and it was commonly said that Buffett was outmoded, an old-economy relic, and so forth.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

And the Federal Reserve—with the honorable exception of the wise Board of Governors member Ned Gramlich—agreed. The Fed, after all, had stopped any serious depression from happening after the stock market crash of 1987, after the S&L overleverage crash of 1990, and after the Mexican financial crisis of 1994, the East Asian crisis of 1997, the Russian state and Long-Term Capital Management hedge-fund bankruptcies of 1998, the dot-com crash of 2000, and the 2001 terrorist attacks. Surely all this lent confidence that the Federal Reserve could handle whatever shocks the finance sector could throw at it. In a world that still had a very large gap between average returns on safe and risky assets, was it not worthwhile to encourage financial experimentation, to explore what mechanisms might induce more risk-bearing on the part of investors, even if it led to some cowboy-finance excesses?


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

For their part, always thinking about money gives economists finely tuned financial antennae, and some from prominent universities wasted little time in seizing the opportunity to moonlight as advocates of deregulation. Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan were not the only prominent economists whose reputation suffered greatly from the notion of market perfection. The bankruptcy of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1994 humiliated Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, both Nobel laureates and champions of flawed economic theory. Other academicians closely identified with Reaganomics, including Hubbard, Mankiw, and Martin Feldstein, became controversial as well.48 Europeans even have a name for them, calling such American economists “the secret lobbyists.”49 The economics profession owes you an apology for permitting Reagan and George W.


pages: 708 words: 196,859

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, plutocrats, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, rolodex, scientific management, the market place

The article described how close the world had come to an economic meltdown in 1997 and 1998—the big Asian economies of Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia had had to suspend payments on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, Asian currencies had collapsed against the dollar, Russia had defaulted on its domestic debt, and the hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, had lost $4 billion of its investors’ capital, threatening the stability of the entire U.S financial system. The three “economist heroes,” as Time magazine called them, were able to avert a disaster by acting quickly and aggressively to commit billions of dollars in public funds to stem a panic of proportions not experienced since the 1930s.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Much of Emmott’s career since 2006 has nevertheless been devoted to sparring with Berlusconi, as well as browbeating the country into market reforms: a 2012 documentary, Girlfriend in a Coma, shows Emmott doing his best Michael Moore, accosting Berlusconi in a crowded salon of ‘elites’.43 Finance and Globalization The Economist did not ignore the financial bubbles that punctuated the New Economy years – in sovereign debt, dotcom stocks and housing – up to 2008, but it minimized them as relatively small bumps on the road to globalized capitalism. Mexico, East Asia and Russia were among the hardest hit by interlinked currency and debt crises. When Moscow defaulted in 1998, triggering the collapse of Long Term Capital Management – the heavily exposed hedge fund that lost $4.6 billion in four months – the paper defended the computer wizards whose models had failed to foresee this: ‘it is pleasant to mock the Nobel Laureates who helped found LTCM, but much of this mockery clouds the truth’, for ‘the question arises whether recent events are ever likely to be repeated.’44 But it also went on the attack against any who used such examples of ‘market failure’ to criticize, question or hold up globalization, with deputy editor Clive Crook leading the charge.45 Crook was thirty-eight in 1993, but looked ‘more like a teenager in the grey flannel slacks, white oxford-cloth shirt, and blue pullover sweater that are his only known costume’.46 ‘Fearsomely brilliant’, ‘arguing for Free Trade in this gruff Lancashire accent’, he was ‘the Manchester School come to life’; others called him the ‘intellectual Godfather’, with Emmott by turns ‘enthralled’ and ‘intimidated’, as editors asked (on points of doctrine), ‘Is Clive ok with this?’


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In the meantime the mispricing got worse, not better. Royal Dutch fell to more than 30% below parity in mid-1981. Therefore, you had to report a substantial loss on your “arbitrage” strategy in that year. You were fired and took up a new career as a used-car salesman. The demise in 1998 of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) provides another example of the problems with convergence trades. LTCM, one of the largest and most profitable hedge funds of the 1990s, believed that interest rates in the different eurozone countries would converge when the euro replaced the countries’ previous currencies. LTCM had taken massive positions to profit from this convergence, as well as massive positions designed to exploit other pricing discrepancies.

., 383n, 392 Lockbox systems, 790 Lognormal distributions, 191n London interbank offered rate (LIBOR), 357, 607–608, 625, 626, 672n, 793 London Metal Exchange (LME), 667 London Stock Exchange, 76, 874 Longevity bonds, 623 Long-lived assets choice between short-lived assets and, 144, 145–148 investing in, 348–349 multiple risk-adjusted discount rates for, 235–237 single risk-adjusted discount rate for, 234–237 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 335 Long-term financial planning, 748, 760–765 contingency planning, 761 example, 762–764 need for, 761–762 pitfalls in model design, 764 spreadsheet functions, 762 Long-term financing decisions. See Corporate financing Longwei Petroleum, 549–550 Lookback options, 554 Loomis, C., 287n Lopez-de-Salanes, F., 352n, 419n, 864, 864n, 869n, 869–870, 878 LoPucki, Lynn, 854n L’Oréal, 5 Lottery winnings, 29 Loughran, R., 330n Loughran, T., 382n, 383n, 389n, 390n Lowenstein, L., 829n Lowe’s Companies, 739–740 LTV, 848 Lu, Qi, 341n Lucas, Deborah, 595 Lucent Technologies, 841, 842 Luehrman, T.


pages: 920 words: 233,102

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Paul Tucker

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Even in the late twentieth century, one British merchant bank held out against a possible market solution to the Barings crisis, just as it is said that, on Wall Street in 1998, Bear Stearns held out against a collective private sector solution for the problems of (the splendidly named) Long-Term Capital Management facilitated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 10 The implicit thought experiment concerns the costs of separate governance for (a) basic needs and pure coordination problems and (b) cooperative ventures. This has some things in common with Hardin, Liberalism, which explains constitutional stability in terms of the costs of change. 11 Four kinds of legal right (and correlating duty) are often associated with, among other contexts, a “right to rule”: a claim right to impose obligations, a power right to create liabilities, a right to immunities, a permissive right to a monopoly of coercion (Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions).


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

Using their own balance sheets, the banks agree to provide their corporate clients the money they are seeking and take the risk themselves of syndicating the loan, bond, or equity to the world of investors, be they other banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, or the public. Usually the risks for underwriters are minimal and the fees disproportionately generous, but when markets crash--after September 11, or upon the collapse of Long Term Capital Management--these same underwriters can get stuck with major capital losses. Lazard, with a tiny balance sheet, has never been very interested in making loans or underwriting junk bonds, which require large amounts of capital. The subcommittee then zeroed in on another of Lazard's secret competitive advantages: its so-called interlocking directors, where Lazard partners also sit on their clients' boards of directors.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

He tried to take out a mortgage on a ninth house. He hasn’t failed, you see, he’s just had a learning experience. That’s what happens when you refuse to lose hope. While this behavior may seem to be merely stupid, it also puts me in mind of two Nobel-Prize-winning economists . . . . . . namely Merton and Scholes of Long-Term Capital Management. While LTCM raked in giant profits over its first three years, in 1998 the inefficiences that LTCM were exploiting had started to vanish—other people knew about the trick, so it stopped working. LTCM refused to lose hope. Addicted to 40% annual returns, they borrowed more and more leverage to exploit tinier and tinier margins.