Satyajit Das

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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

To find out more about Pearson Education publications, or tell us about the books you’d like to find, you can visit www.pearsoned.co.uk DAS_A01.QXD 5/3/07 8:01 PM Page vi Traders, Guns & Money Knowns and unknowns in the dazzling world of derivatives Satyajit Das DAS_A01.QXD 5/3/07 8:01 PM Page vii PEARSON EDUCATION LIMITED Edinburgh Gate Harlow CM20 2JE Tel: +44 (0)1279 623623 Fax: +44 (0)1279 431059 Website: www.pearsoned.co.uk First published in Great Britain in 2006 © Satyajit Das 2006 The right of Satyajit Das to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ISBN: 978-0-273-70474-4 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress All rights reserved.

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Satyajit Das is an international expert in the dazzling world of financial derivatives and has 25 years’ experience in the financial markets. He has had a foot on both sides of the derivatives equation, having worked for banks (the “sell side”) such as the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Citicorp Investment Bank and Merrill Lynch and, as Treasurer of the TNT Group, for clients (the “buy side”). He now acts as a consultant advising banks and corporations and presenting seminars throughout the world on the slippery subject of derivatives. “Make room for another must-read on the shelves of any City or Wall Street trader, salesman, or victim.

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Das is the author of a number of highly regarded standard reference books on derivatives including Swaps/Financial Derivatives (2004, Wiley), Structured Products & Hybrid Securities (2001, Wiley) and Credit Derivatives, CDOs and Structured Credit Products (2005, Wiley). Outside the wild world of derivatives, Das is passionate about real wildlife and is co-author (with Jade Novakovic) of In Search of the Pangolin: The Accidental Eco-Tourist (2006, New Holland), a unique travel narrative focused on eco-tourism. SATYAJIT DAS No money is ever really made in financial markets. Markets merely transfer wealth. As to how to make money? Well, it is basically theft, misrepresentation, lies, cheating, deception or force. It is impossible to make the staggering amounts made in derivatives in good years honestly. “IN MOST BUSINESSES, THE NATURE OF THE PRODUCT IS A KNOWN KNOWN.

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

Originally published as A Banquet of Consequences by Penguin Random House Australia in August 2015 Published 2016 by Prometheus Books The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril. Copyright © 2015 by Satyajit Das. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Conti-Zilsberger Inquiries should be addressed to Prometheus Books 59 John Glenn Drive Amherst, New York 14228 VOICE: 716–691–0133 FAX: 716–691–0137 WWW.PROMETHEUSBOOKS.COM 20 19 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Das, Satyajit, author. Title: The age of stagnation : why perpetual growth is unattainable and the global economy is in peril / Satyajit Das. Description: Amherst, NY : Prometheus Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037561| ISBN 9781633881587 (hardback) | ISBN 9781633881594 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Economic development. | Economic policy. | Stagnation (Economics) | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / International / Economics. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Economic Policy. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic Conditions.

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Christopher Wood, The Bubble Economy: Japan's Extraordinary Speculative Boom of the ’80s and the Dramatic Bust of the ’90s, Solstice Publishing, 2006. The Global Financial Crisis John Authers, The Fearful Rise of Markets: A Short View of Global Bubbles and Synchronised Meltdowns, FT Prentice Hall, 2010. William D. Cohan, House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism, Allen Lane, 2009. Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns, and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Financial Derivatives, FT Prentice Hall, 2006. ——, Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk, Penguin Books Australia, 2014. Andrew Gamble, The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

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

—www.runningofthebools.typepad.com Extreme Money Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk Satyajit Das Vice President, Publisher: Tim Moore Associate Publisher and Director of Marketing: Amy Neidlinger Executive Editor: Jim Boyd Editorial Assistant: Pamela Boland Development Editor: Russ Hall Senior Marketing Manager: Julie Phifer Assistant Marketing Manager: Megan Graue Cover Designer: Chuti Prasertsith Managing Editor: Kristy Hart Project Editor: Jovana San Nicolas-Shirley Proofreader: San Dee Phillips Indexer: Larry Sweazy Senior Compositor: Gloria Schurick Manufacturing Buyer: Dan Uhrig © 2011 by Satyajit Das This book is sold with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services or advice by publishing this book.

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—Gillian Tett, Financial Times, London “...an acerbic expose...Funny, readable and peppered with one-liners from Groucho Marx, “Traders, Guns & Money” offers an ideal primer for anyone tempted to take a walk on the derivative side.” —James Pressley, Bloomberg “Long before the 2008-09 credit crisis and collapse, one of the strongest warnings about the dangers of derivatives came from Satyajit Das.... it reads more like a crime novel than a financial book.” —Barry Ritholtz “...a scalpel of a book that pulls back the skin on the derivatives and risk management industry to expose the blood, guts and circulatory system underneath.” —Nina Mehta, Financial Engineering News “Traders, Guns & Money is one the most entertaining investment books I’ve read in a long time...this is possibly the best insider account of a career in investments since Michael Lewis’s book Liar’s Poker.”

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Pearson Education North Asia, Ltd. Pearson Education Canada, Ltd. Pearson Educatión de Mexico, S.A. de C.V. Pearson Education—Japan Pearson Education Malaysia, Pte. Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Das, Satyajit. Extreme money : masters of the universe and the cult of risk / Satyajit Das. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-13-279007-9 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Money. 2. Finance. I. Title. HG221.D257 2012 332—dc22 For Jade Novakovic without whom there is nothing “It is hard to change Gods.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed Contents Prologue: Hubris Part I: Faith Chapter 1 Mirror of the Times Some Kinda Money Trading Places The Invention of Money Barbarous Relic The Real Thing The Hotel New Hampshire Collapse Money Machines Debt Clock Money Is Nothing The Mirrored Room Chapter 2 Money Changes Everything Mrs.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Steel, which controlled two-thirds of America’s steel manufacturing.1 As in the Gilded Age, this market dominance comes with grotesque levels of inequality.2 In Europe and North America, and increasingly in East Asia, we are seeing what Robert Putnam calls “an incipient class apartheid.”3 The main beneficiaries of our current economy lord it over the commoners in a way reminiscent of the medieval nobility. “The new feudalism is like the older model, with class, privilege and wealth still highly influential,” writes Satyajit Das in the Independent.4 “Experts” and “Problems” The oligarchs and a privileged clerisy might be seen as fulfilling the role of a ruling “expert” class as proposed during the Enlightenment and in the Progressive Era. The ideal of rule by experts presupposes a society in which all problems—including those of morality, faith, and justice—are thought to have scientifically derived solutions.

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Here’s how to change it,” New Statesman, October 31, 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/were-living-system-new-feudalism-heres-how-change-it. 13 Shannon Tiezzi, “Report: China’s 1 Percent Owns 1/3 of Wealth,” Diplomat, January 15, 2016, https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/report-chinas-1-percent-owns-13-of-wealth/; Jonathan Kaiman, “China gets richer but more unequal,” Guardian, July 28, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/28/china-more-unequal-richer; David S.G. Goodman, Class in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 2–3, 45. 14 Satyajit Das, “Despite appearances, the idea of social progress is a myth,” Independent, July 30, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/despite-appearances-the-idea-of-social-progress-is-a-myth-a7867371.html. 15 Christopher Ingraham, “American land barons: 100 wealthy families now own nearly as much land as that of New England,” Washington Post, December 21, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/21/american-land-barons-100-wealthy-families-now-own-nearly-as-much-land-as-that-of-new-england/?

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Bordewich, “How the Gilded Age Got That Way,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-gilded-age-got-that-way-1503683705. 3 Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 8. 4 Satyajit Das, “Despite appearances, the idea of social progress is a myth,” Independent, July 30, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/despite-appearances-the-idea-of-social-progress-is-a-myth-a7867371.html. 5 H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Support (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1999), 99; Fred Siegel, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class (New York: Encounter, 2015), 7, 43. 6 Ned Levin et al., “China Tightens Restrictions on Messaging Apps,” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-issues-new-restrictions-on-messaging-apps-1407405666; Maya Wang, “China’s Chilling ‘Social Credit’ Blacklist,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-chilling-social-credit-blacklist-1513036054. 7 Arjun Kharpal, “A.I. is in a ‘golden age’ and solving problems that were once in the realm of sci-fi, Jeff Bezos says,” CNBC, May 8, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/amazon-jeff-bezos-artificial-intelligence-ai-golden-age.html; Michael Knox Beran, “The Narrowing of the Elite: Part One,” National Review, September 19, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/educated-elites-faith-in-salvation-through-technology/. 8 Jill Priluck, “America’s corporate activism: the rise of the CEO as social justice warrior,” Guardian, July 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/01/americas-corporate-activism-the-rise-of-the-ceo-as-social-justice-warrior. 9 Irving Kristol, “Is Technology a Threat to Liberal Society?”

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

Each of these trades was a customized combination of bonds, swaps, and options that was virtually impossible for a typical client to accurately value; the dealer would charge a large fee, break the transaction into its component parts, and hedge them individually at a much lower cost. Derivatives expert Satyajit Das has outlined the abusive economics of these transactions. Describing the mechanics of a typical inverse floater, he wrote, “Chairman Greenspan might wax lyrical about the unbundling of risks but we spent most of our waking hours frantically rebundling the risks and stuffing them down the throats of any investor we could find.”74 Because these derivatives were zero-sum trades—one party’s loss was the other’s profit—one side could be badly burned.

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On Brooksley Born, see Rick Schmitt, “Prophet and Loss,” Stanford Magazine, March–April 2009, available at http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2009/marapr/features/ born.html; Manuel Roig-Franzia, “Credit Crisis Cassandra: Brooksley Born’s Unheeded Warning Is a Rueful Echo 10 Years On,” The Washington Post, May 26, 2009, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/25/AR2009052502108.html; and “The Warning,” Frontline (PBS television broadcast October 20, 2009), available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/. 10. Frank Partnoy, F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 59. For another account of the derivatives industry, see Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (Harlow, England: Prentice Hall, 2006). 11. Bank for International Settlements, Semi-Annual OTC Derivatives Statistics, available at http://www.bis.org/statistics/derstats.htm. 12. Quoted in Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 163. 13.

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Losses on mergers and acquisitions arbitrage also contributed to the decision to downsize the proprietary trading operation. 72. Nassim Taleb, Foreword to Pablo Triana, Lecturing Birds on Flying: Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets? (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), xiii. 73. Semiannual OTC Derivatives Statistics, supra note 15, at Table 19. 74. Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (Harlow, England: Prentice Hall, 2006), 47. For an explanation of a leveraged inverse floater, see ibid. at 45–50. 75. On the transactions that created these losses, see Frank Partnoy, F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street (New York: W.

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

Davies, Aline Van Duyn, Francesco Guerrera, Jennifer Hughes, Sam Jones, Michael Mackenzie, David Oakley, Anousha Sakoui, Saskia Scholtes, Henny Sender, Gary Silverman, and Peter Thal-Larsen. Janet Tavakoli, Satyajit Das, and Arturo Cifuentes were some of the few mavericks who were willing to speak openly to FT about the looming credit dangers at an early stage. In various stages of writing, Adam Ridley, Charles Morris, Keith Hart, Henry Fajemirokun, and Satyajit Das read various drafts and offered extremely helpful comments. Henny Sender also offered very kind logistical support. Pascal Spreen, Shannon Gitlin, and Madhavi Pulapaka conducted research.

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

Market practitioners, analysts, and other thinkers with whom I’ve had a productive dialogue include Martin Wolf, Steve Roach, David Rosenberg, Mark Zandi, Jim O’Neill, Luis Oganes, Joyce Chang, Lewis Alexander, Don Hanna, Stephen King, Manu Kumar, Jens Nystedt, Robert Kahn, Chris Whalen, Joshua Rosner, Barry Ritholtz, Yves Smith, Wolfgang Munchau, Gillian Tett, Ian Bremmer, Michael Pettis, Steve Drobny, Satyajit Das, Katerina Alexandraki, Daniel Alpert, Charles Morris, Richard Bookstaber, Edward Chancellor, and Walter Molano. Former policy makers and other policy think-tank scholars with whom I’ve interacted include Alex Pollock, Desmond Lachman, Ted Truman, Fred Bergsten, Morris Goldstein, Adam Posen, and Benn Steil.

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.”: Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report for 2002, p. 13, online at http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2002ar/2002ar.pdf. 199 Senator Phil Gramm: Eric Lipton and Stephen Labaton, “A Deregulator Looks Back, Unswayed,” New York Times, November 16, 2008. 200 infamous episodes: An excellent overview of their checkered history can be found in Lynn A. Stout, “Why We Need Derivatives Regulation,” New York Times, October 7, 2009, online at http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/dealbook-dialogue-lynn-stout/; also Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns, and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Financial Times Press, 2006). 200 some sensible steps: Some of the following proposals echo those found in Viral A. Acharya et al., “Derivatives: The Ultimate Financial Innovation,” in Acharya and Richardson, eds., Restoring Financial Stability; and Rym Ayadi and Patrick Behr, “On the Necessity to Regulate Credit Derivatives Markets,” Journal of Banking Regulation 10 (2009): 179-201. 204 Basel Committee on Banking Supervision: For basic information on the Basel Committee, see “The New Basel Capital Accord: An Explanatory Note,” Bank for International Settlements, 2001, online at http://www.bis.org/publ/bcbsca01.pdf; see also Bryan J.

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Chapter 9: Radical Remedies 211 “The lesson I take from this experience . . .”: Ben S. Bernanke, “Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble,” speech to annual meeting of the American Economic Association, January 3, 2010, http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20100103a.pdf. 214 standard industry guide to derivatives: Satyajit Das, The Das Swaps & Financial Derivatives Library (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2006). 215 a bewildering array of regulatory bodies: See Richard H. K. Vietor, “Government Regulation of Business,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3:969-1012, particularly the chart on 3:980; also Andreas Busch, Banking Regulation and Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33-66. 216 beneficial “competition”: See, for example, Richard J.

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

According to a McKinsey study, “global debt has grown by $57 trillion . . . outpacing world GDP growth” and “no major economy has decreased its debt-to-GDP ratio since 2007.”3 In the decades preceding the crisis, an increasingly greater share of GDP had been based on financial services, which in turn had been based on credit growth. However, financialization only contributes to growth up to a certain point before this trend reverses.4 As finance takes up an increasingly larger share of GDP, investment in the real economy falls.5 The author and former banker Satyajit Das notes that “[at] its peak, the finance industry generated 40 percent of corporate profits.”6 As a result finance decoupled from the economy, and while Wall Street got richer, everyone else got poorer, thereby increasing the wealth gap. Financialization has also contributed significantly to corporate ownership and control, which has expanded and strengthened elite networks even further.

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Ôzgûr Orhangazi, “Financialization and Capital Accumulation in the Non-Financial Corporate Sector,” Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Working Paper Series Number 149, October 2007, http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1120&context=peri_workingpapers. 6. Satyajit Das, The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril (New York: Prometheus Books, 2016) 598, Kindle edition. 7. “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground,” Pew Research Center, December 9, 2015, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground. 8.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Eric Topol Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box” Each of us is gradually being morphed into an event-data recorder by virtue of our digital identity and presence on the Web. David Rowan Personal Data Mining We need to [mine] our own output to extract patterns that turn our raw personal data stream into predictive, actionable information. Satyajit Das Parallelism in Art and Commerce [Damien] Hirst was the artist of choice for conspicuously consuming hedge-fund managers, who were getting very rich. Laurence C. Smith Innovation In the world of science, innovation stretches the mind to find an explanation when the universe wants to hold on to its secrets just a little longer.

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Indeed, as the work of Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Gilbert, and Christakis and Fowler demonstrate so powerfully, accurate individual-level data tracking is key to understanding how human happiness can be quantified, how our social networks affect our behavior, how diseases spread through groups. The data is already out there. We just need to encourage people to tap it, share it, and corral it into knowledge. Parallelism in Art and Commerce Satyajit Das Expert, financial derivatives and risk; author, Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives and Extreme Money Confluence of factors is highly influential in setting off changes in complex systems. A common example is in risk—the “Swiss cheese” theory.

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

These “market drivers of liquidity,” he argued, “currently exceed influences coming from traditional monetary policy instruments.”18 To David Tice at the Prudent Bear Fund, credit derivatives had enabled “a credit apparatus unlike any in history with endless capacity to create ‘money’-like debt instruments.”19 Derivatives expert Satyajit Das called the new quasi currency “candyfloss money,” explaining that “by the early 2000s, the new liquidity factory had created a money pyramid that had no parallel in history.”20 Bill Gross, from the bond-market viewpoint, made a pointed analogy in his October 2007 Investment Outlook:Remember those old economics textbooks that told you how a $1 deposit at your neighborhood bank could be multiplied by five or six times in a magical act of reserve banking?

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Andrews, “Fed and Regulators Shrugged as the Subprime Crisis Spread,” New York Times, December 18, 2007. 17 “Credit Turmoil ‘Has Hallmarks of Bank Run,’ ” Financial Times, September 2, 2007. 18 Mohamed El-Erian, “In the New Liquidity Factories, Buyers Must Still Beware,” Financial Times, March 22, 2007. 19 David W. Tice, “Report to Shareholders,” Prudent Bear Funds, Inc., April 30, 2007. 20 Satyajit Das, “Credit Crunch: The New Diet Snack of Financial Markets,” www.prudentbear.com, September 5, 2007. 21 Bill Gross, “What Do They Know?”Investment Outlook, www.pimco.com, October 2007. 22 “Testimony of Robert J. Shiller Before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress,” Washington, D.C., September 19, 2007, pp. 1-2. 23 “The R-Word Surfaces on Wall Street,” Financial Times, September 10, 2007. 24 Ibid. 25 “A New Light on Housing’s Role in U.S.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Hidden confl icts of interest have long haunted Wall Street fi rms, so it would be foolish to argue that secret algorithms somehow hijacked or corrupted American fi nance.163 But it would also be a mistake to pass over questions concerning technology in finance, because modeling methods and automation have vastly expanded the sector’s capacity to bluff those who are supposed to manage risk and detect deception. As former trader Satyajit Das memorably puts it, “No trader making $1 million + a year is going to take questions from an auditor making $50,000 a year”— especially when the trader has myriad models to prove the wisdom of his position.164 Admittedly, my illustrations are not comprehensive. Some might say that they are unrepresentative, skewed toward go-go years of reckless speculation.

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For historical accounts of corrupt or confl icted practices, see Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929; Fred Schwed, Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? (New York: Wiley, 2006); Henwood, Wall Street: How it Works; Robert Kuttner, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity (2010), 112, 231. 164. Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (Great Britain: FT Press, 2006), 144. 165. Daniel Carpenter, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 20. 166. Quoted in Brian McKenna, “How Will Gillian Tett Connect with the Natives of the U.S.

Swimming With Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers by Joris Luyendijk

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Emanuel Derman, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flash crash, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, inventory management, job-hopping, Large Hadron Collider, light touch regulation, London Whale, Money creation, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, regulatory arbitrage, Satyajit Das, selection bias, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, too big to fail

But the fundamental conflicts of interest he identified do exist and when I met him again a few times in a sober state his story remained the same. Risk and compliance is disparaged not only by front-office bankers but by most insiders. In Traders, Guns and Money, former middle-office veteran Satyajit Das defines the department as those who ‘keep lists of all documents that need to be shredded in case of a problem’. This is almost the opposite of what the man at the party and others working in internal control functions signed up for. I want to do a good job, they claimed. But my own bank stops me from doing it.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

BART KOSKO Thinking Machines = Old Algorithms on Faster Computers JULIA CLARKE The Disadvantages of Metaphor MICHAEL MCCULLOUGH A Universal Basis for Human Dignity HAIM HARARI Thinking About People Who Think Like Machines HANS HALVORSON Metathinking CHRISTINE FINN The Value of Anticipation DIRK HELBING An Ecosystem of Ideas JOHN TOOBY The Iron Law of Intelligence MAXIMILIAN SCHICH Thought-Stealing Machines SATYAJIT DAS Unintended Consequences ROBERT SAPOLSKY It Depends ATHENA VOULOUMANOS Will Machines Do Our Thinking for Us? BRIAN CHRISTIAN Sorry to Bother You BENJAMIN K. BERGEN Moral Machines LAURENCE C. SMITH After the Plug Is Pulled GIULIO BOCCALETTI Monitoring and Managing the Planet IAN BOGOST Panexperientialism AUBREY DE GREY When Is a Minion Not a Minion?

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As much as having our own ideas, ingenuity will lie in the proper exploration of such ready-made sets of thought. Measuring the cognitive space of all possible thoughts will be as awe-inspiring as astronomy’s exploration of the universe. Maybe Mahler’s potential Sixtieth is as awesome as his Sixth. UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES SATYAJIT DAS Former banker; author, Extreme Money and Traders, Guns, and Money In his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon identifies the confusion about the subject and object of inquiries: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” Thinking about machines that think poses more questions about human beings than about the machines or artificial intelligence.

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

Only then could we hope to manage the challenge of climate change. CHAPTER 1 Credit Power Modern finance is generally incomprehensible to ordinary men and women … The level of comprehension of many bankers and regulators is not significantly higher. It was probably designed that way. Like the wolf in the fairy tale: ‘All the better to fleece you with.’ Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns and Money (2010) Finance must be the servant, and the intelligent servant, of the community and productive industry; not their stupid master. National Executive Committee of the British Labour Party (June 1944), Full Employment and Financial Policy The global finance sector today exercises extraordinary power over society and in particular over governments, industry and labour.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

I often questioned the usefulness of journalism itself, keenly aware of the limitations of the medium to bring significant changes where they were needed. In particular, I was struck by how often people felt like slaves to an economic system over which they had no control. Financial consultant Satyajit Das writes that “the rule of extreme money is that everybody borrows, everybody saves, everybody is supposed to get wealthier. But only skilled insiders get richer, running and rigging the game.”8 This book uncovers these covert players, exposes their tactics, recognizes the financial, social, and political groups that have created this mess, and makes the case for change.

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

See also Ozgur Orhangazi, “Financialisation and Capital Accumulation in the Non-financial Corporate Sector: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation on the US Economy: 1973–2003,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 38, no. 6 (November 2008); Office of Financial Research; and Mason, “Disgorge the Cash.” 9. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 3–4, citing Julie Froud et al., Financialization and Strategy: Narrative and Numbers (London: Routledge, 2006). 10. “How Money Got Weird,” Planet Money podcast, NPR, September 30, 2011. See also Satyajit Das, Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2011). 11. Catherine Ngai and Jeffrey Dastin, “U.S. Airlines Confront Cheap Oil’s Flip Side: Costly Hedges,” Reuters, December 23, 2014. 12. Author interview with Buffett for this book. 13. Author interview with Sharma for this book. 14.

Mathematics of the Financial Markets: Financial Instruments and Derivatives Modelling, Valuation and Risk Issues by Alain Ruttiens

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, financial engineering, fixed income, implied volatility, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market microstructure, martingale, p-value, passive investing, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Satyajit Das, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, time value of money, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

RUTTIENS, Hurst coefficient, chaos theory and financial markets behavior, Proceedings of the Conference organized by The Technical Analyst, “Automated trading 2009”, London, 10/16/2009. 7 For an in-depth study of this field, see for example the PhD thesis in Applied Sciences of S. DABLEMONT, Forecasting of high frequency financial time series, Louvain University (Belgium), 2008 (available on the web). 8 Quoted by Satyajit DAS, in “Tales of leverage”, RISK, July 2009, pp. 74 and 75. 9 However, irrational expectation is not necessarily problematic, see this short but surprising paper by R. ROLL (one of the authors of the APT model), see Chapter 4, Section 4.3.5, “Rational infinitely lived asset prices must be non-stationary”, Journal of Banking & Finance, vol. 26, no. 6, 2002, pp. 1093–1097. 10 See a good introduction to behavioral finance can be found in M, SEWELL, Behavioural Finance, University of Cambridge, working paper, rev. 2010, which provides a detailed bibliography.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Many authors and thinkers have heavily influenced the ideas that have been expressed in the book. Although it would be impossible to thank them all, I would like to thank the most influential authors to whom I owe a great intellectual debt. These include Lord Adair Turner, W. Brain Arthur, Doyne Farmer, Andreas Antonopoulos, Satyajit Das, Joyce Appleby, Yanis Varoufakis, Patrick O’Sullivan, Nigel Allington, Mark Esposito, Sitabhra Sinha, Thomas Sowell, Niall Ferguson, Andy Stern, Alan Kirman, Neel Kashkari, Danny Dorling, David Graeber, Amir Sufi, Atif Mian, Vitalik Buterin, Andy Haldane, Gillian Tett, Martin Sandbu, Robert Reich, Kenneth Rogoff, Paul Beaudry, Michael Kumhof, Diane Coyle, Ben Dyson, Dirk Helbing, Guy Michaels, David Autor, Richard Gendal Brown, Tim Swanson, David Andolfatto, Paul Pfleiderer, Zoltan Pozsar, Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, César Hidalgo, and Robin Hanson, among others.

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

“When combined with the toxic ecology of bonus systems that emphasize short-term revenues, banks evolved a transactional business model. Deals and profits dominated at the expense of client interests and longer term relationships, a practice known as ‘scorched earth banking.’” (See S. Das, “Goldman Sachs’ Flawed Model,” The Independent, March 17, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/satyajit-das-goldman-sachs-flawed-model-7575865.html.) 42. A. Garfinkle, “A Conversation with Robert S. Kaplan,” The American Interest, March 15, 2012, http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1223. 43. Ibid. 44. S. Gandel, “Goldman Says It Can Profit from Europe’s Bust,” Fortune, May 31, 2012, http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/tag/gary-cohn/. 45.

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

Shawn Donnan, ‘“Deaths of despair” Surge among US White Working Class’, Financial Times, 22 March 2017. See also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (New Haven, Conn., 2020). 108. Wolff, Century of Wealth, p. 680. Wolff blamed the rising death rate on economic insecurity. 109. Satyajit Das, The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth is Unattainable and the Global Economy is in Peril (Amherst, NY, 2016), p. 299. 110. Galbraith, Inequality and Instability, p. 290. 111. Wolff, Century of Wealth, p. 38. 112. Yves-André Istel, ‘Behind the Inequality Cloud, Hope May Glimmer’, Financial Times, 1 January 2018.

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

Tarullo (2008) Banking on Basel: The Future of International Financial Regulation, Peterson Institute for International Economics. 27 Roy Kreitner (2000) ‘Speculations of Contract, or How Contract Law Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Risk’, Columbia Law Review 100 (4) (May): 1096–138. 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.

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

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks