- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Little, Brown (30 April 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1408701642
- ISBN-13: 978-1408701645
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.2 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 28,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
This weekend, trade in any two eligible items at Amazon.co.uk and you'll get an additional £5 Gift Card. Terms and conditions apply. Ends Sunday, February 5. Visit the Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
`A truly gripping narrative . . . The fact that Tett is able to reproduce such raw private communications is a tribute to her journalistic abilities'
--Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times
--Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times
Review
`Her blow-by-blow story is an impressive piece of detective work. She pulls back the curtain on a closed, unaccountable world of finance'
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
57 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
She should have called it: The story of the J.P. Morgan CDO desk,
This review is from: Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Hardcover)
The book's content is less ambitious that its titles suggests. It is about how a team of derivative experts at J.P. Morgan contributed to the development of the securities, including credit default swaps and options, which led to the financial crisis. That's reasonably interesting, but it's a fairly narrow perspective on what happened. The collapse of Lehman is covered in a few pages. She doesn't even mention that the major banks were manipulating Libor. At points it sounds like she is writing to protect her sources. There is a lot about what a great CEO Jamie Dimon is at JP Morgan chase. She says the JPM team shouldn't be blamed for other banks misusing the derivatives they created. I've never heard anyone blame them for it.
There are a few mistakes: the internet bubble of 1999 was equity driven, not debt fueled. She uses acronyms too often, and there are no anecdotes explaining why the subprime default rates were so high. Indeed, she is very light on what happened in the subprime sector. The corruption there could have really livened up her book, and illuminated the causes of the crash. I learnt more about the crisis from the introduction to Niall Ferguson's Financial History of the World.
82 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insight into the human drama,
By
This review is from: Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Hardcover)
This is the first properly considered book about the financial crisis to be published. Gillian Tett is well known as a financial journalist (working for the FT in London). Accordingly, you might think this book has been rushed out to simply rehearse the emerging consensus view on the causes of the financial crisis. Not so! This is a very impressive volume. To start with - Gillian Tett knows the spider's web of complex structured products at the heart of this story well enough to be able to describe it simply. That is the mark of true mastery. What is best about this book, however, is the way it tells the human story. That is the story of the innovators at J.P. Morgan who created these products and realised at an early stage that they left behind a kind of nuclear waste that needed to be properly contained - particularly so in relation to derivatives based on residential mortgages (the default pattern of which was essentially unknowable until recently). Other banks didn't realise this (or didn't care) and just left that waste sitting on their balance sheets, or worse, shifted it to quasi-subsidiary vehicles where it was hidden and supported by short-term funding that quickly evaporated at the first sign of trouble. Ultimately, the book shows that financial innovation is not a problem per se - it's the use to which such innovation was put that created problems.
Overall - this is a very informative and interesting read which has clearly been in the planning for some time. A well considered book.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heads they win, Tails we lose,
By
This review is from: Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Hardcover)
This is a gripping read from an author who is sure of her facts and can tell the true story of the banking crisis clearly and dramatically. Because she was one of the first to forecast financial disaster she has become a pundit on the subject and there is rarely a day when Gillian Tett is not on television or radio. Thanks to a useful glossary the reader is guided through the murky world of what Vince Cable dubbed "casino banking" with explanations of "Credit Default Swaps", "Mortgage-Backed Bond Security", the surreal sounding "Gaussian Copula" and the like. What started out as a well-thought out investment strategy turned into a glorified pyramid selling spree in order to generate bank profits, and therby bonuses. The author has a degree in anthropology and this gives the book a human interest beyond the world of high finance. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to understand the greatest economic trauma of our times.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
