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Amazon.co.uk Review
Ugly Americans documents the "Wild East" of the mid-1990s, where young, brilliant and hypercompetitive traders became "hedge fund cowboys", manipulating loopholes in an outdated and inefficient Asian financial system to rake in millions. Using a concept called arbitrage, they made their fortunes mainly on minute shifts in stocks being sold on the Nikkei, the Japanese stock market, collapsing banks and nearly bankrupting the Japanese economy in the process. Other schemes were also concocted, most of which were technically legal, though certainly unethical. This true story revolves around "John Malcolm", who, in exchange for anonymity, agreed to give Ben Mezrich all the access and information he needed to write this book. As a recent Princeton graduate in the mid-1990s, Malcolm accepted an undefined job offer from an American expatriate in Japan to work in the investments field. Though he had no prior experience, he facilitated 25 million dollars worth of trades on his first day on the job, and it just got more exciting from there. He soon joined a small group of expatriates, all in their 20s and mostly Ivy League graduates, who lived like rock stars, thriving on the stress and excitement of their jobs to create their own steroid versions of the American Dream half a world away.
Ugly Americans documents the "Wild East" of the mid-1990s, where young, brilliant and hypercompetitive traders became "hedge fund cowboys", manipulating loopholes in an outdated and inefficient Asian financial system to rake in millions. Using a concept called arbitrage, they made their fortunes mainly on minute shifts in stocks being sold on the Nikkei, the Japanese stock market, collapsing banks and nearly bankrupting the Japanese economy in the process. Other schemes were also concocted, most of which were technically legal, though certainly unethical. This true story revolves around "John Malcolm", who, in exchange for anonymity, agreed to give Ben Mezrich all the access and information he needed to write this book. As a recent Princeton graduate in the mid-1990s, Malcolm accepted an undefined job offer from an American expatriate in Japan to work in the investments field. Though he had no prior experience, he facilitated 25 million dollars worth of trades on his first day on the job, and it just got more exciting from there. He soon joined a small group of expatriates, all in their 20s and mostly Ivy League graduates, who lived like rock stars, thriving on the stress and excitement of their jobs to create their own steroid versions of the American Dream half a world away.
Mezrich tells this riveting story well, incorporating elements of the culture into his narrative, including the infamous and pervasive Japanese "Water Trade", or sex business, romantic intrigue and even run-ins with the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Though there is little real analysis of their financial dealings and how they ultimately changed the rules of finance in Asia, this entertaining page turner does offer a glimpse into a world little explored in print until now. --Shawn Carkonen, Amazon.com
Review
Sex, money, and more than a whiff of criminal activity enliven this too-good-to-be-true real-life business drama. With the exception of Bringing Down the House (2002), which profiled six MIT students who scammed the Vegas casinos, Mezrich has made a career in fictional thrillers (Reaper, 1998, etc.), which doesn't make him unqualified to write nonfiction but definitely makes him suspect when the going gets pulpy. After an author's note that tells us all the main characters' names have been changed, we meet our bright young star: John Malcolm, an ex-Princeton football player who lands a job as a Nikkei trader in Osaka in the 1990s, working for Kidder Peabody superstar Dean Carney. After an accounting screw-up leaves Malcolm's division unemployed, he gets hired by Barings and meets the venerable British bank's Singapore hotshot, Nick Leeson. In January 1995, when an earthquake rattles Japan and the Nikkei, it turns out that not only had Leeson had been betting billions on the Nikkei rising, he'd been betting the company's own money with no client to back it up. The resulting catastrophe almost destroyed Barings, which laid off 1,200 people, including Malcolm. He bounced back with a job at Carney's hot new hedge fund, where rules were broken and scruples shattered in the name of ungodly amounts of profit. Here's where the tale begins to resemble one of Mezrich's thrillers: the Yakuza show up, and there's even a gorgeous girlfriend whispering get-out-before-it's-too-late warnings in Malcolm's ear. The author knows how to plot his story, giving his protagonist moral dilemmas to solve at regular, well-timed intervals and painting it all against a Boiler Room-like background of easy money, sports cars, and frat-boy Americans going wild in Tokyo's seedy underbelly. But the beats are too perfectly synchronized, the action too perfectly dramatic, and the people too reminiscent of stock movie characters. Undeniably fun, but readers may well wonder just how much of this could actually be true. (Kirkus Reviews)
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62% buy the item featured on this page: Ugly Americans |
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17% buy Bringing Down the House: How Six Students Took Vegas for Millions £5.79 |
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15% buy Breaking Vegas £5.99 |
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3% buy Rigged£5.99 |
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