Monday, May 4, 2009

Roger Lowenstein - When Genius Failed

I saw this book lying on the shelf in the company library and picked it up on a whim. It was a quick read. More than anything else, this shows the importance of marketing in high finance (in the case of LTCM, the mystique of quants and modeling is what was sold).

I do have a few criticisms of style: Greenspan is always "oracular", and banks tend to "squawk" (for some reason), but other than that the writing is crisp and straight-forward.

It was also amusing, just the next day after I finished reading this book, to see an article about Jon Corzine in The Times (during the LTCM saga he was a Goldman executive, and now he is the governor of New Jersey).

Since we have a binary rating system here, I suppose I will have to go with "impressed", though that might imply a slightly too-high level of enthusiasm. But it was interesting, so thumbs up.

1 comment:

ShockingSchadenfreude said...

In my opinion, this is a brilliant book assuming you can read between the lines.

When I first started working on Wall St., I had asked what people were doing to prevent this, and the response was "we've solved that problem."

After hubris, comes nemesis.