A compelling narrative on what went wrong with our financial
system—and who’s to blame.
From an award-winning journalist who has been covering the
industry for more than a decade, The Devil’s Derivatives charts the
untold story of modern financial innovation—how investment banks
invented new financial products, how investors across the world
were wooed into buying them, how regulators were seduced by the
political rewards of easy credit, and how speculators made a
killing from the near-meltdown of the financial system.
Author Nicholas Dunbar demystifies the revolution that briefly
gave finance the same intellectual respectability as theoretical
physics. He explains how bankers worldwide created a secret
trillion-dollar machine that delivered cheap mortgages to the
masses and riches beyond dreams to the financial innovators.
Fundamental to this saga is how “the people who hated to lose”
were persuaded to accept risk by “the people who loved to win.” Why
did people come to trust and respect arcane financial tools? Who
were the bankers competing to assemble the basic components into
increasingly intricate machines? How did this process achieve its
own unstoppable momentum—ending in collapse, bailouts, and a public
outcry against the giants of finance?
Provocative and intriguing, The Devil’s Derivatives sheds
much-needed light on the forces that fueled the most brutal
economic downturn since the Great Depression.
關於作者:
Nicholas Dunbar is one of the most respected financial
journalists in the United Kingdom, covering complex derivatives and
risk management. He is the author of Inventing Money: The Story of
Long-Term Capital Management and a columnist for Reuters. In 2007,
he won the State Street award for institutional financial
journalism.