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Title details for Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett - Wait list

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
Stephen Hoye
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Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia"—as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—Gillian Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.


The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk.


But when the Morgan team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom and was perverted—through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed—by such titans of banking as Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch (even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling), catastrophe followed. Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.


A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool's Gold is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 20, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400192830
      • File size: 291962 KB
      • Duration: 10:08:15

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      With the worst of the credit crisis behind us, journalists continue to work to explain to Joe Public what went wrong. Gillian Tett of the UK's FINANCIAL TIMES has made a fine contribution with her account of J.P. Morgan's, mostly unwitting, role in the disaster. Stephen Hoye deftly navigates a text filled with finance jargon and acronyms, and by the end listeners may understand more about CDOs, CDSs and SIVs than the bankers who bought them. Hoye's decision to use accents--always dubious when reading a work of journalism--is regrettable, but this is a quibble as there's little dialogue in the text. And one has to admit--his Bronx accent is not too bad. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 4, 2009
      At once a gripping narrative, an education in derivatives, and a most lucid origin-story for the current financial meltdown, it's no surprise the author of this volume is an award-winning Financial Times journalist. Taking readers back to the invention of credit-derivative obligations (CDOs) at J. P. Morgan in 1994, and the subsequent exponential growth of that market, Tett (Saving the Sun) deploys a remarkable sense of pacing, generating real suspense over rapidly inflating debt on bank balance sheets; by the time Lehman Brothers fails, the book has become a bonafide page-turner. Tett explains how credit derivatives seemed a win-win for the financial world, freeing up capital, increasing profits, and diversifying risk, but makes the missteps equally clear as the industry hurtles toward a largely-unforeseen wave of loan defaults (the worst since the Great Depression). Interestingly, J.P. Morgan was one of a handful of banks sufficiently prescient to imagine this "perfect storm" of simultaneous defaults, and so never became over-reliant on CDOs. Ignoring the tacked-on, preachy epilogue (in which Tett advocates her specialty, social anthropology, as a way to avert future such crises), Tett's explosive, illuminating narrative is the one to read for anyone confused by the present financial mess.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 30, 2009
      Tett's complex and well-written narrative of J.P. Morgan's role in the financial meltdown lends itself awkwardly to the audio format, in part because general readers who are not specialists in the workings of financial derivatives will find themselves lost in a sea of acronyms and specialized terminology without the useful glossary at the back of the print book. Stephen Hoye's talents don't shine here, with an on-again/off-again British accent for one of the key players and a plodding delivery of some portions of the labyrinthine story. An abridgment could have helped to retain listener interest without becoming ensnared in intricately detailed descriptions of events; such descriptions were the lifeblood of Tett's sophisticated print book, but they slow the audio version significantly. A Free Press hardcover (Reviews, June 8).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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