Prologue: Hubris
Sub-prime dialects
Best in show
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
Retreat
Swiss inquisitions
Idea of an investment
Ambush
Mega presentations
Fording streams
Liquidity and leverage
Democracy of greed
Pick and pay
Black Sea real estate
Life on the margin
Racing days
Dr Doom
Extreme money
Part 1 Faith
1 Mirror of the times
Some kinda money
Trading places
The invention of money
Barbarous relic
The real thing
The Hotel New Hampshire
Collapse
Money machines
Debt clock
Money is nothing
The mirrored room
2 Money changes everything
Mrs Watanabe goes to Wall Street
FX Beauties Club
Plutonomy
Trickling down, trading up
I shop, therefore I must be!
Spend it like Beckham!
Golden years
Tax avoidance
Japanese curse
The god of our time
3 Business of business
Limited consciences
A brilliant daring speculation
Dirty tricks
Marriages and separations
The house that Jack built
Capital ideas
WWJD – watch what Jack did!
Business dealings
4 Money for sale
It’s a wonderful bank!
Pass the parcel
Loan frenzy
Plastic fantastic money
Casino banking
Confidence tricks
The Citi of money
Sign of the times
5 Yellow brick road
Monumental money
The battle of the ‘pond’
Cool Britannia
Barbarian invasions
Unlikely centres
El-Dollardo economics
The unbalanced bicycle
Foreign treasure
Fool’s gold
Liquidity vortex
6 Money honey
Printing it
Column inches
Video money
Studs, starlets
Financial porn
Speedy money
Literary money
Money for all
Part 2 Fundamentalism
7 Los Cee-Ca-Go boys
Dismal science
Chicago Interpretation
Economic politics
Academic warfare
The Gipper and the Iron Lady
Political economy
New old deal
The monetary lens
Unstable stability?
8 False gods, fake prophecies
Mystery of price
Demon of chance
Corporate M&Ms
Risk taming
Slow and quick money
Corporate practice
Everything is just noise
Perfect worlds
Financial fundamentalism
Fata morgana
Part 3 Alchemy
9 Learning to love debt
Fixed floor coverings
By the bootstraps
Leverage for everything
Cutting to the bone
Professor Jensen goes to Wall Street
Drowning by numbers
Censored loans
High opportunity bonds
Fallen angels
Junk people
Milken’s mobsters
The sweet envy of bankers
Thank you for borrowing
One bridge too far
National treasure
10 &n
Satyajit Das is an internationally respected expert in finance with 33 years’ experience. He has worked for the “sell side” (Citicorp Investment Bank and Merrill Lynch), the “buy side” (as Treasurer of the TNT Group), and as a consultant advising banks, investors, corporations, and central banks worldwide. Das is the author of many highly regarded standard reference books on derivatives and risk management. In 2006, he published the international bestseller Traders, Guns & Money, an extraordinary insider’s account of the world of derivatives trading. In Traders and in a series of speeches in 2006 entitled - The Coming Credit Crash, Das anticipated many of the problems that became apparent in the financial crisis and are still affecting the global economy. He was recently featured in Charles Ferguson’s 2010 Oscar®-winning documentary Inside Job and the 2009 BBC documentary Tricks with Risk.
Long listed for Financial Times/ Goldman Sachs Business Book of the
Year 2011 Listed in Bloomberg’s Top Business Books of the
Year 2011 One of ninemsn.com.au’s best business books of
2011 "…a powerful book…highly readable and
informative…Anyone who decodes the ratings of the three major
agencies so amusingly – CCC means "Russian roulette with five
bullets in the chamber" and D means "scrape your brains off the
wall and place in a plastic bag"- demands to be read."
Lindsay Tanner, former Australian Minister of Finance inThe
Monthly, August 2011 " While the run-up to the global financial
crisis has been well documented, Das provides his own unique
insights."
Luke Faulkner, Hedge Funds Review, August 2011 "...virtually in a
category of its own – part history, part book of financial
quotations, part cautionary tale, part textbook. It contains some
of the clearest charts about risk transfer you will find anywhere.
...Others have laid out the dire consequences of financialisation
("the conversion of everything into monetary form", in Das’s
phrase), but few have done it with a wider or more entertaining
range of references...[Extreme Money] does... reach an important,
if worrying, conclusion: financialisation may be too deep-rooted to
be torn out. As Das puts it – characteristically borrowing a line
from a movie, Inception – "the hardest virus to kill is an idea".
Andrew Hill "Eclectic Guide to the Excesses of the Crisis"
Financial Times, 17 August 2011 “an idiosyncratic yet withering
analysis of how 30 years of financial alchemy and excessive credit
have plunged us into what feels like a slow-motion depression…
addresses, one by one, the overarching themes of the great credit
boom and bust of the late 20th century. Black humor is Das’ natural
medium, and he gave me a rueful chuckle every few pages. You know
that a writer is hard to pigeonhole when the advance praise
compares him to both Candide and Hunter S. Thompson. I prefer to
view Das as a modern-day Ishmael with an attitude, a weathered
seaman who has witnessed firsthand the crazed hunt of hedge-fund
captains for alpha, the great whale of superior investment returns.
… I could only endorse the conclusion. “There is no simple,
painless solution” to the fix we’re in, Das writes. “The world has
to reduce debt, shrink the financial part of the economy, and
change the destructive incentive structures in finance. Individuals
in developed countries have to save more and spend less.”
Doomsday Debt Machine Roars as Wizard Das Chides Buffett: Books, By
James Pressley, Sep 19 2011 “ a fast paced ride...Das manages to be
both an insider and outsider – much of what he covers is based on
first hand experience...there’s no of the faux glamour that infuses
many otherwise critical books on finance.... this is a thoughtful,
interesting and unusual book that deserves to jostle for shelf
space alongside classics such as Charles Kindleberger’s Manias,
Panics and Crashes and Devil Take The Hindmost by Edward
Chancellor. It is well worth a read by anyone seeking to grasp the
broader impact of the recent crisis."
Chris Sholto Heaton, Money Week, November 2011 “...Mr Das
has a keen eye for an anecdote .... give[s] the reader
plenty of chances to chuckle at the hubris he reveals.. the views
of people like Mr Das were consistently ignored in the run-up to
the debt crisis..” More luck than judgment,
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