From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Mallaby The World''s Banker gives unusually
lucid explanations of hedge funds and their balancing of long and
short positions with complex derivatives, but what really entrances
him is their freedom from regulation, high leverage, and outsized
performance incentives. In his telling, they empower a heroic breed
of fund managers whose inspired stock picking, currency trading,
and futures contracting outsmart the efficient market. In
engrossing accounts of e
內容簡介:
The first authoritative history of hedge funds-from
their rebel beginnings to their role in defining the future of
finance.
Based on author Sebastian Mallaby''s unprecedented
access to the industry, including three hundred hours of
interviews, More Money Than God tells the inside story of
hedge funds, from their origins in the 1960s and 1970s to their
role in the financial crisis of 2007- 2009.
Wealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls
have become the It Boys of twenty-first?century capitalism. Ken
Griffin of Citadel started out trading convertible bonds from his
dorm room at Harvard. Julian Robertson staffed his hedge fund with
college athletes half his age, then he flew them to various
retreats in the Rockies and raced them up the mountains. Paul Tudor
Jones posed for a magazine photograph next to a killer shark and
happily declared that a 1929- style crash would be "total
rock-and-roll" for him. Michael Steinhardt was capable of reducing
underlings to sobs. "All I want to do is kill myself," one said.
"Can I watch?" Steinhardt responded.
Finance professors have long argued that beating the market is
impossible, and yet drawing on insights from physics, economics,
and psychology, these titans have cracked the market''s mysteries
and gone on to earn fortunes. Their innovation has transformed the
world, spawning new markets in exotic financial instruments and
rewriting the rules of capitalism.
More than just a history, More Money Than God is a window on
tomorrow''s financial system. Hedge funds have been left for dead
after past financial panics: After the stock market rout of the
early 1970s, after the bond market bloodbath of 1994, after the
collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, and yet again
after the dot-com crash in 2000. Each time, hedge funds have proved
to be survivors, and it would be wrong to bet against them now.
Banks such as CitiGroup, brokers such as Bear Stearns and Lehman
Brothers, home lenders such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, insurers
such as AIG, and money market funds run by giants such as
Fidelity-all have failed or been bailed out. But the hedge fund
industry has survived the test of 2008 far better than its rivals.
The future of finance lies in the history of hedge funds.
關於作者:
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul Volcker Senior
Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign
Relations and a Washington Post columnist. He spent thirteen years
on The Economist magazine, covering international finance in
London and serving as the bureau chief in southern Africa, Japan,
and Washington. He spent eight years on the editorial board of
The Washington Post, focusing on globalization and political
economy. His previous books are The World''s Banker 2004,
which was named as an Editor''s Choice by The New York Times,
and After Apartheid 1992, which was a New York
Times Notable Book.