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Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
- By Satyajit Das
- Published Aug 7, 2011 by FT Press.
- Copyright 2012
- Dimensions: 6" x 9"
- Pages: 480
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-13-279007-6
- ISBN-13: 978-0-13-279007-9
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Product Author Bios
Satyajit Das (Sydney, Australia) 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 consultant advising banks, investors, corporations, and central banks worldwide. Das is 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. He was recently featured in Charles Ferguson's 2010 Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job.
The human race created money and finance: then, our inventions recreated us. In Extreme Money, best-selling author and global finance expert Satyajit Das tells how this happened and what it means. Das reveals the spectacular, dangerous money games that are generating increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth, prosperity, and wealth--while endangering the jobs, possessions, and futures of virtually everyone outside finance.
"...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 (August 17, 2011)
Extreme Money named to the longlist for the 2011 FT and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.
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64 of 69 people found the following review helpful
Moving away the mirrors, Blowing away the smoke of Financial Engineering, By
This review is from: Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This is a "tell all" book surrounding the financial disasters that most people have heard about, but only a few understand. The author provides with high energy and more metaphors than atoms in the universe the financial underpinnings that created all the financial disasters over the past five years. This includes the failure of many of the big names of finance as well as those implicated in the sub-prime mortgage diabolical. A majority financial collapses leaving investors holding the bag is outlined in this book. More importantly, the book attempts to provide the "math" or the structure of how the financial mechanisms worked to produce large virtual gains leading ultimately to literal financial bankruptcy.The author himself is a financial advisor with over 30 years of experience. The basic thread or meta message through the book is the inability to analyze and sometimes the resistance to accept the inherent risk in the investment structures that were producing huge... Read more
53 of 60 people found the following review helpful
Masters, again..., By
This review is from: Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Satyajit Das presents an erudite, insider's view of the world of very high finance, far removed from the every day money transactions on "Main Street." This world is as different, and as counter-intuitive, as quantum mechanics is from classical Newtonian physics. Das has "paid his dues," working on both the "buy" and "sell" side in this ethereal world for 33 years. His 2006 book Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and unknowns in the dazzling world of derivatives Revised edition (Financial Times Series) raised the specter of a "crash," due to leverage and the concentration of economic power, as opposed to the carefully promoted image of "risk management" that has been flogged by the salesmen for derivatives, including Alan Greenspan. As is well-known, the crash did come in 2008, requiring a massive government bailout as it is politely called (in...
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35 of 39 people found the following review helpful
Exhaustive, exhausting, uncoordinated, poorly focussed,
This review is from: Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Extreme Money is Satyajit Das's account of how a culture of corruption led to the great financial and mortage collapse at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and the ensuing financial and monetary crises. It mixes scenes depicting actors at extremes of elation and despondency with the history of events, using the purchase of works of art as markers and icons for the mood and the people.At the book's core is a solid chronology and a lot of detail, and the book is valuable for that. But it disappointed me in a number of ways. First, the story begins with mood and atmosphere, then lurches into finance and back to atmosphere without a clear alignment between one and the other. There is no guiding structure (eg. atmosphere-event-atmosphere). Second, the level of detail is inconsistent, alternately glossing over details of financial instruments and swamping the reader in them. Often the reader is left searching for an explanation of how a financial... Read more |
Online Sample Chapter
Extreme Money: Mirror of the Times
Table of Contents
Prologue: Hubris 1
Part I: Faith
Chapter 1: Mirror of the Times 21
Chapter 2: Money Changes Everything 38
Chapter 3: Business of Business 52
Chapter 4: Money for Sale 65
Chapter 5: Yellow Brick Road 78
Chapter 6: Money Honey 89
Part II: Fundamentalism
Chapter 7: Los Cee-Ca-Go Boys 101
Chapter 8: False Gods, Fake Prophecies 116
Part III: Alchemy
Chapter 9: Learning to Love Debt 133
Chapter 10: Private Vices 153
Chapter 11: Dice with Debt 168
Chapter 12: The Doomsday Debt Machine 188
Chapter 13: Risk Supermarkets 208
Chapter 14: Financial Arms Race 226
Chapter 15: Woodstock for Hedge Funds 239
Chapter 16: Minsky Machines 253
Part IV: Oligarchy
Chapter 17: War Games 264
Chapter 18: Shell Games 279
Chapter 19: Cult of Risk 294
Chapter 20: Masters of the Universe 307
Chapter 21: Financial Nihilism 321
Part V: Cracks
Chapter 22: Financial Gravity 337
Chapter 23: Unusually Uncertain 348
Epilogue: Nemesis 367
Notes 384
Select Bibliography 420
Index 429
Sample Pages
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Errata
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