Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

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.

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