Extreme Money

Satyajit Ray

Description

The human race created money and finance. But our inventions re-create us. Mankind mistook money—a lubricant of society and human well-being—for an end in itself. Finance; the monetary shadow of real things; came to dominate human reality. Extreme Money tells the story of how this happened—and; in so doing; it tells the story of the modern world. Bestselling author Satyajit Das draws on 33 years of personal experience at the heart of modern global finance to narrate this story. Das reveals the spectacular; dangerous money games that have generated increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth; Ponzi prosperity; sophistication; and wealth—while endangering the jobs; possessions; and futures of virtually everyone outside the financial industry. You’ll learn how everything from home mortgages to climate change has become financialized; as vast fortunes are generated by individuals who build nothing of lasting value. Das shows how “extreme money” has become even more unreal; how “voodoo banking” continues to generate massive phony profits even now; and how a new generation of “Masters of the Universe” has come to dominate the world.

Sujets

• Gestion et management

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184753714
• Langue: English

Extrait

SATYAJIT DAS
Extreme Money
The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
Contents
Dedication
Figures and tables
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. Private Vices
Excess returns
Sexy private equity
Inflight entertainment
Selling the family silver
Holey dollar
Money for nothing
Public squalor, private profits
Locust plagues
Vain capital
Amateur hour
Turbulence
11. Dice With Debt
Securitisation recipes
Slice and dice
Almost as safe as houses
Synthetic stuff
Get copula-ed
Sticky mess
Several houses of one’s own
Cheaper cuts of mortgage
ARMs race
Heroes for one day
12. The Doomsday Debt Machine
Alpha-debt soup
In the shadow of debt
Virtual loans
Counting on the abacus
Intellectual masturbation
Used to be smart
Chain reaction
Phase transition
Terra incognita
13. Risk Supermarkets
Mind your derivatives
Particle finance
Hedging your bets
Sewer bonds
Harvard case studies
The Italian job
Betting your hedge
TARDIS trades
I will kill you later
First to lose
Toxic municipal siblings
Playing swaps and robbers
The Greek job
Madman’s games
14. Financial Arms Race
Shock-Gen
Evil Kerviel
Soldier monks
Mystère Kerviel
Risk is our business
Free money
Credit’s fatal attraction
Post-modern contradictions
Derivative deconstruction
Piñata parties
15. Woodstock For Hedge Funds
Keeping up with the Joneses
In search of Moby Dick
Style gurus
Magic wand
Lucky man
Sharpe practice
Embedded
In the long run, we are all dead
The game
The more things change
Hedgestock
16. Minsky Machines
Affinities and curses
Crowded hours
Crime without punishment
Fast cars, slow hedge funds
Fast cornering
Children of privilege
Make money not war
Part 4 Oligarchy
17. War Games
Borrowed times
Liquidity factory
Six degrees of separation
Paper chains
Toxic pathologies
Relying on the Zohar
Blind capital
Rent collectors
Best in best possible world
18. Shell Games
Central bank republics
Games of old maid
Protection rackets
Stockholm Syndrome
Free speech
No accounting for values
Mark to make believe
Out of sight
Creeping crumble
Management by neglect
Directing traffic
19. Cult of Risk
Growth for all seasons
Financial groupthink
Celebrity central banking
Dealing with dissent
Noneofuscouldanode
Je ne regrette rien!
Last supper
20. Masters of the Universe
Money illusions
Factories for unhappy people
War versus money
Shop floors
Misinformed
Smiling and killing
Pay grades
Much more than this
Attached
Bonus season
Plenty
Tipping points
21. Financial Nihilism
Cosmetic consumption
The physical impossibility of spending the amount earned by someone living
Celebrity finance
Manqué not monkey
Wizard and muggles
In the midnight hour
Last rites
Safe as
Snuff movies
Silent mass murder
Part 5 Cracks
22. Financial Gravity
Air pockets
Mass extinction
ER
This is not a seminar!
ICU
Country for sale
Crying games
Newtonian economics
23. Unusually Uncertain
Botox economics
China syndrome
Regulatory dialectic
Patient zero
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide
Built to fail
End of Ponzi prosperity?
Losing the commanding heights
Zen finance
Unknown unknowns
Epilogue: Nemesis
Marginal
Widows and orphans
Nausea
Crunch porn, crash lit
Economic rock stars
Showtime
Meta money
Economic trivialities
This time, it is no different!
Suicide is painless
The turning world
Notes
Select bibliography
Publisher s acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Praise for Extreme Money
A true insider s devastating analysis of the financial alchemy of the last 30 years and its destructive consequences. With his intimate first-hand knowledge, Das takes a knife to global finance and financiers to reveal their inner workings without fear or favour.
Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics at NYU Stern School of Business and Chairman of Roubini Global Economics
Das describes the causes of the financial crisis with the insight and understanding of a financial wizard, the candour and objectivity of an impartial observer, and a wry sense of humour that reveals the folly in it all.
Brooksley Born, former chairperson of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
The best book yet to come out of the financial crisis. Satyajit Das is a graceful, witty writer, with an unusually broad range of reference. He is also a long-time master of the arcana of the netherworlds of finance, and nicely balances historical sweep with illuminating detail. Extreme Money is lively, scathing, and wise.
Charles Morris, author of The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and The Great Credit Crash
Like Hunter S. Thompson s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , Extreme Money launches you into a fascinating and disturbing alternative view of reality. But now greed predominates, the distorted world of finance is completely global, and the people making crazy decisions can ruin us all. This is an informative, entertaining, and deeply scary account of Hades s new realm. Read it while you can.
Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management and author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown
You know when Lewis Carroll, Max Weber, Alan Greenspan, and Sigmund Freud all appear on the same early page that you are about to read an intellectual tour de force. Satyajit Das is an authoritative and colourful critic of modern markets, and here he weaves financial history and popular culture into an entertaining and blistering social critique of how so many people have come to chase endless financial reflections of the real economy. Extreme Money speaks truth to power.
Frank Partnoy, George E. Barrett Professor of Law and Finance at the University of San Diego and author of F.I.A.S.C.O, Infectious Greed and The Match King
Extreme Money is a highly entertaining, richly detailed account of how fools and charlatans, masquerading as investment professionals, pillage the world economy. Satyajit Das is modern finance's Candide: a cool, precise, globe-trotting observer of decades of delusion and rapacity. The serial revelations of his picaresque tour will amuse, enlighten and enrage both lay people and market insiders.
Yves Smith, founder of www.nakedcapitalism.com and author of Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism
A rich analysis told with colour and verve.
Philip Augar, author of Reckless: The Rise and Fall of the City
Most books written about the global financial crisis have been written by those who only became wise after the event. Satyajit Das is not one of them. Long before the collapse of Lehman Brothers he warned about the flaws in modern finance. Extreme Money is his account of what went wrong. Read it!
Edward Chancellor, member of GMO s asset allocation team and author of Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
It is hard to change gods. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed , 1872
For Jade Novakovic without whom there is nothing
Figures and tables
Figure 4.1 Traditional banking model
Figure 4.2 Originate-to-distribute model
Figure 11.1 Asset-backed security structure
Figure 11.2 Asset-backed security tranches
Figure 11.3 Synthetic CDO
Figure 11.4 Synthetic CDO tranches
Figure 11.5 Mortgage chain
Figure 12.1 S