When Genius Failed

Zusatztext A riveting account that reaches beyond the market landscape to say something universal about risk and triumph! about hubris and failure. The New York Times [Roger] Lowenstein has written a squalid and fascinating tale of world-class greed and! above all! hubris. Business Week Compelling . . . The fund was long cloaked in secrecy! making the story of its rise . . . and its ultimate destruction that much more fascinating. The Washington Post Story-telling journalism at its best. The Economist Informationen zum Autor Roger Lowenstein, author of the bestselling Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist , reported for The Wall Street Journal for more than a decade, and wrote the Journal 's stock market column "Heard on the Street" from 1989 to 1991 and the "Intrinsic Value" column from 1995 to 1997. He now writes a column in Smart Money magazine, and has written for The New York Times and The New Republic , among other publications. He has three children and lives in Westfield, New Jersey. Klappentext "A riveting account that reaches beyond the market landscape to say something universal about risk and triumph, about hubris and failure."-The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BUSINESSWEEK In this business classic-now with a new Afterword in which the author draws parallels to the recent financial crisis-Roger Lowenstein captures the gripping roller-coaster ride of Long-Term Capital Management. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein explains not just how the fund made and lost its money but also how the personalities of Long-Term's partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the culture of Wall Street itself contributed to both their rise and their fall. When it was founded in 1993, Long-Term was hailed as the most impressive hedge fund in history. But after four years in which the firm dazzled Wall Street as a $100 billion moneymaking juggernaut, it suddenly suffered catastrophic losses that jeopardized not only the biggest banks on Wall Street but the stability of the financial system itself. The dramatic story of Long-Term's fall is now a chilling harbinger of the crisis that would strike all of Wall Street, from Lehman Brothers to AIG, a decade later. In his new Afterword, Lowenstein shows that LTCM's implosion should be seen not as a one-off drama but as a template for market meltdowns in an age of instability-and as a wake-up call that Wall Street and government alike tragically ignored. Praise for When Genius Failed "[Roger] Lowenstein has written a squalid and fascinating tale of world-class greed and, above all, hubris."-BusinessWeek "Compelling . . . The fund was long cloaked in secrecy, making the story of its rise . . . and its ultimate destruction that much more fascinating."-The Washington Post "Story-telling journalism at its best."-The Economist Introduction The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is perched in a gray, sandstone slab in the heart of Wall Street. Though a city landmark building constructed in 1924, the bank is a muted, almost unseen presence among its lively, entrepreneurial neighbors. The area is dotted with discount stores and luncheonettes-and, almost everywhere, brokerage firms and banks. The Fed's immediate neighbors include a shoe repair stand and a teriyaki house, and also Chase Manhattan Bank; J. P. Morgan is a few blocks away. A bit further, to the west, Merrill Lynch, the people's brokerage, gazes at the Hudson River, across which lie the rest of America and most of Merrill's customers. The bank skyscrapers project an open, accommodative air, but the Fed building, a Florentine Renaissance showpiece, is distinctly forbidding. Its arched windows are encased in metal grille, and its main en...

Auteur

Roger Lowenstein, author of the bestselling Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal for more than a decade, and wrote the Journal's stock market column "Heard on the Street" from 1989 to 1991 and the "Intrinsic Value" column from 1995 to 1997. He now writes a column in Smart Money magazine, and has written for The New York Times and The New Republic, among other publications. He has three children and lives in Westfield, New Jersey.

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Introduction

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is perched in a gray, sandstone slab in the heart of Wall Street. Though a city landmark building constructed in 1924, the bank is a muted, almost unseen presence among its lively, entrepreneurial neighbors. The area is dotted with discount stores and luncheonettes-and, almost everywhere, brokerage firms and banks. The Fed's immediate neighbors include a shoe repair stand and a teriyaki house, and also Chase Manhattan Bank; J. P. Morgan is a few blocks away. A bit further, to the west, Merrill Lynch, the people's brokerage, gazes at the Hudson River, across which lie the rest of America and most of Merrill's customers. The bank skyscrapers project an open, accommodative air, but the Fed building, a Florentine Renaissance showpiece, is distinctly forbidding. Its arched windows are encased in metal grille, and its main entrance, on Liberty Street, is guarded by a row of black cast-iron sentries.

The New York Fed is only a spoke, though the most important spoke, in the U.S. Federal Reserve System, America's central bank. Because of the New York Fed's proximity to Wall Street, it acts as the eyes and ears into markets for the bank's governing board, in Washington, which is run by the oracular Alan Greenspan. William McDonough, the beefy president of the New York Fed, talks to bankers and traders often. McDonough especially wants to hear about anything that might upset markets or, in the extreme, the financial system. But McDonough tries to stay in the background. The Fed has always been a controversial regulator-a servant of the people that is elbow to elbow with Wall Street, a cloistered agency amid the democratic chaos of markets. For McDonough to intervene, even in a small way, would take a crisis, perhaps a war. And in the first days of the autumn of 1998, McDonough did intervene-and not in a small way.

The source of the trouble seemed so small, so laughably remote, as to be insignificant. But isn't it always that way? A load of tea is dumped into a harbor, an archduke is shot, and suddenly a tinderbox is lit, a crisis erupts, and the world is different. In this case, the shot was Long-Term Capital Management, a private investment partnership with its headquarters in Greenwich, Connecticut a posh suburb some forty miles from Wall Street. LTCM managed money for only one hundred investors, it employed not quite two hundred people, and surely not one American in a hundred had ever heard of it. Indeed, five years earlier, LTCM had not even existed.

But on the Wednesday afternoon of September 2-3, 1998, Long-Term did not seem small. On account of a crisis at LTCM, McDonough had summoned-- invited," in the Fed's restrained idiom-the heads of every major Wall Street bank. For the first time, the chiefs of Bankers Trust, Bear Stearns, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Salomon Smith Barney gathered under the oil portraits in the Fed's tenth-floor boardroom-not to bail out a Latin American nation but to consider a rescue of one of their own. The chairman of the New York Stock Exchange joined them, as did representatives from major European banks. Unaccustomed to hosting such a large gathering, the Fed did not have enough leather-backed chairs to go around, so the chief executives had to squeeze into folding metal seats.

Although McDonough was a public official, the meeting was secret. As far as the public knew, America was in the salad days of one of history's great bull markets, although recently, as in many previou…