Gillian Tett

"Fool's Gold" tells the fascinating, unknown story behind the current financial crisis.

How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe

Fool's Gold

Paul Hayes

Great read, easy, fast paced and informative. Recommend to anybody who wants to understand the recent financial crisis and how it happened.

Lisa Miller

After reading The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis I decided to follow up with this book. It follows the birth of the financial tools in the 80's by a group at J. P. Morgan that eventually led to the Great Financial Crisis in 2008. Much broader in scope both in the period of time it covers and the who it covers (it's main focus is J. P Morgan both on Wall Street and in London). It's paints the bigger picture but lacks the vivacity of the Big Short.

From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her news-breaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool’s Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown. Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the “Morgan Mafia,” as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team’s bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control. The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the “shadow banking” world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk. But when the Morgan team’s derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted—through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed—by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch—even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling—catastrophe followed. Tett’s access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank’s escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown. A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool’s Gold is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.

Fool's Gold How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe

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