Extreme Money

Long listed for Financial Times/ Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2011

Listed in Bloombergs Top Business Books of the Year 2011

One of ninemsn.com.aus best business books of 2011

" While the run-up to the global financial crisis has been well documented, Das provides his own unique insights."
Luke Faulkner, Hedge Funds Review, August 2011

"...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 Dass 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, 17 August 2011

an idiosyncratic yet withering analysis of how 30 years of financial alchemy and excessive credit have plunged us into what feels like a slow-motion depression addresses, one by one, the overarching themes of the great credit boom and bust of the late 20th century.

Black humor is Das natural medium, and he gave me a rueful chuckle every few pages. You know that a writer is hard to pigeonhole when the advance praise compares him to both Candide and Hunter S. Thompson. I prefer to view Das as a modern-day Ishmael with an attitude, a weathered seaman who has witnessed firsthand the crazed hunt of hedge-fund captains for alpha, the great whale of superior investment returns.

I could only endorse the conclusion. There is no simple, painless solution to the fix were in, Das writes. The world has to reduce debt, shrink the financial part of the economy, and change the destructive incentive structures in finance. Individuals in developed countries have to save more and spend less.
Doomsday Debt Machine Roars as Wizard Das Chides Buffett: Books, By James Pressley, Sep 19 2011

a fast paced ride...Das manages to be both an insider and outsider much of...

Satyajit Das is a globally known and respected consultant in the area of financial derivatives and risk management. He is the author of bestselling Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006, FT-Prentice Hall). He is also the author of a number of key reference works on derivatives and risk management. His works include Swaps/ Financial Derivatives Library, a 4 volume 4,200 page reference work for practitioners on derivatives, and Credit Derivatives, CDOs and Structured Credit Products. He is also the author (with Jade Novakovic) of In Search of the Pangolin: The Accidental Eco-Tourist, a unique travel narrative offering passionate and often poignant insights into the natural world and the culture of eco-travel.

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

Its 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

Fools 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       &n...