By the late nineties, I had lost faith in the industry where I had made a living for twenty years. Deregulation on Wall St and in the City had left investment banking with a business model riddled with conflict of interest. The rewards spiralled out of control and the businesses became too complicated for the regulators to supervise. I have a doctorate in history and had been a top-ranked investment analyst in several sectors. I took an idea to Penguin and my first book, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism, was published in 2001. I've since written six more, and contributed regularly to the Financial Times and BBC.
I wrote
The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market
This is the book that lifted the lid on Wall St’s roaring eighties. It’s funny, personal, and true to life. It exposes the basic truth in investment banking: the customer comes second. "Who do you work for, this guy or Salomon Brothers?" a shame-faced Lewis is asked by his boss after inadvertently selling a bad bond to an unsuspecting client. It’s a question that every investment banker faces at some time in their career and it’s all laid bare in the book that established a genre.
Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street's premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar's Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years-a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game…
This is the definitive book about events in and around the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the most globally significant banking crash since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The centerpiece is the brilliantly told, ‘in-the-room’ drama of the weekend Lehman Brothers collapsed. Tense and fearless, it is a vivid characterisation of the big beasts responsible for both the disaster and the rescue and of the desperate interplay between them.
They were masters of the financial universe, flying in private jets and raking in billions. They thought they were too big to fail. Yet they would bring the world to its knees.
Andrew Ross Sorkin, the news-breaking New York Times journalist, delivers the first true in-the-room account of the most powerful men and women at the eye of the financial storm - from reviled Lehman Brothers CEO Dick 'the gorilla' Fuld, to banking whiz Jamie Dimon, from bullish Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to AIG's Joseph Cassano, dubbed 'The Man Who Crashed the…
The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 might look like a storm that blew up out of nowhere but it had been brewing for a decade or more in the murky world of structured credit. Written by one of the first journalists to see the problem coming and skillfully unravelling complexity through the story of a small band of derivatives experts, Fool’s Gold shows the unintended consequences of financial innovation as it spun out of control.
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…
Discrete, mysterious, and powerful, Wall St’s great financial institutions shaped corporate America in the 20th century and none more so than Lazard Freres. But towards the end of the century, as competitors scaled up, Lazard was distracted by a power struggle involving hard-charging Wall St bankers and an inscrutable French billionaire. Who really played the winning hand? This book reveals all!
A grand and revelatory portrait of Wall Street’s most storied investment bank
Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started…
What does a book written in the 1950s about a financial crash in the 1920s have to tell us about modern finance? The answer is ‘everything you need to know.’ This financial classic, barely 200 pages long, shows how greed, hubris, and illusion brought about Wall Street’s first great crash. Today’s financial products might be more complicated than those in Galbraith’s book but the tricks of the trade are not. This elegant account is a ‘must-read’ for anyone wanting to understand the people and institutions who drive markets.
'One of the most engrossing books I have ever read' Daily Telegraph
John Kenneth Galbraith's now-classic account of the 1929 stock market collapse remains the definitive book on the most disastrous cycle of boom and bust in modern times.
Vividly depicting the causes, effects, aftermath and long-term consequences of financial meltdown, Galbraith also describes the people and the corporations who were affected by the catastrophe. With its depiction of the 'gold-rush fantasy' ingrained in America's psychology, The Great Crash 1929 remains a penetrating study of human greed and folly.
Boardroom feuds, grandiose dreams, and a struggle for supremacy between rival camps at one of Britain’s biggest banks: Barclays' journey from an old Quaker bank to a full-throttle capitalist machine had it all. It is also a paradigm for Britain's social and economic life as the City moved from the edge of the economy to its very centre. The Barclays story is at the heart of that rise, creating unprecedented prosperity for a tiny number before leaving their reputations in tatters.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
