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Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe Paperback – January 1, 2010

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 573 ratings

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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0349121893
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Abacus; Digital original edition (January 1, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780349121895
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0349121895
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 1.1 x 7.72 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 573 ratings

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Gillian Tett
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Gillian Tett serves as the chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times. She writes weekly columns, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues. She is also the co-founder of FT Moral Money, a twice weekly newsletter that tracks the ESG revolution in business and finance which has since grown to be a staple FT product.

Previously, Tett was the FT’s US managing editor from 2013 to 2019. She has also served as assistant editor for the FT’s markets coverage, capital markets editor, deputy editor of the Lex column, Tokyo bureau chief, Tokyo correspondent, London-based economics reporter and a reporter in Russia and Brussels.

Tett is the author of The Silo Effect, which looks at the global economy and financial system through the lens of cultural anthropology. She also authored Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe, a 2009 New York Times bestseller and Financial Book of the Year at the inaugural Spear’s Book Awards. Additionally, she wrote the 2003 book Saving the Sun: A Wall Street Gamble to Rescue Japan from its Trillion Dollar Meltdown. Her next book, Anthro-Vision, A New Way to See Life and Business will come out in June 2021.

Tett has received honorary degrees from the Carnegie Mellon, Baruch, the University of Miami in the US, and from Exeter, London and Lancaster University in the UK.

In 2014, Tett won the Royal Anthropological Institute Marsh Award. She has been named Columnist of the Year (2014), Journalist of the Year (2009)and Business Journalist of the Year (2008) at the British Press Awards, and won two awards from the Society of American Business and Economics Writers. Other awards include a President’s Medal by the British Academy (2011), and being recognized as Senior Financial Journalist of the Year (2007) by the Wincott Awards

Before joining the Financial Times in 1993, Tett was awarded a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University based on field work in the former Soviet Union. While pursuing the PhD, she freelanced for the FT and the BBC. She is a graduate of Cambridge University.

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4.4 out of 5 stars
573 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book engaging and interesting. They praise the writing quality as engaging without being too technical. The book provides a logical history and good insights into how and why it all happened. Readers consider it a valuable guide for those who want to know how the banks operate and well worth the effort.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

39 customers mention "Readability"39 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging and informative. They describe it as a comprehensive and easy-to-understand history of the 2008 financial crisis. The book is described as a thrilling page-turner that you don't want to put down. Readers appreciate the author's ability to turn this into a good story instead of a brain-dumps.

"...Tett's focus gives her a chance to shape an arching narrative, for at the beginning we see a group of young JPM bankers disporting themselves in..." Read more

"...Fool's Gold is good instructional material, brims with interesting characters, and opens a nice window on the arcane doings of a most peculiar tribe...." Read more

"...The book is well-written, focused, and surprisingly a page-turner that you don't want to put down once you start reading it...." Read more

"Great Book!..." Read more

31 customers mention "Writing quality"28 positive3 negative

Customers find the book engaging and readable. They appreciate the narrative structure that supports the technical writing. The writing is detailed and understandable, making it a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the financial crisis.

"...time, the focus on JPM didn't impede Tett from giving very clear explanations of key terms -- collateral debt obligations, asset backed securities,..." Read more

"...She's not a brilliant stylist but writes with an admirable, straightforward clarity characteristic of the best exemplars of the Journalism Tribe...." Read more

"...Her writings in the FT are insightful and timely. This book only reinforces her reputation as one of the best journalists in the field...." Read more

"...extensive knowledge of the events and subject matter with a flowing writing style and has created a highly readable account of the disaster...." Read more

28 customers mention "Understanding"28 positive0 negative

Customers find the book provides a logical history of the financial crisis and explains it from an anthropological perspective. They appreciate the thorough research and analysis, making the complex topic understandable.

"...She has a talent not just for clear explanations but for framing analogies that make the transactions understandable to non-experts like me...." Read more

"...Fool's Gold is good instructional material, brims with interesting characters, and opens a nice window on the arcane doings of a most peculiar tribe...." Read more

"...led to the development of Credit Risk products, its escalating complexity and volumes with the eagerness to get earnings with credit risk mitigation..." Read more

"...not-so-carefully thought out banking mergers that followed, provides a logical history of how and why it all happened by the men and women that..." Read more

8 customers mention "Value for money"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book a valuable guide for understanding how banks operate. They say it's worth reading and an excellent companion to Michael Lewis' book The Big Short.

"...But it is worth the effort. She just didn't crank out something fast to exploit the crises. It has a lot of depth and information." Read more

"This book is an excellent companion to Michael Lewis' book "The Big Short"...." Read more

"...This information is a powerful tool for navigating and surviving "the system." Deborah Weir, CFA Author,..." Read more

"...to get all the terms clearly planted in the head, but it was well worth the effort!" Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2016
    Gillian Tett was very shrewd in focusing her account of the financial meltdown of 2007-09 on J. P. Morgan. JPM was one of the few banks that came out on the other side looking relatively good, and I surmise that it was because they had acted with a greater degree of restraint and responsibility that they were willing to have Tett tell their story, and I assume that she had a lot of access to almost all the players. At the same time, the focus on JPM didn't impede Tett from giving very clear explanations of key terms -- collateral debt obligations, asset backed securities, derivatives, credit default swaps, monoline insurance, leverage, capitalization, structured investment vehicles, and all the rest. She has a talent not just for clear explanations but for framing analogies that make the transactions understandable to non-experts like me. Of course, her focus on JPM means that we don't get inner views on the operations of, say, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Fannie Mae -- or the Federal Reserve or the Treasury, come to that -- but there are other books that will give you some of that. Sorkin's "Too Big To Fail" has the broader scope, but the downside of his broader approach is that the narrative is a bit diffuse and the character of individual actors less developed. No reason not to read both, however.

    Tett's focus gives her a chance to shape an arching narrative, for at the beginning we see a group of young JPM bankers disporting themselves in south Florida and in effect inventing credit derivatives. At the end of the book, she brings us back to that group, now dispersed fifteen years later, and wondering what the heck happened. How did a strategy they developed with the aim of dispersing risk end up increasing it? That's the story Tett's telling, and it's clear that at the end she and the original bankers still believe that their invention was a good thing -- a tool, as one of them put it, but one that was used for purposes that the inventors never intended (or imagined, it seems), and purposes that might have been subverted with better regulation, better oversight, and more attention from the upper-levels of bank management to what the young guns were doing. More than the other books on the crisis that I've read, Tett gives me an understanding of the "shadow banking system" and its relation to the big banks. Especially chilling was the explanation of how some banks -- though not JPM -- encouraged the setting up of separate "structured investment vehicles" (SIVs) for off-the-books trading that enabled them to make a lot of money when the going was good with a "parent" bank that was in fact undercapitalized. There were capital requirements for investment banks (that is, a certain percentage of their assets had to be always available as capital just in case there was a "run" on the bank) and compliance was monitored by the Fed. However, there were no such requirements for SIVs, and because the SIV trades were not on the parent bank's balance sheet, the parent bank's capitalization appeared to be stronger than it was. If one wanted to be moralistic about it -- and why shouldn't one -- one could say that the deployment of SIVs enabled banks to evade capitalization requirements. However, when people started cashing in or seeking to sell because the value of their purchased instruments was dropping, the shadow SIV couldn't meet the demand and suddenly the parent bank was on the hook and losses started showing up on their balance sheets apparently out of nowhere. Soon, in many cases, the parent found itself short of capital too. So . . . what was the Federal Reserve to do? It's a great and sobering story.

    An obviously related matter that is very well accounted for by Tett is the degree to which it became almost impossible to put a value on mortgage-backed securities. Sellers invented complex instruments that involved the bundling together of millions of dollars in mortgage debt, which were then sliced up as "collateral debt obligation" (CDOs) and sold in "tranches'" that carried, ostensibly, varying degrees of risk. But the models on which the risk assessments were made envisioned no collapse of house prices and the tide of foreclosures that followed. To complicate matters, new instruments had been developed that bundled CDOs -- CDOs of CDOs, aka "synthetic" CDOs -- and sliced and diced THEM -- and how THEIR values could be clearly established at such a distance from the original mortgages became a major problem. When banks didn't like the fact that the market value of their instruments was falling, it was awkward, to say the least, that they couldn't give a rationale for a higher value. When a bank admits that it doesn't know what its (supposed) assets are worth, then the panic is on . . .

    The irony isn't just that an invention intended to reduce risk actually made it worse. There's the irony that many of these bankers who followed Alan Greenspan in believing that the markets always got prices right didn't like it when the market started devaluing what they were selling. People who believed that the government shouldn't get involved in financial matters -- for that would stifle "innovation" -- were asking the government, in the shape of the Federal Reserve, to enable them to achieve adequate capitalization -- and try not to call it a "bailout," please! -- that had been undermined by the "innovations" by which they set so much store. The innovators weren't the only ones to blame, of course -- mortgage lenders (many of them unregulated and unscrupulous), inattentive and greedy mortgage purchasers, ratings agencies that were financed by the very people they were rating, credulous insurance companies, and -- some would say, though Tett doesn't get into this -- the Federal Reserve itself for failing to act promptly -- all can take their shares of the blame. Tett was academically trained as a social anthropologist and her feel for the cultures of groups in banking and for the psychology of panicky investors gives her telling of this story an interesting human dimension. It's not just a matter of "baddies" and "goodies." Jamie Dimon and his team at JPM resisted the siren song of easy profits when everybody else was making gazillions, and Dimon was able, in a crucial meeting with the Fed and the Treasury, to high-mindely invoke civic responsibility -- but when Bear Stearns got in trouble and he saw a chance to gobble it up, he took it.

    NOTE: The title of this review is from Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida." In a crucial scene, the Trojans are debating whether Helen of Troy, whose kidnapping initiated the war with the Greeks, is worth keeping? The quotation I've used as a title is Troilus's assertion that yes -- we Trojans gave her the value she has, and that's what she's worth! and we're MEN, and we're going to fight to keep her. His brother Hector, tired of a seemingly endless war, isn't having it: "Brother," he says, "she is not worth what she doth cost the keeping . . ." It's a great moment in a great and disturbing play.
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  • Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2010
    Although this is too admiring an account of the JP Morgan creators of CDOs and what then became of their "innovation," it is, as others have pointed out, an excellent blow-by-blow chronology of how those particular instruments became weapons of mass financial destruction. Tett, with a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge, puts her training to good use as the FT's international finance columnist. Here, based mostly on her own reporting, she tells an important, thickly descriptive story that many others are now also taking a whack at, but perhaps not as felicitously as Tett. She's not a brilliant stylist but writes with an admirable, straightforward clarity characteristic of the best exemplars of the Journalism Tribe. Sometimes, however, I thought her somewhat lacking in expository patience; in one instance, in zipping through her story (and think of it: a lively book on derivatives!?), although it may be that she was simply striving for an effect, trying to build narrative tension by withholding a major point until that moment in the narrative that it began to become apparent, I was a bit annoyed. The text continually begged an important question and made me wait several chapters for the full implications of why the AAA-rated "super senior" debt was the ticking time bomb lurking within so many portfolios. (I presume true financial cognoscenti would have known all along, but that's certainly not me, nor was it most of her presumed readers.) But when Tett discloses it, I got it, clearly and well.

    Fool's Gold is good instructional material, brims with interesting characters, and opens a nice window on the arcane doings of a most peculiar tribe. If I have a genuine beef (as opposed to the above faux beef, more a frustration), it's probably over Tett's unfounded and redundant assertions that the JP Morgan founders of many species of derivative innovation were high minded visionaries who actually believed they were making the markets and thus the world a better place. (Bejesus, it's embedded in her subtitle.) She uses the term "ambitious" to describe many of her subjects. How does one construe the unembellished adjective "ambitious" in this particular setting? We have to figure it out ourselves. Ambitious to create social good? Ambitious for power and position? Ambitious for the Frank Sinatra objective of "having the most stuff" at one's end of days and thereby "winning"? None of these strike me as objectionable, but a hard-nosed journalist might be more compelling by not coming across as credulous in response to her subjects' high-minded self-description. It's not, after all, dishonorable to simply be piling up bonuses or augmenting the firm's asymmetric information advantage over potential investors, buyers who may not have fully understood the underpriced risk but did understand that "JP Morgan" plus "S&P AAA" were literally "money in the bank"--thereby allowing the innovators themselves to ride that advantage straight to considerable personal wealth.

    In the end, like Catherine the Great in reverse, they took, but they wept. And Ms. Tett seems to have swallowed their protestations like a rube swallows snake oil: bottle, label, cork, and all. That said, I really enjoyed, and thus recommend, Fool's Gold, but be wary of what the salesperson's NOT telling you.
    8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Nicola S.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Ottimo resoconto.
    Reviewed in Italy on May 9, 2023
    Ottimo resoconto con dettagli interessanti e ampiamente documentati. I dettagli tecnici sono ridotti al minimo e funzionali alla narrazione. Avvincente.
  • Daniel A Beaton
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very satisfied.
    Reviewed in Canada on November 16, 2019
    Very satisfied. Plus this is a very good book by a very good writer.
  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente leitura
    Reviewed in Brazil on June 22, 2019
    Leitura obrigatória para quem gosta de mercado financeiro.
  • Biktokai
    4.0 out of 5 stars Good read on the intricacies of the 2008 crisis.
    Reviewed in Mexico on June 11, 2019
    Incredible how greed transformed a great idea into the ruin of millions of people and lots of countries. A great description of how the crisis formed and transformed into one the greatest failures of modern economy. It is very descriptive so it's a good read for non-versed financial individuals.
  • Robert Broadbent
    5.0 out of 5 stars Statistics & all that
    Reviewed in Australia on June 9, 2020
    fascinating - and exemplifies how easy it is make mistakes even when using the most powerful statistical concepts if you don't keep your eye on the ball. I seriously wonder how far we are away from the next catastrophe - living on borrowed money is an another example of the background storey that caused the GFC. Plus of course the greed of traders who make their money and walk away unscathed.