Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It

Nicholas Dunbar

Wiley, 2000 - Business & Economics - 245 pages

LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) - a portmfolio of bonds worth 100 billion - owned 5% of the global interest rate swap market plus other derivatives, it had a notional value of 1 trillion. The people involved in the LTCM were the "dream team": Robert Merton and Myron Scholes (both Nobel Prize winners for their work on option pricing), John Meriwether (the former vice-chairman of Salomon Brothers and one-time Wall Street star of bond trading), and David Mullins (ex-Harvard Business School Professor and previously vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve). Even with all this financial expertise, in September 1998, LTCM collapsed, making financial headline news across the world and requiring 14 investment banks to provide 3.6 billion in cash to stop the fund going under and dragging each of them down as well.

Contents

• The Theory of Speculation: 1
• Trading in Time: 45
• The Garden of Forking Paths: 67

About the author

NICHOLAS DUNBAR studied physics in the UK at Manchester and Cambridge and finally in the US at Harvard University, where he gained a Master's degree in earth and planetary sciences. During this period his interests ranged from quantum mechanics and black holes to evolution and the history of global climate change. His teachers included Stephen Hawking at Cambridge and Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard. In 1990, Dunbar decided to leave academia. He spent the next few years working in feature films and television, in a wide range of capacities. In 1996, after launching the television production company Flicker Films, a chance encounter with some old Harvard friends set him on a new path of finance and science writing, focusing on the derivatives industry. In 1998, he joined Risk magazine as technical editor. He is 33 and lives in London.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It; Inventing Money: The Story of Long-term Capital Management and the Legends Behind it, Nicholas Dunbar
• Author: Nicholas Dunbar
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Wiley, 2000
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Oct 14, 2008
• ISBN: 0471899992, 9780471899990
• Length: 245 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Corporate & Business History; Business & Economics / Economic History; Business & Economics / Economics / Theory; Business & Economics / Finance / General; Business & Economics / General; Business & Economics / Investments & Securities / General; Business & Economics / Investments & Securities / Stocks