By Richard Bookstaber
Inside markets, innovation, and risk
Why do markets continue crashing and why are monetary crises more than ever prior to? because the threat supervisor to a few of the major organizations on Wall Street–from Morgan Stanley to Salomon and Citigroup–and a member of a few of the world’s greatest hedge money, from Moore Capital to Ziff Brothers and FrontPoint companions, Rick Bookstaber has visible the ghost contained in the computing device and vividly indicates us an international that's even riskier than we expect. The very issues performed to make markets more secure, have, actually, created a global that's way more risky. From the 1987 crash to Citigroup last the Salomon Arb unit, from fantastic losses at UBS to the loss of life of long term Capital administration, Bookstaber provides readers a entrance row seat to the administration judgements made through essentially the most robust monetary figures on this planet that ended in disaster, and describes the effect of his personal actions on markets and marketplace crashes. a lot of the innovation of the final 30 years has wreaked havoc at the markets and price trillions of greenbacks. A Demon of Our personal Design tells the tale of man’s try and deal with marketplace hazard and what it has wrought. within the technique of displaying what we have now performed, Bookstaber shines a gentle on what the longer term holds for a global the place capital and tool have moved from Wall road associations to elite and hugely leveraged hedge cash.
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Additional info for A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation
Example text
It finally became obvious that Jett’s trading performance was an accounting illusion with no economic substance. Kidder fired Jett, and General Electric, Kidder’s parent company, took a charge of $350 million. qxd 7/13/07 2:42 PM Page 42 A DEMON OF OUR OWN DESIGN company to PaineWebber for $600 million in late 1994. One more illustrious Wall Street name passed into history. These and any number of other screwups made risk management a hot topic on Wall Street. Merrill Lynch was early on the case because of a spectacular trading loss on its mortgage desk in 1987, followed shortly thereafter by Bankers Trust.
Meanwhile, in Orange County, California, treasurer Robert Citron had been structuring trades with the help of friends at Merrill Lynch to borrow on the short end of the yield curve to finance positions in the usually higher-yielding intermediate-term rates. Citron’s strategy depended on short-term interest rates remaining relatively low when compared with medium-term interest rates. This they did in the early 1990s, so Citron’s yield curve bet made money and everyone was happy, with no questions asked.
Because all of the firms running these programs had the same type of hedging strategies in place—albeit with different clients—in the face of a market drop we would all have to sell to increase our hedges. Palmedo’s conclusion: “You have $3 billion of positions you need to hedge. Between you and LOR and everyone else who is doing this—not counting some places that have started doing this sort of hedging in-house—there must be 20 times that amount. ” Palmedo had figured it out. In his view, actions would drive the market down even further, and this in turn would require us to increase our hedges further, which would lead to a downward spiral in prices.