When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

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Fourth Estate, 2001 - Business & Economics - 264 pages
It became the banks' own favourite fund and from its inception achieved a run of dizzyingly spectacular returns. New investors barged each other aside to get their investment money into LTCM's hands. But as competitors began to mimic Meriweather's fund, he altered strategy to maintain the fund's performance, leveraging capital with credit on a scale not fully understood and never seen before. When the markets in Indonesia, South America and Russia crashed in 1998 LCTM's investments crashed with them and mountainous debts accumulated. The fund was in melt-down, and threatening to bring down into its trillion-dollar black hole a host of financial institutions from New York to Switzerland. It is a tale of vivid characters, overwheening ambition and perilous drama told, in Roger Lowenstein's hands, with style and panache.

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About the author (2001)

Roger Lowenstein, author of the bestselling Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal for over a decade and wrote the stock-market column "Heard on the Street" from 1989 to 1991 and the "Intrinsic Value" column from 1995 to 1997. He now writes a column in SmartMoney magazine and has written for The New York Times and The New Republic, among other publications. He has three children and lives in Westfield, New Jersey.

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