Synopses & Reviews
'In F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street, a former derivatives salesman takes readers onto the trading floor of a leading investment bank\'\"and in a tell-all, no-holds-barred expos, reveals for the first time the ugly truth about these complex financial products and the people who peddle them. Writing with the same eye for telling details as Michael Lewis in Liar\"s Poker, Frank Partnoy shows how the once genteel world of investment banking has now become a place where the rallying cry is \"There\"s blood in the water. Let\"s go kill someone.\"
Partnoy was in his late twenties when he landed the job of his dreams\'\"a position in Morgan Stanley\"s Derivatives Products Group, the single most profitable division of the venerable investment bank. With vivid character sketches and a wealth of funny-yet-disturbing anecdotes, Partnoy takes us inside the culture of Morgan Stanley\"s derivatives group. Encouraged by upper management and egged on by gun-toting senior salesmen, derivatives had become a business-as-war, take-no-prisoners operation where people pored over Soldier of Fortuneand gloated when they sold a product that \"ripped off\" a client\"s face.
As he leads us through the ups and downs of his fifteen months at Morgan Stanley, Partnoy explains in plain English what derivatives are\'\"and shows how he and the other \"rocket scientists\" at the bank custom-designed these arcane financial products to dodge government regulators, encourage foreign currency speculation by pension and mutual funds, disguise risky gambles with AAA Standard & Poor\"s ratings, and avoid capital gains taxes for weathy individuals. He also details, for the first time, the deal that earned Morgan Stanley the fattest fee in Wall Street history\'\"a $74.5 million profit for devising a derivative that wiped hundreds of millions in losses off a Japanese company\"s balance sheet.
But dreaming up ever more complicated derivatives products\'\"Dollarized Yield Curve Notes, Constant Maturity Treasury Floaters, Trigger Notes, and Total Return Swaps, to name a few\'\"was never enough. For the bank to earn its fee, they had to be sold\'\"usually, as Partnoy notes, either to \"cheaters\" (fund managers who wanted riskier investments than their regulators or charters normally allowed) or to \"widows and orphans\" (unsophisticated fund managers who couldn\"t understand the risks in fine print).
Throughout the book, Partnoy gives us a trading-floor view of the disasters fueled by derivatives trading and provides the formula of greed, daring, and ingenuity that are the basic ingredients of all derivatives. Written with humor, insight, and a mounting sense of moral outrage, F.I.A.S.C.O.is both a brilliant insider\"s account of investment banking today and a blistering indictment of the largely unregulated market in derivatives\'\"a book that everyone who has a pension plan or invests in mutual funds needs to read.'
Review
"It's hard to imagine a better explanation of how clients can be misled into believing that these sophisticated hedging instruments are safe investments." Worth
Synopsis
A classic of its kind, Frank Partnoy's best-selling takes readers inside the rollicking world of derivatives on Wall Street during the mid-1990s. The book tracks Partnoy's success as a young Morgan Stanley employee who quickly becomes steeped in a culture that treats client as targets to be "blown up" or have their faces "ripped off." A decade later remains one of the most damning and prescient pictures of the speculative frenzies that grip Wall Street and the victims they can leave in their wake. In Partnoy's case they include well-publicized losses at Orange County, Barings, and Procter & Gamble, among others. A new epilogue written for this edition brings Partnoy's story--as well as the story of derivatives--up to the present.
Synopsis
F.I.A.S.C.O. is the best-selling account of Frank Partnoy's education in the jungle of high finance from 1993 to 1995. It follows the young Morgan Stanley salesman as he learns to navigate a marketplace where billions of dollars are made and lost in the creation and trading of derivatives, a type of security that almost nobody fully understands. Seen in relief against the financial meltdown of 2008, F.I.A.S.C.O. appears ever more prescient, and in a new epilogue written for this edition, Partnoy connects his story to the central role derivatives played in that crisis.
Synopsis
"Fiasco" is the shocking story of one man's education in the jungles of Wall Street. As a young derivatives salesman at Morgan Stanley, Frank Partnoy learned to buy and sell billions of dollars worth of securities that were so complex many traders themselves didn't understand them. In his behind-the-scenes look at the trading floor and the offices of one of the world's top investment firms, Partnoy recounts the macho attitudes and fiercely competitive ploys of his office mates. And he takes us to the annual drunken skeet-shooting competition, FIASCO, where he and his colleagues sharpen the killer instincts they are encouraged to use against their competitiors, their clients, and each other.
Synopsis
"Applies an intelligent, clinical eye to [an] excruciatingly complex corner of the financial world." --
Synopsis
'\'Applies an intelligent, clinical eye to [an] excruciatingly complex corner of the financial world.\' \'\"
New York Times\n
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About the Author
Frank Partnoy is the author of Infectious Greed and The Match King. He has written for the Financial Times, the New York Times, and Portfolio. He teaches law at the University of San Diego, where he lives.