Book Review: A Demon of Our Own Design (Bookstaber)

Aug 22nd, 2007 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Regulation, Institutional Investing

Great news everyone!  After decades of waiting, we finally know who caused the Crash of ‘87.  It was Richard Bookstaber, then a trader at Morgan Stanley and now a hedge fund manager and author of a new book Demons of Our Own Design.   Even better, he takes the blame for the LTCM debacle (sort of).  Bookstaber reveals all on page one of his book:

While it is not strictly true that I caused the two great financial crises of the last twentieth century – the 1987 stock market crash and the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) debacle 11 years later – let’s just say I was in the vicinity.  If Wall Street is the economy’s powerhouse, I was definitely one of the guys fiddling with the controls.

The book’s publisher describes the page-turner as:

a front row seat to the management decisions made by some of the most powerful financial figures in the world that led to catastrophe, and describes the impact of his activities on markets and market crashes

But A Demon of Our Own Design is really three books in one.  The first 140 pages read like a Wall Street tell-all book containing detailed and colourful account of meetings in oak-paneled offices concerning gargantuan sums of money.

More…


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