When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein - Fourth Estate Paperback - Business & Finance Non Fiction

Details Condition: Brand New Format: Paperback ISBN: 9781841155043 Publisher: Fourth Estate Overview When Genius Failed is Roger Lowenstein's gripping account of the rise and collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the hedge fund run by Wall Street legend John Meriwether and staffed with Nobel Prize-winning economists. This brand-new UK paperback traces how a fund once considered infallible nearly brought down the global financial system, offering timeless lessons on risk, leverage, and hubris for investors, students, and general readers alike. About the Book In the mid-1990s, Long-Term Capital Management was the envy of Wall Street. Founded by bond trader John Meriwether and backed by brilliant minds including two Nobel laureates, the fund promised sophisticated mathematical models delivering consistent, near risk-free returns. For a time, it delivered spectacularly, attracting billions from banks, pension funds, and wealthy individuals. Roger Lowenstein takes readers inside the fund's workings, explaining how derivatives, arbitrage, and enormous leverage combined to create extraordinary profits. But when the 1997 Asian financial crisis and 1998 Russian default sent shockwaves through global markets, LTCM's models failed catastrophically. As losses mounted into the billions within weeks, the fund's collapse threatened a chain reaction across the world's banking system. Lowenstein documents the extraordinary intervention by the Federal Reserve and a consortium of Wall Street banks who orchestrated a private-sector bailout to avert a broader crisis. Drawing on his own experience covering Wall Street, Lowenstein crafts a narrative as gripping as a thriller yet grounded in rigorous financial reporting. The book remains one of the definitive accounts of how brilliance, arrogance, and unchecked leverage can create systemic risk, and continues to be cited as essential reading for understanding later financial crises, including the 2008 crash. A dramatic, page-tur