Volatility and Correlation: The Perfect Hedger and the Fox (Wiley Finance) Review

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(More customer reviews)I have read this text from cover to cover twice. It is much easier to understand its organization the second time around. The reviewer who complained that it feels disjointed perhaps simply didn't connect with the key messages running through the book. Having assumed (incorrectly) that the intro chapters were a bunch of fluff typical of these texts, I glossed over the intro the first time around. You'll benefit greatly if you scan the book, then go re-read the intro. It's all there put together painstakingly by an author who must have spent an inordinate amount of care and effort trying to make his points clear.
Another reviewer complains that it's verbose. Perhaps, but Rebonato really drives his points home by explaining the same thing from multiple angles and repeats himself at just the right points to keep you on the right track. I can see how somebody impatient can get annoyed by it, but if you are willing to invest time and read his prose - especially the intro chapters - carefully, the insight gained is definitely worth it. Not verbose at all in my view. Every paragraph has a purpose if you understand what he's trying to communicate.
It's an advanced text. Don't waste your time if you just learned what a call option it. There are more relevant texts for you out there. You should also have covered basics of stochastic calculus (see Neftci for one). For somebody who has traded vol and wanted to go deeper this book is pure gold. I love it as much as I love Taleb's Dynamic Hedging, albeit Taleb is much less formal and rigorous. What's common betw the two is the depth of original insight relevant to a trader not typically found in the sea of literature on derivs.

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Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets Review

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(More customer reviews)Exeptional! A great history of the deception of Wall Street. It looks like an intimidating book at close to 400 pages but it is absolutely captivating. The sad conclusion however is that nothing has changed and Wall Street continues to use us as rats in its financial labratory. And the government, rating agencies and accounting firms sit on the sidelines collecting fines and fees. I only mildly disagree with his conclusions on Efficient Market Hypothesis which I don't think concluded markets were rational.

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Capitalism and Slavery Review

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(More customer reviews)The transformation from subsistance society where everyone more or less consumed what they produced, to international capitalism required as a precondition the accumulation of capital. That is, some people had to be able to produce more than they consumed before they could have anything to invest.
Williams contribution to the literature of this transformation is to focus on the role of the slave trade. On the one hand, it provided a source of raw materials (human beings) which could be sold at a profit by traders, and then used to produce even more wealth by the buyers (slaveholders). This double accumulation of wealth went a long way toward allowing a few very wealthy people to accumulate capital, which coul;d then be invested in things like machinery.
At the same time, the slave trade provided an economic foundation for a large scale international trading network (the famous molasses, slave, rum triangle, later includeing cotton). Without this international network of shippers and merchants, the English (and later New England) cotton mills would not have had anywhere to sell their manufactured product (cotton cloth), nor a cheap source of cotton to use as raw materials.
Williams' ground breaking contirbution was to link all of this together, and argue that without the immoral slave trade, the industrial revolution, and thus capitalism as we know it, would not have happened. The inescapable conclusion is that since much of modern wealth was founded on slavery, some form of reparations is warranted.

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Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England.Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.
Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

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Stabilizing an Unstable Economy Review

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(More customer reviews)This classic work of political economy, first published in 1986, has valuable lessons for us today. Minsky studies the recessions of 1975 and 1982, economic theory, institutions, particularly banks, and finally presents an agenda for reform.
Financial traumas have led to ever-worse recessions, in 1970, 1975, 1979-80, 1982, 1987, 2002 and the present. As he notes, "the normal functioning of our economy leads to financial trauma and crises, inflation, currency depreciations, unemployment, and poverty in the midst of what could be virtually universal affluence - in short, .. financially complex capitalism is inherently flawed." Yet he believes, "the collapse of aggregate demand and profits, such as occasionally occurred and often threatened to occur in pre-1933 small government capitalism, is never a clear and present danger in a Big Government capitalism such as has ruled since World War Two." Life is disproving this hope.
What causes these recessions? Minsky writes, "the Wall Streets of the world are important; they generate destabilizing forces. ... This instability is not due to external shocks or to the incompetence or ignorance of policy makers. Instability is due to the internal processes of our type of economy. The dynamics of a capitalist economy which has complex, sophisticated, and evolving financial structures leads to the development of conditions conducive to incoherence - to runaway inflations or deep depressions." Strangely, capitalism can't handle capital: "capitalism is flawed precisely because it cannot readily assimilate productive processes that use large-scale capital assets."
What is to be done? He warns, "Meaningful reforms cannot be put over by an advisory and administrative elite that is itself the architect of the existing situation." Then he stresses, "The emphasis on investment and `economic growth' rather than on employment as a policy objective is a mistake. A full-employment economy is bound to expand, whereas an economy that aims at accelerating growth through devices that induce capital-intensive private investment not only may not grow, but may be increasingly inequitable in its income distribution, inefficient in its choices of techniques and unstable in its overall performance." But, as Minsky acknowledges, capitalism cannot deliver full employment: "Capitalist market mechanisms cannot lead to a sustained, stable-price, full-employment equilibrium."
He proposes, "Public control, if not out-and-out public ownership, of large-scale capital-intensive production units is essential." He suggests nationalising the railroads and the nuclear power industry, as private enterprise runs both so poorly.

He also notes capitalism's other failures: "the market mechanism ... cannot and should not be relied upon for important, big matters such as the distribution of income, the maintenance of economic stability, the capital development of the economy, and the education and training of the young." It seems we can't rely on capitalism for anything.


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Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader Review

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(More customer reviews)There are several very interesting parts of this book, the most notable being the chapters (4, 7 - 10) in which Mr. Partnoy gives a high level description of some of the transactions that he was involved in. Some of his anecdotes, particularly those in which he discusses the atmosphere in an investment bank around bonus time (pg.40 - 42, 202 - 205), are pretty amusing and dead on accurate. The author's descriptions of some of his deals are clearly told from a junior banker's perspective, but they do a good job of putting forth what was being done, how it was being done, what everyone's perceived incentives for the transaction were, the work required to get the deal done, what kind of money, and importantly what kind of fees were involved. In this regard, the book offers more than both "Liar's Poker" by Lewis and "When Genius Failed" by Lowenstein.
Like all books written by former investment bankers the book contains liberally sprinkled anecdotes regarding job interviews from hell, the ridiculous daily escapades that can occur on a trading floor, strip clubs, the lack of personal lives, gambling trips and other stories which could easily have been pulled from the pages of Mr. Lewis's book or "Monkey Business" by Rolfe and Troob. All of these shenanigans culminate around the bank's (in this case Morgan Stanley), or more specifically, his group's annual sporting clay outing, FIASCO. The book also suffers from a somewhat poorly defined timeline and the lack of a defining event which drives the story. Due to these faults, it is at times little more than a book about the evils of investment bankers, the ignorance of their customers, all put forward to enforce Mr. Partnoy's somewhat guarded thesis; Derivatives are used by organizations that are legally prevented from investing in certain areas in order to skirt those laws.
This is a good book that could have been better, the occasions where it shine through make it worth reading, but also unfortunately let us know the author could have produced a somewhat better product.

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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. FIASCO is the first book to take on the derivatves trading industry--the most highly charged and risky sector of the stock market. More importantly, it is a blistering indictment of the largely unregulated market in derivatives and serves as a warning to unwary investors about real fiascos, which have cost billions of dollars.

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