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FOOL’S GOLD
How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe

$26.00

Fool’s Gold tells the story of how a group of bankers from JP Morgan invented the credit derivatives business and how their innovations spread unchecked throughout the market and eventually snowballed into the financial crisis.

The book’s author Gillian Tett is assistant editor for the Financial Times of London. She was among the first to predict the credit crunch. In 2008 she won the British Press Award for Financial Journalist of the Year.

“Most readable is Gillian Tett, one of few correspondents to bring the human dimension to financial journalism. With her much-vaunted PhD in social anthropology, Tett looks at financiers as if at a strange Tajikistan tribe with curious rites and beliefs. In Fool’s Gold, she follows the fortunes of a small, hermetically sealed team at JP Morgan whom she credits for inventing the ‘financial Latin’ that not even their own bosses could understand.” —Nicholas Shakespeare, Telegraph

“The thesis of Fool’s Gold is that a small group of clever quants at JPMorgan invented credit derivatives, all those dangerous acronymic creatures—CDOs, CLOs and the like—that we have come to know as the crisis has evolved. But it was other, greater fools, in other banks, who misunderstood and misused them.” —Howard Davies, Financial Times •