Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe & the Cult of Risk (Financial Times Series): The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk - Softcover

Das, Satyajit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0273723979 ISBN 13: 9780273723974

Publisher: FT Publishing International, 2011

Synopsis

The human race created money and finance. But our inventions re-create us. Mankind mistook money—a lubricant of society and human well-being—for an end in itself. Finance, the monetary shadow of real things, came to dominate human reality. Extreme Money tells the story of how this happened—and, in so doing, it tells the story of the modern world.

Bestselling author Satyajit Das draws on 33 years of personal experience at the heart of modern global finance to narrate this story. Das reveals the spectacular, dangerous money games that have generated increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth, Ponzi prosperity, sophistication, and wealth—while endangering the jobs, possessions, and futures of virtually everyone outside the financial industry.  Das shows how “extreme money” has become ever more unreal; how “voodoo banking” continues to generate massive phony profits even now; and how a new generation of “Masters of the Universe” has come to dominate the world.

 

Extreme Money is about:
The new financial fundamentalism: false gods, false prophets - Faith in money, faith in risk, faith in shadows
The cult of risk and the growth engine that isn’t - How financial engineering replaced real engineering and illusions replaced reality
Financial alchemy and the “Doomsday Debt Machine”- The rise of the global financial machine we cannot escape
The new global oligarchy—and the nihilistic games they play - Too smart, too fast, too greedy, too self-absorbed—and far too dangerous

 

About this title

Review:

Long listed for Financial Times/ Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2011

 

Listed in Bloomberg’s Top Business Books of the Year 2011

 

One of ninemsn.com.au’s best business books of 2011

 

"...a powerful book...highly readable and informative...Anyone who decodes the ratings of the three major agencies so amusingly – CCC means "Russian roulette with five bullets in the chamber" and D means "scrape your brains off the wall and place in a plastic bag"- demands to be read."
Lindsay Tanner, former Australian Minister of Finance inThe Monthly, August 2011

" While the run-up to the global financial crisis has been well documented, Das provides his own unique insights."
Luke Faulkner, Hedge Funds Review, August 2011

"...virtually in a category of its own – part history, part book of financial quotations, part cautionary tale, part textbook. It contains some of the clearest charts about risk transfer you will find anywhere. ...Others have laid out the dire consequences of financialisation ("the conversion of everything into monetary form", in Das’s phrase), but few have done it with a wider or more entertaining range of references...[Extreme Money] does... reach an important, if worrying, conclusion: financialisation may be too deep-rooted to be torn out. As Das puts it – characteristically borrowing a line from a movie, Inception – "the hardest virus to kill is an idea".  
Andrew Hill "Eclectic Guide to the Excesses of the Crisis" Financial Times, 17 August 2011

“an idiosyncratic yet withering analysis of how 30 years of financial alchemy and excessive credit have plunged us into what feels like a slow-motion depression... addresses, one by one, the overarching themes of the great credit boom and bust of the late 20th century.

Black humor is Das’ natural medium, and he gave me a rueful chuckle every few pages. You know that a writer is hard to pigeonhole when the advance praise compares him to both Candide and Hunter S. Thompson. I prefer to view Das as a modern-day Ishmael with an attitude, a weathered seaman who has witnessed firsthand the crazed hunt of hedge-fund captains for alpha, the great whale of superior investment returns.

... I could only endorse the conclusion. “There is no simple, painless solution” to the fix we’re in, Das writes. “The world has to reduce debt, shrink the financial part of the economy, and change the destructive incentive structures in finance. Individuals in developed countries have to save more and spend less.”
Doomsday Debt Machine Roars as Wizard Das Chides Buffett: Books, By James Pressley, Sep 19 2011

“ a fast paced ride...Das manages to be both an insider and outsider – much of what he covers is based on first hand experience...there’s no of the faux glamour that infuses many otherwise critical books on finance.... this is a thoughtful, interesting and unusual book that deserves to jostle for shelf space alongside classics such as Charles Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes and Devil Take The Hindmost by Edward Chancellor. It is well worth a read by anyone seeking to grasp the broader impact of the recent crisis."
Chris Sholto Heaton, Money Week, November 2011

 

“...Mr Das has a keen eye for an anecdote ....   give[s] the reader plenty of chances to chuckle at the hubris he reveals.. the views of people like Mr Das were consistently ignored in the run-up to the debt crisis..”

More luck than judgment, The Economist, 15 October 2011

 

“...Extreme Money is not about the financial crisis, as such. It is about the history of money and the journey that brought us to 2011. Das writes in a clear, straightforward manner that is approachable to all readers and takes in a diverse range of references from Hollywood movies to mediaeval literature, with plenty of gags and reflections from his career in the industry, which make for an easy read.”

Nick Ferguson  “A history of extreme money”, 21 September 2011, Finance Asia

 

 

"...exposes the shambles of a system characterised by bogus and failed economic market theory, a shamelessly rapacious finance industry, and a broad failure by governments to protect either their citizens or their productive industries from a finance industry driven by the most perverse incentives....Das writes colourfully, in short punchy sections, and countless memorable aphorisms...Politicians, please read this book."

Richard Thwaites “Dangerous money games” Canberra Times, 17 September 2011

 

“Das is a chatty writer, with a style that combines elegance with wit, erudition and a large dollop of cynicism. He is also widely read, given to inventing unusual metaphors and quoting from sources as diverse as Trollope and Groucho Marx. As a result, he has succeeded in producing an entertaining page-turner on a subject considered both numbingly dull as well as frighteningly opaque.”

Devangshu Datta “World money, salted and seasoned” Business Standard, 16 December 2011

 

“ Extreme Money is about much more than the financial crisis. ... Das is writing about the society that has been built under the suzerainty of finance over the last few decades. He uses the references to highlight, underline and contrast some of the features of this crazy society. At one level, Das gives us the conventional narrative of the crisis. ...At another level, he elaborates on the economic theory that provided the intellectual sustenance for the financial revolution. ... But at a more fundamental level, this book is about the corruption in values caused by what Das terms Extreme Money, by which he means not only the dangerous speculative games played with money, but also the attitudes and culture that have emerged out of casino capitalism. At the deepest level, this book is about hubris and the nemesis that inevitably follows.”

Manas Chakravarty “The money shot:The global society formed by the financial currents of the last few decades” Live Mint , 9 December 2011

 

“This is probably the finest financial history of the period.... , it tells with great authority the real story of modern finance—how money mutated into a rogue virus— something that finance students will otherwise never know. The book is a mirror of our financial times, a must-read for all.”

Debashis Basu  “Extreme Money: Modern Finance—The Rogue Virus” Moneylife, 24 December 2011

 

“...Das dons a professorial cap to weave financial history and popular culture into an entertaining and blistering social critique of how so many have come to chase endless financial reflections of the real economy...”

“No loss in the telling” Hindustan Times 23 December 2011

 

“ Extreme Money is a morality tale of the cascade of massive wealth into the pockets of financial wizards at the cost of the stability of the global financial system.... a cautionary tale from Faust warning what happens to those who trade their souls for lucre."

Andrew Allentuck, Financial Post,5 Noof financial alchemy...  lays bare the investment bankers’ schemes and machinations which culminated in the worldwide financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007 to date.... an illuminating text that has much to teach you about the world of high finance.”

Thomas Herold “An Inside Look Into The Masters of The Financial Sandbox”, 30 August 2011

 

 

“Das' irreverent and sardonic wit permeates the book, making it an enjoyable read despite its dark tone.”

Barbara Whelehan “Money books for holiday giving” Bankrate.com, December 16 2011

 

"...an absolutely brilliant examination of the world of money and finance... a realistic, confronting and amazing critique of the machinations and workings of the global financial industry.. an enlightening dissection of the world of high finance, policy making, and supposed regulation, and reveals how illusory is the ability of central banks and governments to control and manage economies ... The amount and depth of information in this book is amazing. It is essential reading for all those with an interest in the financial markets, delving into areas and subjects that most writers with a vested interest in the markets don't and won't cover.."

Your Trading Edge (May-June 2012)

 

 

 

From the Back Cover:

'A true insider’s devastating analysis of the financial alchemy of the last 30 years and its destructive consequences.  With his intimate first-hand knowledge, Das takes a knife to global finance and financiers to reveal its inner workings without fear or favor.'

-Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics at NYU Stern School of Business and Chairman of Roubini Global Economics

 

'Das describes the causes of the financial crisis with the insight and understanding of a financial wizard, the candor and objectivity of an impartial observer, and a wry sense of humor that reveals the folly in it all.'

Brooksley Born, former chairperson of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

 

Once upon a time human society built things. We engineered beautiful objects and created authentic goods. Now this real industrial engineering has been replaced by financial engineering: shuffling money in an endless process of debt, trading and speculation. It’s enabled vast fortunes to be made for a few, while the risk was borne by ordinary people – the 'privatisation of gain' and 'socialisation of losses'.

 

Extreme Money tells the story of spectacular and dangerous money games and those elite bankers, traders and financiers, the so-called Masters of the Universe, who continue to play them. Written by an insider, Extreme Money will show you how, little by little, we’ve all become slaves to financial alchemy and have been enchanted by our own illusory creation: the cult of global finance.

About this edition

• Publisher: FT Publishing International
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0273723979
• ISBN 13: 9780273723974
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 536