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A compelling narrative on what went wrong with our financial systemand whos to blameFrom an award-winning journalist who has been covering the industry for more than a decade The Devils Derivatives charts the untold story of modern financial innovationhow investment banks invented new financial products how investors across the world were wooed into buying them how regulators were seduced by the political rewards of easy credit and how speculators made a killing from the near-meltdown of the financial systemAuthor Nicholas Dunbar demystifies the revolution that briefly gave finance the same intellectual respectability as theoretical physics He explains how bankers worldwide created a secret trillion-dollar machine that delivered cheap mortgages to the masses and riches beyond dreams to the financial innovatorsFundamental to this saga is how the people who hated to lose were persuaded to accept risk by the people who loved to win Why did people come to trust and respect arcane financial tools Who were the bankers competing to assemble the basic components into increasingly intricate machines How did this process achieve its own unstoppable momentumending in collapse bailouts and a public outcry against the giants of financeProvocative and intriguing The Devils Derivatives sheds much-needed light on the forces that fueled the most brutal economic downturn since the Great Depression.



About the Author

Nicholas Dunbar

Nicholas Dunbar grew up in London and trained as a physicist at Manchester, Cambridge and Harvard universities. He was inspired to become a financial journalist by university friends who took their mathematical skills from academia onto the trading floors of investment banks.From 1998 until 2009, Dunbar was technical editor of Risk magazine, a specialist derivatives publication. In 2005, he launched Life & Pensions, a sister publication to Risk aimed at the insurance and pensions industry.During this time, Dunbar wrote a series of exclusive stories on derivatives blow-ups which cemented his reputation as an investigative journalist, and in 2007 he won the State Street award for institutional financial journalism. He has also written a column called 'Risky Finance' for the financial commentary service Reuters Breakingviews and currently works for Bloomberg.In 1999, Dunbar wrote his first book, Inventing Money: the story of Long-Term Capital Management and the legends behind it (Wiley, 2000). The Devil's Derivatives is his second book. For further information visit www.nickdunbar.net



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