With a lucid style and a sense of humor and amusement, Lowenstein guides us through the thickets of high finance in the...
An entertaining and informative history of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the hedge fund whose 1998 collapse rattled the financial markets.
Lowenstein (Buffett, 1995) begins with a portrait of John Meriwether, the man who would be head of LTCM. Chicago-born, trained in mathematics and business at Northwestern and the University of Chicago, Meriwether joined Salomon Brothers in 1974. At 30, he formed the Arbitrage Group there in 1977. The author credits Meriwether with bringing the academic nerd to Wall Street, hiring Eric Rosenfeld, Gregory Hawkins, and Lawrence Hilibrand (all MIT wunderkinder) at precisely the moment that computer research was transforming the bond market. In 1993 Meriwether created LTCM and took his crew to Greenwich, Connecticut—and for four years the fund shone. Staffers and outsiders complained that the partners were condescending and secretive, but the huge profits kept everyone happy. In 1997 Myron Scholes and Paul Merton, LTCM’s star academics, won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Lowenstein excels at explaining esoteric financial topics; he clarifies the nature of hedge funds and coherently describes the general strategies and specific types of trades in arbitrage. With access to the partners’ confidential memoranda, he is also able to document LTCM’s swift fall with exceptional clarity and insight. On August 17, 1998, the fund had capital of $3.6 billion—but in another five weeks it was mostly gone. In a dizzying succession of events, Russia declared a moratorium on its debt, Brazilian and Mexican bonds weakened, and the Asian markets declined. All of LTCM’s trades went bad, to a degree that no one had been prepared for. (Whereas the wizards’ mathematical model calculated that a loss of more than $35 million in one day was unlikely, the fund lost $553 million on August 21, 1998, alone.) The story ends with drama and comedy: the 14-bank bailout group bickered and backstabbed, but it saved the day—and by December 1999 Meriwether and his old crew were back in business with a fresh $250 million and a new name.
With a lucid style and a sense of humor and amusement, Lowenstein guides us through the thickets of high finance in the computer age.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50137-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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