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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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