When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein (2001, Paperback, Reprint)

An excellent dissection of the particular and the general. In particular, the workings of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge-fund explains in detail the history of the enterprise and the personalities who brought it about...and down. Reading this in light of the current Great Recession (as some refer to the results of the mortgage-fund et al. meltdowns which have forever changed the corporate landscape in which most of us have grown up), one can conclude that the seeds of disaster were certainly planted in part under the aegis of the high-rolling philosophy that embraces the something-for-nothing boom and bust. The arcane financial entities and procedures are explained so that the interested reader--and I speak as someone who at one time was licensed as a stock-broker and still did not grasp some of these concepts--can get something of a handle on just how unreal the financial world can be, and what the inevitable consequences will be.

This book was a very well written example of how men are called "Genius" when they were merely men who took idiotic chances with other peoples money, only to lose. This book was easy to read for anyone that wants to get a glimpse into how traders convinced bankers that they had found a new way to make money and keep the bankers making 15 to 20% returns on the money, while giving their customers 5 to 10%, which was not bad, but they were hardly able to continue this charade. this was the beginning of the bank failures (depression) we see today, because alot of banks involved very quietly.

The Longterm Capital Management story, a must buy for any finance major.
Sheds some light on the myth preached by so many that Buffet bailed out LTCM. Explains how the fund ran into trouble and the positions that ate its capital. Even covers in brief some of the practices employed by the LTCM arbitragers such as, Yield curve trades,Bond convergence, merger arbitrage.