The Greatest Trade Ever - The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker.

With a new Afterword addressing today’s financial crisis

A BUSINESS WEEK BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

In this business classic—now with a new Afterword in which the author draws parallels to the recent financial crisis—Roger Lowenstein captures the gripping roller-coaster ride of Long-Term Capital Management. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein explains not just how the fund made and lost its money but also how the personalities of Long-Term’s partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the culture of Wall Street itself contributed to both their rise and their fall.

When it was founded in 1993, Long-Term was hailed as the most impressive hedge fund in history. But after four years in which the firm dazzled Wall Street as a $100 billion moneymaking juggernaut, it suddenly suffered catastrophic losses that jeopardized not only the biggest banks on Wall Street but the stability of the financial system itself. The dramatic story of Long-Term’s fall is now a chilling harbinger of the crisis that would strike all of Wall Street, from Lehman Brothers to AIG, a decade later. In his new Afterword, Lowenstein shows that LTCM’s implosion should be seen not as a one-off drama but as a template for market meltdowns in an age of instability—and as a wake-up call that Wall Street and government alike tragically ignored.

From the bestselling, prize-winning author of HOUSE OF CARDS, a revelatory history of Goldman Sachs, the most dominant, controversial and feared investment bank in the world 
 
Goldman Sachs has always projected an image of being better than its competitors. The firm—buttressed by an aggressive and sophisticated PR machine—often boasts of "The Goldman Way," a business model predicated on hiring the most talented people, indoctrinating them in a corporate culture of “the greater good,” and honoring the 14 Principles, the first of which is "Our clients' interests always come first."
 
But there is another way of viewing Goldman -- a secretive money-making machine that has straddled the line between conflict-of-interest and legitimate deal-making for decades; a firm that has exerted undue influence over government since the early part of the 20th century; a workplace rife with brutal power struggles; a Wall Street titan whose clever bet against the mortgage market in 2007 -- a bet not revealed to its clients -- may have made the Great Recession worse.
 
The firm has also shown a remarkable ability to weather financial crises, congressional, federal and SEC investigations, and numerous lawsuits, all with its reputation and enormous profits intact.  By reading thousands of pages of government documents and conducting over 100 interviews, including those with clients, competitors, regulators, current and former Goldman employees (as well as the six living men who have run Goldman), Cohan has constructed a vivid narrative that looks behind the veil of secrecy to reveal how Goldman has become so profitable, and so powerful.
 
 
William D. Cohan is the author of the New York Times bestsellers House of Cards and The Last Tycoons, which won the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.  He writes frequently for Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Fortune, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post.  A former investment banker, Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University’s School of Journalism and Graduate School of Business.