Fool's Gold

Little, Brown, 2009. Paperback. Good. In the mid 1990s, at a vast hotel complex on a private Florida beach, dozen s of bankers from JP Morgan gathered for what was to become a legendary off -site meeting. It was a wild weekend. But among the drinking, nightclubbing and fist-fights lay a more serious purpose - to assess the possibility of building a business around the new-fangled concepts of credit derivatives. The group at the heart of this revolution was an intense team, made up of i ndividuals with a supreme sense of loyalty to each other and to the bank - for years, nothing could break them apart. But when, finally, the team disp ersed, the innovations spread far beyond their original intentions, produci ng perversions in the mortgage market that ultimately culminated in disaste r. Part real-life thriller, part investigation and expose, this searing nar rative takes us deep inside the shadowy world of complex finance - A PERFEC T STORM for the credit crunch.