The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market [Hardcover]

Leah McGrath Goodman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 15, 2011

The Asylum is a stunning exposé by a seasoned Wall Street journalist that once and for all reveals the truth behind America’s oil addiction in all its unscripted and dysfunctional glory.

In the tradition of Too Big to Fail and Liar’s Poker, author Leah McGrath Goodman tells the amazing-but-true story of a band of struggling, hardscrabble traders who, after enduring decades of scorn from New York’s stuffy financial establishment, overcame more than a century of failure, infighting, and brinksmanship to build the world’s reigning oil empire—entirely by accident.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What should be a quasi-public utility—the market exchange where oil and gas are traded—is actually a madhouse of vice, vendettas, and corrupt crypto-capitalism, according to this breathless account of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Finance journalist Goodman traces NYMEX's transformation since the 1960s from an obscure market specializing in potato futures to a colossus with a stranglehold on the sale of the world's energy. Goodman explores the lurid culture of NYMEX traders, scruffy hustlers who shriek and swear and pummel each other over deals, and bring guns, drugs, and hookers right into the trading pit. It's an entertaining scene, but Goodman's account is hobbled by the strictures of the business epic, which require her to devote inordinate space to NYMEX's boardroom politics and the posturing of its chairmen. This is one of the year's most colorful business histories, but the larger importance of NYMEX remains elusive; the author paints it sometimes as a force for price transparency and stability, sometimes as a dangerously ill-regulated cesspool of speculative scams and occult market manipulations that are more insinuated than demonstrated. Photos. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

The New York Mercantile Exchange, or Nymex, began as a butter, cheese, and egg exchange in 1872. The world�s largest physical commodities futures exchange, it took a hit in the infamous �potato scandal� in the 1970s but rebounded after the introduction of crude oil futures in the early 1980s. Goodman reveals that the traders at Nymex are a rough-and-tumble group with little formal education, who dress down, answer to no one, and are tougher than marines. Activities at the exchange are rife with cheating and overindulgence in drugs, prostitutes, and illegal gambling as well as a slew of investigations by the FBI and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which took down and banned for life several Nymex board chairmen. The most shocking revelation is how the price of oil is controlled not by OPEC, which hardly qualifies as a cartel these days, but by a few hundred speculators in Manhattan and U.S. banks like Goldman Sachs, which are exempted from regulation by means of several loopholes. Biting and infuriating, with even a �Deep Throat� in the scoop. --David Siegfried

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1 edition (February 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061766275
• ISBN-13: 978-0061766275
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #273,858 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #64 in Books > Business & Investing > Investing > Futures

More About the Author

An award-winning journalist, Leah McGrath Goodman spent a decade in New York and London as an editor, senior writer and special correspondent for Dow Jones & Co., breaking hundreds of stories on the oil market and the New York Mercantile Exchange for The Wall Street Journal and Barron's. She also has written for Forbes, Condé Nast Portfolio, Bloomberg, The Financial Times and The Guardian, and has appeared on CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox News. Residing in Boulder, CO, she is a Ted Scripps environmental journalism fellow at the University of Colorado.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful look at a world gone by March 25, 2011

By DeeJayDubya

Format:Hardcover

Asylum tells the story of the men--and a few women--who ran the NYMEX up into the stratosphere and then into the ground. A tale of greed, hubris, brilliance and idiocy, every page reveals that these guys are not your every day Joes. Though the bulk of the characters are salt-of-the-earth types, they each possess an almost maniacal drive--to make money, to dominate, to prove something. Ms. Goodman's flair in painting these men as driven but flawed individuals makes each insight jump off the page. By the end, you feel like you know a bunch of these guys, but are glad you don't.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars 'How Could This Place Exist, And No One Does Anything About It?' March 10, 2011

By Olive Oyl

Format:Hardcover

If you've ever wondered who on earth is behind $4 gasoline or $100-plus oil, look no further than this book, which tells the story of the untrained, rebel scrappers from Manhattan who built this stranger-than-fiction monstrosity. It's all here, which is why some haters on this page don't want you to read it. (If I were them, I wouldn't want you to, either.)

Just to clear up a few of the debates raging on Amazon and elsewhere, the oil market being discussed in `The Asylum' is quite literally where the U.S. gets its energy prices. No one contests that. (Just check any news outlet -- Nymex oil is the world's reference point.) It determines what we pay at the pump for gasoline. It has been the global benchmark for the past 30 years. When oil tops $100, where do you think it comes from? Outer space? Nope. It comes from this market and the unshaven, bet-on-anything maniacs who are running it into the ground.

How weird is it that the enemy is not outside U.S. borders but primarily a bunch of greedy people in and around Wall Street and Washington who dine and hunt and golf together (among other, more salacious things we won't get into here, due to Amazon's policy against blasphemy) hell-bent on taking their pound of flesh, to the detriment of us all?

It might be the most spectacular shell game ever devised by man.

This is the story of who, exactly, these people are, how they got to do what they are doing, and why their wild antics threaten us all. This book was released Feb. 15 -- the same day oil prices began their latest trek to $100 and up. I wonder how long it will keep going?

One thing is for sure (as made clear by 'The Asylum'): no one's about to stop it. Congress and financial regulators would have you believe that it is the Middle East and Big Oil who are solely to blame for high energy prices. Why? Because if they point to factors outside their control, they don't have to do anything about it.

The sad thing about this book is that we've met the enemy...and the enemy is us.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Character-driven answers March 19, 2011

By Jeff Lenard

Format:Hardcover

Why was oil $147 AND $33 per barrel the same year? This book lays out the answers and also explains what we are seeing today. It's a story worth telling, and it's very told through the characters who led us on the 30-plus-year journey to $100 oil.