When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (Hardcover)

by Roger Lowenstein (Author) "IF THERE WAS one article of faith that John Meriwether discovered at Salomon Brothers, it was to ride your losses until they turned into gains..." (more)
Key Phrases: arbitrage group, equity vol, swap spreads, Wall Street, New York, Merrill Lynch (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
On September 23, 1998, the boardroom of the New York Fed was a tense place. Around the table sat the heads of every major Wall Street bank, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and representatives from numerous European banks, each of whom had been summoned to discuss a highly unusual prospect: rescuing what had, until then, been the envy of them all, the extraordinarily successful bond-trading firm of Long-Term Capital Management. Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed is the gripping story of the Fed's unprecedented move, the incredible heights reached by LTCM, and the firm's eventual dramatic demise.

Lowenstein, a financial journalist and author of Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, examines the personalities, academic experts, and professional relationships at LTCM and uncovers the layers of numbers behind its roller-coaster ride with the precision of a skilled surgeon. The fund's enigmatic founder, John Meriwether, spent almost 20 years at Salomon Brothers, where he formed its renowned Arbitrage Group by hiring academia's top financial economists. Though Meriwether left Salomon under a cloud of the SEC's wrath, he leapt into his next venture with ease and enticed most of his former Salomon hires--and eventually even David Mullins, the former vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve--to join him in starting a hedge fund that would beat all hedge funds.

LTCM began trading in 1994, after completing a road show that, despite the Ph.D.-touting partners' lack of social skills and their disdainful condescension of potential investors who couldn't rise to their intellectual level, netted a whopping $1.25 billion. The fund would seek to earn a tiny spread on thousands of trades, "as if it were vacuuming nickels that others couldn't see," in the words of one of its Nobel laureate partners, Myron Scholes. And nickels it found. In its first two years, LTCM earned $1.6 billion, profits that exceeded 40 percent even after the partners' hefty cuts. By the spring of 1996, it was holding $140 billion in assets. But the end was soon in sight, and Lowenstein's detailed account of each successively worse month of 1998, culminating in a disastrous August and the partners' subsequent panicked moves, is riveting.

The arbitrageur's world is a complicated one, and it might have served Lowenstein well to slow down and explain in greater detail the complex terms of the more exotic species of investment flora that cram the book's pages. However, much of the intrigue of the Long-Term story lies in its dizzying pace (not to mention the dizzying amounts of money won and lost in the fund's short lifespan). Lowenstein's smooth, conversational but equally urgent tone carries it along well. The book is a compelling read for those who've always wondered what lay behind the Fed's controversial involvement with the LTCM hedge-fund debacle. --S. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly
In late September 1998, the New York Federal Reserve Bank invited a number of major Wall Street investment banks to enter a consortium to fund the multibillion-dollar bailout of a troubled hedge fund. No sooner was the $3.6-billion plan announced than questions arose about why usually independent banks would band together to save a single privately held fund. The short answer is that the banks feared that the fund's collapse could destabilize the entire stock market. The long answer, which Lowenstein (Buffett) provides in undigested detail, may panic those who shudder at the thought of bouncing a $200 check. Long-Term Capital Management opened for business in February 1994 with $1.25 billion in funds. Armed with the cachet of its founders' stellar credentials (Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, 1997 Nobel Prize laureates in economics, were among the partners), it quickly parlayed expertise at reading computer models of financial markets and seemingly limitless access to financing into stunning results. By the end of 1995, it had tripled its equity capital and total assets had grown to $102 billion. Lowenstein argues that this kind of success served to enhance the fund's golden legend and sent the partners' self-confidence off the charts. As he itemizes the complex mix of investments and heavy borrowing that made 1994-1997 profitable years, Lowenstein also charts the subtle drift toward riskier (and ultimately disastrous) ventures as the fund's traditional profit centers dried up. What should have been a gripping story, however, has been poorly handled by Lowenstein, who obscures his narrative with masses of data and overwritten prose. Agent, Melanie Jackson. Author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (September 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037550317X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375503177
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (229 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #70,426 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

201 of 224 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The gang that couldn't hedge stright, October 8, 2000

By	reader 1001 - See all my reviews

A somewhat didactic narrative history of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. Nicholas Dunbar covers the same subject in his book "Inventing Money." Both books present a blizzard of details about who did what and when. Too much detail. The general reader would better served by a medium sized article. Nevertheless if you're a finance buff interested in the nitty-gritty then read both books. Dunbar has a physics background and his book is more technical, while Lowenstein comes from journalism and his narrative flows better.

LCTM began operating in 1994, set up by John Meriwether formally head of the bond-arbitrage group at Solomon Brothers. He put together a star-studded cast that included three (1997) Nobel prize winners in economics. Their basic strategy was something called convergence arbitrage. In essence this strategy says buy two bonds that you think will track one another. Go long on the cheap one and short on the other; you make money if the spread narrows. In theory you are protected from changing prices as long as the two vary in the same way. To make the big bucks LCTM was after they took a gigantic number of highly leveraged arbitrage positions all over the world. To get high leverage you borrow for the position, like buying a stock on margin. LCTM got really high leverage by avoiding something called the "haircut," which is an extra margin of collateral banks usually demand, but forgave LCTM. Why would banks they do such a thing? Because they were blinded by the glitter of the cast, and in some cases the banks themselves were investors in LCTM. By 1997 convergence arbitrage opportunities in bonds began to dry up, everyone was doing it. So LCTM applied their strategy to stocks. Find two stocks that will track on another and go long and short with borrowed money. This is not easy. Stocks are less amenable to mathematical analysis than bonds, and after all these were the bond guys from Solomon, they were out of their depth. You might ask how can you borrow most of your stock position when the Federal Reserve requires 50% margin (Regulation T). Answer: don't really buy the stocks, instead buy derivative contracts that simulate stocks, an end run around Regulation T. Even with all this leverage LCTM would claim that the fund was no more risky than the stock market, meaning a stock index. In 1998 the markets went against LCTM, with the "flight to quality" (US government bonds) as investors panicked. The fund suffered from what reliability engineers call "common mode error." Spreads got wider not narrower across the board, and LCTM's capital base began to shrink as their positions lost money. At a certain point they would have to start liquidating positions, and the market impact of such large scale selling would cascade across their portfolio. The fund would "blow up."

The above gives a flavor of the material Lowenstein provides, only in much greater detail. If that's what you want, buy the book. Is this a tale of human folly or just plain bad luck? Answering that question is not easy, one needs to grasp a large amount of technical finance theory, and understand what happened in the particular case of LCTM. This book will help.

45 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Drama on Wall Street, October 1, 2000

By	Bruce I Jacobs (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews

In 1994, bond arbitrage guru John Meriwether, late of Salomon Brothers, launched a hedge fund. Its partners included two soon-to-be Nobel laureates and an ex-vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. The fund was to exploit highly quantitative techniques to bet on (primarily) bond spreads throughout the world, using large amounts of leverage to magnify small returns from supposedly low-risk positions. By early 1998, each dollar invested in the fund had grown to $4.11. By early fall 1998, that $4.11 was down to 33 cents. The fund's potential bankruptcy so threatened the world economy that the U.S. Federal Reserve had to step in to broker a rescue.

The tale of the rise and fall of Long-Term capital was coming to its end as I was putting to press my own book on option-based trading strategies and their effects on market volatility (Capital Ideas and Market Realities). The whole adventure constituted a perfect capstone to my story, which goes back to the crash of 1929, showing how strategies that purport to eliminate the risk of investing can end up exploding in the face of their followers and investors generally.

Now Roger Lowenstein, formerly a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and author of a biography on Warren Buffett, has devoted a whole book to LTC. Drawing largely on contemporaneous reporting and on his own personal interviews with many of the principal and supporting players (although not, alas, Meriwether himself), Lowenstein manages to create a real page-turner out of the unfolding events, even for readers who already know the ultimate outcome.

Part of the tension, it seems to this reader, stems from the unresolved (and probably unresolvable) ambiguity about the real nature of the story. On the one hand, it seems to play out as a classic tragedy: Its larger-than-life protagonists hubristically pit themselves against the gods of the marketplace and fall hard. Certainly, for many of the players involved, it was a tragedy. Meriwether not only lost his money but his reputation. Nobel laureates Robert Merton and Myron Scholes found their lives' works on modern finance theory rocked to the core. Many of those instrumental in engineering LTC's rescue (including Goldman Sachs' Jon Corzine) ended up subsequently losing their own jobs. LTC's employees, who had been encouraged to invest their bonuses from the firm's fat years back into the firm itself, lost it all when the firm collapsed; nor did they get the $500,000 bonuses secured by the LTC partners as part of the bailout package.

On the other hand, one can also view the whole affair as great comedy (especially if one is on the outside looking in). After all, a scene with 140 lawyers in one room is worthy of the Marx brothers. Then you have the Fed descending, at the eleventh hour, like some deus ex machina, to restore order and stability; not to mention Wall Street's viciously competitive masters of the universe gathered on folding metal chairs around the New York Fed's boardroom table, trying to rescue the world from themselves. Even LTC's partners bounce back. Meriwether (J.M. to friends, and throughout the book) starts a new hedge fund, bringing in several old LTC colleagues. Merton and Scholes are still teaching and consulting. A week after LTC was bailed out, many of the principals gather at the Pierre Hotel in New York to celebrate Scholes' remarriage; a wedding, of course, is the classic comedic emblem of reconciliation and renewal.

The vibrancy of any play, whether comedy or tragedy, often rests on the quality of its villains. Lowenstein singles out a few individuals for special opprobrium. These include Victor Haghani and Lawrence Hilibrand, who basically ran LTC's trades and pushed the firm into ever larger, more highly leveraged positions, and into areas such as merger arbitrage in which the firm had no demonstrated expertise. Hilibrand comes across in a particularly bad light, especially when he shows up at the bailout negotiations with his own private lawyer and threatens to derail the whole process because "there was nothing in it for him."

The person one might expect to hold the center of the story, J.M. himself, plays a strangely muted role. Lowenstein describes him as "an unlikely star, too bashful for the limelight." Even his contributions in furtherance of LTC's eventual downfall seem to be more sins of omission than sins of commission. That is, he failed to rein in his uber traders, Haghani and Hilibrand, and he failed to heed the warnings of his more temperate (and, as it turned out, more realistic) colleagues. Of course, J.M. did set the tone for the firm-the air of infallibility that was to prove its downfall.

The book emphasizes how LTC's greed, arrogance and even foolhardiness made it susceptible to a market crisis. But was this crisis purely a result of exogenous events, such as the turmoil in Asia and Russia, as Lowenstein suggests? If so, how did these troubles overwhelm markets in fundamentally sound Western economies?

In my opinion, the book lets LTC off the hook in failing to explain how the very strategies it followed helped to create the perfect storm that ended up swamping the firm. The argument in my book, based on decades of debate with options experts in the industry and in academia, is that LTC provides yet another illustration of the market's susceptibility to certain large-scale trading strategies. These strategies tend to attract a lot of capital because they appear to offer a haven from the vicissitudes of market risk; given leverage and derivatives, they can command hundreds of billions (even trillions) of dollars of assets. Under adverse market conditions, however, the "rules" of these strategies call for dumping all these assets on the market-all at once. We saw this in the crash of 1987, and again in the turbulence of 1989, 1991,1994 and 1997.

All in all, however, When Genius Failed is a classic tale of greed and fear on Wall Street. Lowenstein tells it well, especially in the later chapters, which give readers a blow-by-blow account of the bailout negotiations. What's more, he brings out the story's particular pertinence for today's investors: Even with all the brains and all the computers in the world, investors can't control, let alone predict, human nature.

Bruce I. Jacobs ([e-mail]), Principal, Jacobs Levy Equity Management, and author of Capital Ideas and Market Realities (Blackwell, 1999)

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining dose of schadenfreude - but inferior product, May 30, 2003

By	Mr. O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (Paperback)

A couple of years ago I read Nick Dunbar's account of the LTCM collapse "Inventing Money", and a friend recently lent me this book. They make an interesting comparison.

Dunbar - a physicist by trade - is more interested in the theoretical economics that went into the risk arbitrage fund in the first place and how this came unstuck. He gives a long description of the Black-Scholes model, what it says, and how it was used to pull off the risk "free" trades which made Long Term so much money for three or four years.

Lowenstein, by contrast, barely mentions either the Black-Scholes model (he barely touches on option pricing at all, as a matter of fact) or the Italian convergence trades which eventually blew the gaffe on the fund, but instead tells the human story, exposes the inevitable egos, and indulges in more than a little smuggery (this book is long on wisdom after the fact) in dissecting the naivety of the LTCM hedging and trading strategy and the people who ran it.

As long as he sticks to the egos and the posturing, When Genius Failed is a dandy read: the negotiations amongst the Wall Street top brass as the fund is going under rate with anything served up in Barbarians at the Gate, and as this is a large part of the book, it rips along quite nicely.

But the schadenfreude grates: One of the lessons of the whole fiasco was that the smart money is with the guy who can predict the future: any old mug can be a genius with hindsight. Lowenstein spends a lot of his time wisely pointing out what the traders should have done.

Additionally, Lowenstein employs some metaphors which indicate he might not have much of a grip on his subject: for one, he states "a bit of liquidity greases the wheels of markets; what Greenspan overlooked is that with too much liquidity, the market is apt to skid off the tracks." It's a poor metaphor, because it isn't excess liquidity which causes markets to skid, rather, it's the sudden disappearance of it. As this is the fundamental lesson of the Long Term story, it's a bad mistake to make for the sake of a smart-alec aphorism.

Similarly, in the epilogue states, with regard to the putative diversification in the fund "the Long-Term episode proved that eggs in separate baskets *can* break simultaneously". Again, this conclusion is not supported by the text, which observes several times that in a market crash, liquidity drains and the correlation risk of instruments in the market goes to one: that is to say, it turns out all your eggs are in the same basket after all. Diversity wasn't the problem; the problem was you wrongly thought you had it.

For these reasons I prefer Dunbar's more academic work: it may not be such a sizzling read, but nor does it misguidedly kick a fund when it's down.