《赌金者》两位诺贝尔经济学奖得主、前美联储副主席与华尔街最成功的套利交易者共同演绎金融市场有史以来最扣人心弦的悲剧性故事。20世纪90年代中期，美国华尔街出现了一个令人神迷目眩的长期资本基金，在短短4年中，其获得了285%的离奇收益率，缔造了华尔街神话。然而，在其出色交易员的过度操纵之下，长期资本基金在仅两个月之内又输掉了45亿美元，走向了万劫不复之地。

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

对长期资本管理公司所做的一次大盘点：清晰、有趣而且信息丰富。特点是：叙述充满戏剧性；对金融世界的解析非常到位；所涉及的内容又非常复杂。在本书所描述的长期资本管理公司故事背后，潜藏着和数理、统计、社会情景相关的许多非常严肃的问题。最至关重要的是，本书描绘了一幅金融文化的群像图：控制着绝对不同寻常的一大笔资金的，事实上是一群非常普通的人。

本书前言
两位诺贝尔经济学奖得主、前美联

《创造金钱:长期资本管理公司的传奇》》以广泛的研究和采访为基础，将读者带上了引人入胜的旅途。尼古拉斯·邓巴从古巴比伦开始，走上了一条风景无限的道路，它包含美国内战、一位鲜为人知的法国数学家、20世纪60年代后期莫顿和斯科尔斯的偶遇、麦丽威泽在80年代才华横溢的债券妙计，直至崩溃后的黑暗时光以及1998年9月的援救随着故事发展到令人难以置信的高潮，长期资本经营管理公司交易活动的表层被逐渐被剥去，向读者展示了才华和争议。 《创造金钱:长期资本管理公司的传奇》》同样也是一家全球对冲基金巨头的崩溃背后的策略和人物故事，是对现代金融世界如何运作的阐释，以及对这个万亿美元行业的历史发展的回顾。