July 2011
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
8h 11m
English
Starting in the late 1980s, a new emphasis on shareholder value forced large banks to improve their return on capital and start acting more like traders. This sparked an innovation race between two ways of transferring credit risk: the old-fashioned “letter of credit” versus a recent invention, the credit default swap (CDS). Behind this race were two ways of looking at credit: the long-term actuarial approach versus the market approach. The champion of the market approach, Goldman Sachs, quickly moved to exploit the CDS approach and was richly rewarded for its ambition—and ruthlessness.
There was a burst of tropical thunder in Singapore on the autumn night in 1997 when ...
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