Wealthy, powerful and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls have become the It Boys of twenty-first century capitalism, succeeding the leveraged-buyouts barons of the 1980s and the dot-com wizards of the nineties. Their weekend mansions are doffer for Vanity Fair photographers; their potential to cause chaos preoccupied authorities even before the recent financial cataclysm. Based on unprecendented access to the industry, including three hundred hours of interveiws and binders of internal documents, More Money Than God provides the first authoritative history of hedge funds, telling the inside story of their origins, their explosive battles with central banks and finally their role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Hedge funds reward risk-takers, so they tend to attract larger-than-life personalities. Ken Griffin of Citadel started out trading convertible bonds from his dorm room at Harvard; a boy genius made good, the financial version of the entreprenerds who forged tech companies such as Google. And there are more.
A saga of riches and rich egos, More Money Than God is a history of discovery, or the search for inefficiencies that lurk within supposedly efficient markets. Ever since the 1950s, finance professors have argued that beating the market is impossible; so how do the titans earn hundreds of millions, year after year? The answers lie in the extraordinary fertility of hedge funds, which draw on insights from physics, economics and psychology to crack the mysteries of the market.
More than just a history More Money Than God is a window on tomorrow's financial system. It describes how hedge funds have been left for dead after past financial panics, but how they have also survived the test of 2008 far better than its rivals. The future of finance lies in the history of hedge funds.
