Richard Bookstaber has a little different background from most other arthors whose books i've read. He came from an academic background but joined wallstreet as a risk manager. The book is full of his anecdotal accounts from work, as well as theories from the academia.
The first half he details the events leading to various market crashes and scandals (eg. Salomon and LTCM), intermittently with his personal experience during the events. He moves on the stories as salomon was incorporated into travelers and later citigroup.
The latter half of the book focuses more on why the market has become so complex, and it is essentially this complexity and tight coupling of the market that leads to the overall increase in risk of the mareket, which causes each next crash to be bigger than the ones before. There are several interesting thing I have found to be very interesting. first, he believes that contrary to popular belief, regulating or raising the transparency of hedge funds will not help the future of the market since hedge funds are esstentially made of every single possible investment strategies known to men. as transparency of their position increases, so do their attempts to hide/take advantage of it. he believes to decrease the complexity of the market is the key. Another thing he has noted is that despite his background in quantitative trading, he believes accounting can contribute much more than it is now, as the current accounting method is based on tangible assets for corporations of the last century instead of intangible assets which are what make modern companies valuable. instead of valuations, he hopes companies can release data such as training expense per employee, customer retentation rate for investors to use. an easier more correct valuation method can certainly keep the market more steady.
Overall, this was quite an amazing read.
