Frank Partnoy's writings delve into the complexities of financial markets and their regulation. Drawing from his background as an investment banker and corporate lawyer, his work offers profound insights into the inner workings of the financial world. Partnoy is recognized as a leading global authority on market regulation, with his analyses frequently featured in major international media outlets. His literary contributions explore themes of market failures and the consequences of financial avarice.
In 'Wait', Frank Partnoy argues that decisions of all kinds, whether 'snap' or long-term, benefit from being made at the last possible moment. The art of knowing how long you can afford to delay before committing is at the heart of many a great decision, whether in a corporate takeover or a marriage proposal.
A Businessweek Bestseller "You fail to read F.I.A.S.C.O. at your peril." —Los Angeles Times F.I.A.S.C.O. is the best-selling account of Frank Partnoy's education in the jungle of high finance from 1993 to 1995. It follows the young Morgan Stanley salesman as he learns to navigate a marketplace where billions of dollars are made and lost in the creation and trading of derivatives, a type of security that almost nobody fully understands. Seen in relief against the financial meltdown of 2008, F.I.A.S.C.O. appears ever more prescient, and in a new epilogue written for this edition, Partnoy connects his story to the central role derivatives played in that crisis.
Match's touching, whip-smart poems chart the limits of the mind/body relationship in decidedly virtual times.
From the author of the best-selling F.I.A.S.C.O., a riveting chronicle of the terrifying rise of financial skulduggery and the damage it is doing. F.I.A.S.C.O. was 'Blood in the Water on Wall Street', this is blood and guts everywhere.
F.I.A.S.C.O. is a ringside seat on the nastiest and most important game being played on Wall Street today: think of derivatives trading as a blood sport, with the unsuspecting consumer as the prey. New chapter with the latest scandals.
In F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street , a former derivatives salesman takes readers onto the trading floor of a leading investment bank—and in a tell-all, no-holds-barred exposé, reveals for the first time the ugly truth about these complex financial products and the people who peddle them. Writing with the same eye for telling details as Michael Lewis in Liar’s Poker , Frank Partnoy shows how the once genteel world of investment banking has now become a place where the rallying cry is "There’s blood in the water. Let’s go kill someone." Partnoy was in his late twenties when he landed the job of his dreams—a position in Morgan Stanley’s Derivatives Products Group, the single most profitable division of the venerable investment bank. With vivid character sketches and a wealth of funny-yet-disturbing anecdotes, Partnoy takes us inside the culture of Morgan Stanley’s derivatives group. Encouraged by upper management and egged on by gun-toting senior salesmen, derivatives had become a business-as-war, take-no-prisoners operation where people pored over Soldier of Fortune and gloated when they sold a product that "ripped off" a client’s face. As he leads us through the ups and downs of his fifteen months at Morgan Stanley, Partnoy explains in plain English what derivatives are—and shows how he and the other "rocket scientists" at the bank custom-designed these arcane financial products to dodge government regulators, encourage foreign currency speculation by pension and mutual funds, disguise risky gambles with AAA Standard & Poor’s ratings, and avoid capital gains taxes for weathy individuals. He also details, for the first time, the deal that earned Morgan Stanley the fattest fee in Wall Street history—a $74.5 million profit for devising a derivative that wiped hundreds of millions in losses off a Japanese company’s balance sheet. But dreaming up ever more complicated derivatives products—Dollarized Yield Curve Notes, Constant Maturity Treasury Floaters, Trigger Notes, and Total Return Swaps, to name a few—was never enough. For the bank to earn its fee, they had to be sold—usually, as Partnoy notes, either to "cheaters" (fund managers who wanted riskier investments than their regulators or charters normally allowed) or to "widows and orphans" (unsophisticated fund managers who couldn’t understand the risks in fine print). Throughout the book, Partnoy gives us a trading-floor view of the disasters fueled by derivatives trading and provides the formula of greed, daring, and ingenuity that are the basic ingredients of all derivatives. Written with humor, insight, and a mounting sense of moral outrage, F.I.A.S.C.O. is both a brilliant insider’s account of investment banking today and a blistering indictment of the largely unregulated market in derivatives—a book that everyone who has a pension plan or invests in mutual funds needs to read.