Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46314 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-10
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Synopsis
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.

Customer Reviews

Partnoy writes like a dream.
This is the best book ever about lies, deceit and lust for money in the financial markets. Partnoy writes like a dream. I keep giving it to people to read. The best thing about it is that he explains so well. By the end of the book I, a completely numbers-illiterate person, could get a grasp on how the fraudsters and the chancers operate.

Partnoy's complaint
This is an entertaining dirt disher, but has no other merit. If you think that life in a Wall Street firm is really like this - these days, at any rate - think again. If you want a really salacious muck raker, only well written - try Michael Lewis' Liars' Poker, on which format this book was surely based. FIASCO is a thoroughly inferior product.

Not only is it poorly written, it suffers from the fact that its author seems to have had very little understanding of what he was doing whilst at Morgan Stanley - this is apparent from simply reading his own explanations of the transactions. Mind you, this is no more than you'd expect from a junior associate who'd been on the derivatives desk for a very short period of time - derivatives trading is a difficult business (if it wasn't, people wouldn't get paid so much to do it) and it takes years to fully understand what is going on, let alone get any good at it. And that's something this author never allowed himself the time to do. If he had (and was any good), my guess is he'd still be doing the job, rather than writing the kiss and tell expose.

Partnoy gives himself away when he sensationally reveals the existence of a secret, off-balance sheet, non-disclosed Cayman SPV, identified only by a PO Box number in Grand Cayman and otherwise totally disassociated from Morgan Stanley. But far from being any real subterfuge, this sounds for all the world like a common or garden repackaging vehicle - of the sort used (quite legitimately and openly) by many investment banks for delivering funded derivative and asset-backed products to their clients. Had he taken the trouble to Google on the words "repackaging" and "Cayman" he would quickly get a sense for how common (and uncontroversial) these sorts of vehicles are.

Partnoy has since become a professor of law at San Diego University, which says as much about the rigours of academic regulation as his book does about derivatives regulation.

Still this silly book sells - but maybe the writing's on the wall: right now, some clunker ex-Enron employee is probably writing the successor in line to FIASCO, only about Enron. With any luck, though, at least this time it'll be written with some style.

Actually, post script to that: Such a book about Enron (et al) has now been written, by one Professor F. Partnoy, esq. It's called Infectious Greed, and the easily shocked will be glad to know the author's prurient sensationalism has not abated in the last few years.

...the industry is different now.
Being in the industry myself (Equity Derivatives Sales/Structurer) I picked up this book with great enthusiasm. I was, however, a bit dissapointment.

His descriptions of products were unneccessarily complicated. I have explained my parents the same products in far more lucid English.

He also seems to have scandalised the industry a bit too much. Perhaps investors were as stupid as the "widows and orphans" during his time, but now-a-days the buy-side are very sophisticated (how I wish they weren't!). Indeed, many on the buy-side have had years on experience on the sell-side too.

More importantly, and perhaps less obvious to most readers, he has given a typically "salesman"'s viewpoint to the entire industry. i.e The convienient notion that all the risk is hedged away, the sales guys "screw" the customers on commission, and money grows on trees. He seems to have forgotten that the real money is made on the trading side, who are themselves trying to screw the sales people.

The industry, however complicated he has tried to potray it, is unfortunately a bit more complex than that.

-- Adi.