Product Description

'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 prey. Read this book, or else...' Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker. Derivatives brought down Barings and in America bankrupted Orange County local government. They are a bomb waiting to go off in the rest of the world. As one trader said (in taped court proceedings): 'funny business, you know? Lure people into that calm and then just totally fuck 'em'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #225697 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Frank Partnoy was a derivatives trader on Wall Street, and has been a financial journalist and lawyer. His enormously successful F.I.A.S.C.O., about men behaving badly on Wall Street, was 'gripping, unreal stuff, delivered with wry humour' (Sunday Times)

Customer Reviews

Reads like a personal outpouring by the author!
In interesting book, covering very technical subject matter. Partnoy goes to some lengths to explain the instruments he was trading, but one gets the impression he is really trying to convey how complex they are more than impart understanding.
Much of the book is delivered in the style of a bemused rant by the author, clearly shocked and frustrated by the conduct he saw around him and by the ease with which he abandoned principles and joined in.
Partnoy has become a hate figure within his industry which [...] suggests his home-truths are not well received by some.
I can't help wondering if, at one point in the book, he is describing the planting of seeds which may have helped precipitate the collapse of the Argentinian banking system a few days ago ...
Read it and see what you think.

Hilarious. Great reality check on market efficiency.
At first sight, this book looks like a 1990's redux of Liar's Poker and - compared to that - dwells a bit too hard just on the author's feelings and not enough on the many interesting figures of Morgan Stanley. A better job could have been done there. Where this book is unbeatable is in providing plenty of real-life examples of biased, arrogant and overconfident behaviors both inside and outside Morgan Stanley. If anybody still believed in market efficiency and investors' rationality, this book is for sure a great reality check. Also laudable is the Author's effort to explain very complex derivative products in reasonable English.
You will fully enjoy this reading especially if you have worked in a trading room before.

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.