Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street's Bluff
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.76 (533 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1118010418 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 352 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-05-13 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
An expose on the delusion, greed, and arrogance that led to America's credit crisisThe collapse of America's credit markets in 2008 is quite possibly the biggest financial disaster in U.S. Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff is the story of Bill Ackman's six-year campaign to warn that the $2.5 trillion bond insurance business was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Branded a fraud by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and investigated by Eliot Spitzer and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ackman later made his investors more than $1 billion when bond insurers kicked
Confidence Game Also Sheds Light on Ackman's Herbalife Battle PyramidSchemeAlert I was prompted to read Confidence Game to learn more about famed hedge fund manager, William Ackman. I did learn much about him. But I learned far more about the mysterious world of the bond market, ratings, and insurance. I also learned deep and enduring lessons about the stale orthodoxy of the business media, and the apparent innate tendency of capital markets to maintain and defend the status quo, regardless of its tenuousness or trend toward catastrophe. Those lesson. "A really great read!" according to Howard. I bought this book along with David Einhorn's ( Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, A Long Short (and Now Complete) Story, Updated with New Epilogue ) which is very similar in the storyline and end result.I thought this book was presented much better and I found myself more immersed in it than with Einhorn's. I was fighting to get through Einhorn's book, while I found myself wanting to read more of this one.All that being said, what Ackman did was tremendous - tr. "A MUST to have among the books on recent financial crisis" according to Miroslav Krajnak. This book is about the late 2000s financial crisis, revolving around the battle between MBIA, the largest and highly leveraged BOND INSURER, and Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager, who in the course of several years has accumulated a huge SHORT position on MBIA.Other players involved include RATING AGENCIES (using different credit-rating scales for municipal and corporate bonds - not making any sense, and earning fees from those companies whose securities they rate - not
"This a riveting account of a tenacious investor, incompetent/apathetic regulators & analysts and a company that hid information, deceived investors and used every connection it had in its attempts to silence him. For me, this is the best of the ‘melt down’ books to date … hands down." — Todd Sullivan, valueplays, April 2010 " Ackman’s pursuit of MBIA spanned the two major crises of capitalism of the last decade, from the earlier era of corporate fraud prosecutions epitomized by Enron and its off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicles (SPVs), to the late credit debacle stemming from the collapse of the CDO house of cards." —The Hedge Fund Law Report, May 2010. At points this reads like a John Grisham n