Extreme money : the masters of the universe and the cult of risk / Satyajit Das.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: Hubris Sub-prime dialects Best in show The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living Retreat Swiss inquisitions Idea of an investment Ambush Mega presentations Fording streams Liquidity and leverage Democracy of greed Pick and pay Black Sea real estate Life on the margin Racing days Dr Doom Extreme money Part 1 Faith 1 Mirror of the times Some kinda money Trading places The invention of money Barbarous relic The real thing The Hotel New Hampshire Collapse Money machines Debt clock Money is nothing The mirrored room 2 Money changes everything Mrs Watanabe goes to Wall Street FX Beauties Club Plutonomy Trickling down, trading up I shop, therefore I must be! Spend it like Beckham! Golden years Tax avoidance Japanese curse The god of our time 3 Business of business Limited consciences A brilliant daring speculation Dirty tricks Marriages and separations The house that Jack built Capital ideas WWJD – watch what Jack did! Business dealings 4 Money for sale It’s a wonderful bank! Pass the parcel Loan frenzy Plastic fantastic money Casino banking Confidence tricks The Citi of money Sign of the times 5 Yellow brick road Monumental money The battle of the ‘pond’ Cool Britannia Barbarian invasions Unlikely centres El-Dollardo economics The unbalanced bicycle Foreign treasure Fool’s gold Liquidity vortex 6 Money honey Printing it Column inches Video money Studs, starlets Financial porn Speedy money Literary money Money for all Part 2 Fundamentalism 7 Los Cee-Ca-Go boys Dismal science Chicago Interpretation Economic politics Academic warfare The Gipper and the Iron Lady Political economy New old deal The monetary lens Unstable stability? 8 False gods, fake prophecies Mystery of price Demon of chance Corporate M&Ms Risk taming Slow and quick money Corporate practice Everything is just noise Perfect worlds Financial fundamentalism Fata morgana Part 3 Alchemy 9 Learning to love debt Fixed floor coverings By the bootstraps Leverage for everything Cutting to the bone Professor Jensen goes to Wall Street Drowning by numbers Censored loans High opportunity bonds Fallen angels Junk people Milken’s mobsters The sweet envy of bankers Thank you for borrowing One bridge too far National treasure 10 &n

The human race created money and finance. But our inventions re-create us. Mankind mistook money—a lubricant of society and human well-being—for an end in itself. Finance, the monetary shadow of real things, came to dominate human reality. Extreme Money tells the story of how this happened—and, in so doing, it tells the story of the modern world.


Bestselling author Satyajit Das draws on 33 years of personal experience at the heart of modern global finance to narrate this story. Das reveals the spectacular, dangerous money games that have generated increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth, Ponzi prosperity, sophistication, and wealth—while endangering the jobs, possessions, and futures of virtually everyone outside the financial industry. Das shows how “extreme money” has become ever more unreal; how “voodoo banking” continues to generate massive phony profits even now; and how a new generation of “Masters of the Universe