F.I.A.S.C.O.: Guns, Booze and Bloodlust - The Truth About High Finance Book

As a young salesman at Morgan Stanley in 1994, Frank Partnoy had a ringside seat to some big derivatives deals, but not the ones that made the news for being such disasters: not the bankruptcy of Orange County, California, helped along by Merrill Lynch, nor Gibson Greetings, suckered by Bankers Trust, or Procter & Gamble, also Bankers Trust, or Barings Bank, brought down by rogue trader Nick Leeson. He discusses those, as well as the ones Morgan Stanley worked on. His tone is cocky and snarky and while I have no doubt that many traders and salesmen were disgusting, reprehensible assholes, engaging in locker room antics, as he says, the book also seems rife with caricatures and exaggerations, somewhat like Liar's Poker. The cocky tone also struck me as odd given the rest of his resume; deciding the life of an asshole was not for him, he left Wall Street after quite a brief stint and founded the Center on Corporate and Securities Law at the University of San Diego.

His discussions of derivatives deals are actually fairly detailed and complex. I wouldn't recommend this to someone looking for a light read. The 2009 edition has an afterward which does a good job of explaining collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps and how they acted as financial WMDs in 2007-08.