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Book description

In the mid 1990's, at a vast hotel complex on a private Florida beach, dozens of bankers from JP Morgan gathered for what was to become a legendary off-site meeting. It was a wild weekend. But among the drinking, nightclubbing and fist-fights lay a more serious purpose - to assess the possibility of building a business around the new-fangled concepts of credit derivatives. The group at the heart of this revolution was an intense team, made up of individuals with a supreme sense of loyalty to each other and to the bank - for years, nothing could break them apart. But when, finally, the team dispersed, the innovations spread far beyond their original intentions, producing perversions in the mortgage market that ultimately culminated in disaster. Part real-life thriller, part investigation and exposé, this searing narrative takes us deep inside the shadowy world of complex finance and derivatives. Gillian Tett has worked for the Financial Times for fifteen years. In 2008 she won the British Press Award for the Financial Journalist of the Year. She often appears on high-profile discussion programmes such as TODAY and she lectures widely. She has PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University