Satyajit Das, the author of Traders, Guns, and Money, has just released a new book — Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk. Satyajit is the genuine insider-turned-informer: someone who actually designed, understood and traded the complex CDOs and so on that helped make the world economy what it is today. As a person with the intelligence to know that what the finance sector was asking mathematically gifted individuals like him to design, and the ethics to find this appalling, he “jumped” ship long ago, and is now one of the best critics of the financial sector alive today.
His new book is on my reading list, and I’ll dive into it when I return from the launch of Debunking Economics II–which is taking place next Tuesday at the University College London. Having read the first, I can heartily recommend it to people who find my analysis of value. Satyajit–Das to his Caucasian friends like me who can never properly pronounce his name–brings what I can’t, an insider’s perspective on this whole sorry mess, and has a delightful writing style.
For those of you who live in Sydney, Dat will be doing an “event” with Phillip Adams (the veteran broadcaster and host of ABC’s Late Night Live) at GleeBooks on Tuesday 25 October 2011 around 600 p.m. If you are interested in listening to ideas far more daring and dangerous than at the Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas — “you will never be able to retire”; “living standards will fall significantly”; “America and China will become isolationist”; “the Arab Spring will turn into a nightmare” etc — then an interesting evening is in prospect.
I’ll be there, and I hope to see many of the Sydney-based readers of Debtwatch in the audience as well.
