Inventing Money : The Story Of Long-Term Capital Management And The Legends Behind It

LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) - a portmfolio of bonds worth $100 billion - owned 5% of the global interest rate swap market plus other derivatives, it had a notional value of $1 trillion. The people involved in the LTCM were the "dream team": Robert Merton and Myron Scholes (both Nobel Prize winners for their work on option pricing), John Meriwether (the former vice-chairman of Salomon Brothers and one-time Wall Street star of bond trading), and David Mullins (ex-Harvard Business School Professor and previously vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve). Even with all this financial expertise, in September 1998, LTCM collapsed, making financial headline news across the world and requiring 14 investment banks to provide $3.6 billion in cash to stop the fund going under and dragging each of them down as well.