Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe. (2010)

“In the mid 1990s dozens of JP Morgan bankers gathered for a legendary meeting to assess the possibility of building a business around the new-fangled concept of credit derivatives.

Gillian Tett is a British author and award-winning journalist at the Financial Times, where she is a markets and finance columnist and an assistant editor.

Little, Brown

In the mid 1990s, 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 concept 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 – a perfect storm for the credit crunch.

Amazon link : Fool’s Gold