El Financial Time comenta el libro Octopus :The Secret Market and the World’s Wildest Co de Guy Lawson mencionando "Del rigor de la Ciencia" de J L Borges (El Hacedor 1960)
Extraña historia de Wall Street
En una de las fábulas de Jorge Luís Borges, un antiguo
imperio se vuelve tan obsesionado con la ciencia de la cartografía que a la
larga el único mapa que será suficiente es aquel cuyo tamaño coincide con la
del propio reino. "El vasto mapa era inútil", escribe Borges
lacónicamente. En su afán de captar la realidad, incluso de superarla, el
imperio pierde todo sentido.
Así es también en el cuento fantástico de Sam Israel III:
El pulpo es un thriller de la vida real que narra la
historia interior de un fraude de fondos de cobertura
Sam Israel era un hombre que parecía tenerlo todo, hasta
que el fondo de cobertura implosionó y se convirtió en el blanco de una cacería
humana a nivel nacional.
Después de ser aprendiz con uno de los operadores más grandes
de fondos de cobertura, en la década de 1980, Sam fundó su propio fondo y
prometió a sus inversores ganancias garantizadas. Con el programa informático
patentado que había creado, decía ser capaz de predecir el futuro.
Wall Street’s strangest story
yet
Review by
Sam Jones
Octopus
:The Secret Market and the World’s Wildest Con
By Guy
Lawson
In one of
Jorge Luis Borges’s fables, an ancient empire becomes so fixated on the science
of cartography that eventually the only map that will suffice is one whose
size matches that of the realm itself. “The vast map was useless,” Borges
writes, laconically. In its drive to capture reality, even to beat it, the
empire loses all sense of it.
So it is
too in the fantastical tale of Sam Israel III: a modern hedge fund fable of
fraud and failure that starts in the familiar territory
of Wall Street grime and crime, and
the drive of one man to beat the market – to “hear” it, as Israel puts it
– and ends deep in the weeds of conspiracy and paranoia.
Truth be
told, the collapse of Israel’s hedge fund, Bayou Capital, in 2008, would have
been condemned to obscurity by the dark, long shadow of the vaster Madoff scam
were it not for its sheer strangeness, as told by Guy Lawson. In Octopus, which
was long-listed for this year’s Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book
of the Year Award, Lawson relates by far the most rollicking, trippy yarn to
emerge from the 2008 financial collapse so far.
It starts
ordinarily enough down a well-trodden path of tightly written financial
storytelling, plotting the rise of Israel in the rough world of 1980s Wall Street
under the tutelage of some of finance’s biggest names, from Freddy Graber to
Leon Cooperman.
“I learned
that Wall Street was an illusion,” he tells Lawson from his prison cell.
“There were different magicians using different tricks in different ways. But
everyone cheated.”
Israel’s equivalent of Borges’s map turns
out to be a trading system he has designed called Forward Propagation, which,
he hopes, will unveil financial truths to him.
Things,
however, go downhill. Bayou, started by Israel in the 1990s, suffers big
losses following the terror attacks of September 11 2001 and the lies begin to
take over. Forward Propagation’s failures – hidden from clients – are outpaced
only by Israel’s
failing grip on reality, massaged by a whole alphabet of uppers and downers
from Depakote to Zoloft via Lithium and Wellbutrin.
Poised on
the precipice of his downfall, Israel
sits in the chapel of a Tudor revival mansion he has bought from Donald Trump –
one room of which he has converted into a “rock ’n’ roll” den, with guitars and
amps. At his desk he has a one-way camera to his hedge fund’s trading room so
that, godlike but impotent, he can watch over his messy creation. There is also
a menagerie of exotic reptiles.
From here,
the tale only becomes stranger still. Far, far stranger.
Israel’s desperation pushes him into the
arms of another conman, who in turn cons him, introducing him to “The Octopus”,
a world-ruling cabal in which the globe is carved up between 13 families. There
is a hidden bond market. An alien did land in Roswell but died of a strawberry ice-cream
overdose. Israel
is sucked in, along with his clients’ already much-diminished pool of money.
In the
book’s manic second half we learn that an estimated $10bn has been lost to such
preposterous “hidden finance” conspiracy scams.
The big
problem with Lawson’s book is that shots of objective reality like this are in
short supply. Octopus is the world according to Sam Israel, based, as Lawson
explains, on “hundreds of hours of interviews” with him from his cell. It is a
claustrophobic place.
After 300
pages, there is a danger of feeling as if you have dedicated yourself to an
afternoon reading through the reams of commentary that populate some of the
internet’s seediest redoubts. Octopus could be leavened with more normality.
All of
which is not to deny it is worth persevering with the book. Bayou might be
small fry but Israel’s
story is one of hedge fund excess nudged only a degree out at inception.
His path so
neatly parallels the greed and hubris of the industry, moving stealthily away
from reality over time, that it perhaps contains a kernel of broader truth – or
a warning – for a financial world that, like Borges’s useless map, can seem at
times as though it is built on pure abstraction.
The writer
is the FT’s hedge fund correspondent
Fuente ; Financial Times
October 31,
2012
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