07/17/2017
Henriques (The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust) turns the clock back to Oct. 19, 1987, a date better known as “Black Monday,” when the Dow Jones plummeted 508 points—22.6% of the market at the time. Her report begins with the 1980 crisis in silver trading and then moves quickly onto the financial-futures markets, (the introduction of which “fundamentally changed the way the traditional stock market worked”) and continues with the rise of institutional investors and introduction of innovations such as computerized program trading. The SEC and other regulatory agencies, meanwhile, are shown to be “poorly equipped, ridiculously fragmented, technologically naive, and fatally focused on protecting turf rather than safeguarding the overall market’s internal machinery.” Henriques’s confident, fast-paced, and thoroughly researched narrative also features plain-English explanations of relevant jargon and insightful profiles of the investors, regulators, and economists on the crash’s front lines. Thanks to Henriques’s attention to detail, her book stands as an irrefutable argument against efficient-market theory—which understands stock-market performance as fundamentally the result of “rational and well-informed decisions”—and for wiser regulation of U.S. financial markets. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why financial markets lurch from crisis to crisis and are still so frighteningly susceptible to crashes today. (Sept.)
A valuable and unfailingly interesting account of a crucial two-decade period in Wall Street history. . . .A highly intelligent and perceptive analysis.” —Charles R. Morris, author of The Trillian Dollar Meltdown, in The New York Times Book Review
"A first-class cautionary tale that should be on every financial regulator's and policy-maker's desk — and many an investor, too."—The Washington Post
"A compelling account...rich in interviews and archival research and personalized with vivid descriptions...Her writing is so skillful that even mathematical risk-mitigation techniques and arcane turf wars between regulatory agencies are infused with life."—Burton G. Malkiel in The Wall Street Journal
"The author's journalistic story-telling will bring a deeper understanding of Black Monday to all readers in the same way Andrew Ross Sorkin's 'Too Big to Fail' did for the 2008 crash." —Library Journal
“Diana Henriques has done it again! A First-Class Catastrophe traces, in vivid detail, the human and structural errors that led to the Crash of 1987. It’s a remarkable and well-told story. I remember watching grown men cry as they watched the market fall 22.6 percent in one dark October day. Thanks to Henriques’s excellent reporting, I now know why.”—William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards and Why Wall Street Matters
"[A] confident, fast-paced, and thoroughly researched narrative. . . . It's a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why financial markets lurch from crisis to crisis and are still so frighteningly susceptible to crashes today."—Publishers Weekly
"Solid economic reportage. Investors who remember the events of 30 years ago will blanch all over again, especially at the author’s suggestion that worse may be yet to come."—Kirkus Reviews
“Diana Henriques brings to life the reckless hubris of Wall Street in the 1980s, where the brightest and best played with fire, oblivious to the gathering hazards. A First-Class Catastrophe is at once a page-turning story and a sobering lesson for everyone interested in the stock market of today. I wish I had written it.”—Bryan Burrough, coauthor of Barbarians at the Gate and author of Days of Rage
“A First-Class Catastrophe is a fast-paced thriller about Black Monday, the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost nearly a quarter of its value. But the book is much more than financial history. It is a tale of unheeded warnings and misguided confidence that is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the fault lines in our modern markets came to be.”—Bethany McLean, coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here
“A First-Class Catastrophe is a riveting narrative of a market gone haywire. Diana Henriques unpacks the crash of October 19, 1987, to reveal a long series of miscues, miscalculations, and failings that led to what is still, three decades later, the worst day in Wall Street history. And to top it off, she has given us a rollicking good read.”—Roger Lowenstein, author of When Genius Failed, The End of Wall Street, and America’s Bank
★ 09/01/2017
The 22.6 percent stock market drop on October 19, 1987, aka Black Monday, was the worst single day in Wall Street history. Author and New York Times journalist Henriques (The Wizard of Lies) cites as underlying causes the laissez-faire approach to business by the Ronald Reagan administration, market computerization, highly leveraged financial derivatives, and increased dominance by institutional investors. A lack of resources and coordination by regulators, says the author, allowed for a build up of complexity and risk, with new strategies such as portfolio insurance, index arbitrage, passive index investing, and program trading increasing volatility. Henriques combines industry moves with the personalities of market participants to take readers to the precipice of the collapse and beyond, lamenting that after the crash few reforms were made, which set the stage for future market turbulence, including the 2008 crisis. VERDICT The author's journalistic storytelling will bring a deeper understanding of Black Monday to all readers in the same way Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail did for the 2008 crisis. [See Prepub Alert, 3/27/ 17.]—Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA
2017-07-03
Financial journalist Henriques (The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust, 2011, etc.) turns her gaze on the catastrophic Wall Street collapse of 1987, "the contagious crisis that the system nearly didn't survive."The crash of 1929 was miserable, the dot-com bubble burst of 2000 inconvenient, and the financial collapse of 2008 frightening. All these pale, however, to the events of Oct. 19, 1987, Black Monday, a one-day decline of 22.6 percent. To reach the same level today, writes the author, the Dow Jones would have to fall by 5,000 points. As Henriques writes, it was a perfect storm of allied causes, all of them ones that would ring true to cautious investors today: the financial firms had become too big, certainly too big to fail, while computer-mediated trades and other flashy innovations placed the exchange beyond immediate human reach. As bad or worse, the same ideology, the same set of academic theories, was driving Wall Street, leading to a monoculture of investment that was ripe to fail from the start. The author, a longtime New York Times writer and winner of the George Polk Award, delivers an account that is not for the financially naïve or the innumerate; a typical passage reads, "unfortunately, there were CBOE limits on how many options any one investor could hold at one time, and LOR was already ‘insuring' accounts too large to fit easily within those limits." Those who can read past the financial wonkiness, though, will be well-served by Henriques' insights into the ascent of the quants and the concentration of big capital into fewer and fewer hands—trends that, she notes, continue to accelerate as investment strategies become "even more obscure." Solid economic reportage. Investors who remember the events of 30 years ago will blanch all over again, especially at the author's suggestion that worse may be yet to come.
