Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader

This is an entertaining dirt disher, but has no other merit. If you think that life in a Wall Street firm is really like this - these days, at any rate - think again. If you want a really salacious dirt disher, only well written - try Michael Lewis' Liars' Poker, on which the format of this book was surely based. FIASCO is a thoroughly inferior product.

Not only is it poorly written, it suffers from the fact that its author seems to have had very little understanding of what he was doing when employed at Morgan Stanley - this is apparent from simply reading his own explanations of the transactions. Mind you, this is no more than you'd expect from a junior associate who'd been on the derivatives desk for a very short period of time - show more investment banking is a difficult business (if it wasn't, people wouldn't get paid so much to do it) and it takes years to fully understand what is going on, let alone to get any good at it. And that's something this author never allowed himself the time to do. If he had (and was any good), my guess is he'd still be doing the job, rather than writing the kiss and tell expose.

Still this silly book sells - but maybe the writing's on the wall: right now, some clunker ex-Enron employee is probably writing the successor in line to FIASCO, only about Enron. With any luck, though, at least this time it'll be written with some style.

Postscript: Well, someone *did* write that book about Enron: Called "Infectious Greed", it is a similarly prurient tale, authored by none other than Frank Partnoy, now a tenured academic at the University of San Diego! Publish or perish! show less