Description
Book SynopsisThe financial industry's invention of complex products such as credit default swaps and other derivatives has been widely blamed for triggering the global financial crisis of 2008. In Codes of Finance, Vincent Antonin Lepinay, a former employee of one of the world's leading investment banks, takes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives
Trade Review"The first in-depth anthropological study of how banks invent new financial products... Lepinay spent nearly two years in a huge French bank ... And his study is both highly revealing and slightly farcical."--The Guardian
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Preface Financial Innovation from within the Bank ix Prologue A Day in a Trader's Life 1 Introduction Questioning Finance 6 Part I From Models to Books 23 Chapter 1: Thinking Financially and Exploring the Code 29 Chapter 2: Hedging and Speculating with Portfolios 55 Part II: Topography of a Secret Experiment 87 Chapter 3: The Trading Room as a Market 91 Chapter 4: The Memory of Banking 119 Part III: Porous Banking: Clients and Investors in Search of Accounts 153 Chapter 5: Selling Finance and the Promise of Contingency 157 Chapter 6: The Costs of Price 182 Chapter 7: Reverse Finance 204 Conclusion What Good Are Derivatives? 222 Appendix A: Capital Guarantee Product: The Full Prospectus 233 Notes 235 Bibliography 265 Index 277
