You can’t really criticize Harry Markopolos. He was right. He had spotted something wrong with Bernie Madoff years before the biggest Ponzi scheme collapsed. Unlike many others, Markopolos contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission about his suspicions. They ignored him. Markopolos went to the press, but no meaningful article came of it. When Madoff’s scheme … Read more »
Category: Book reviews
Compliance and Liar’s Poker
Michael Lewis has written some great stuff on our most recent financial crisis: The Big Short, Iceland’s Meltdown, Greece and Corruption, and Popping the Irish Bubble. This was not his first rodeo. Lewis had a brief career in finance working as a London-based bond salesman for Solomon Brothers during the mid eighties. His finance career … Read more »
Lords of Finance
The financial crisis of 2008 was not the first. In reading Lords of Finance you see some of the obvious parallels from the 1920s. Liaquat Ahamed focuses his story on Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve, Hjalmar Schact of the Reichsbank and Emile Moreau of the … Read more »
What Caused the 2008 Crisis?: All the Devils are Here
Was it Fannie Mae? Was it the lack of regulatory oversight? Was it the rating agencies? Was it pure greed? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Plus, there were lots of other factors. Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera put together an insightful look at the many factors that created the housing bubble and amplified the destruction … Read more »
Attacking Wall Street in 1920
I don’t often include fiction books in my book reviews on this site. But I was drawn to The Death Instinct because its historic fiction is centered around an event on Wall Street. So I thought the book would be interesting for a compliance professional. A horse-drawn wagon passed through Wall Street’s lunchtime crowds on … Read more »
The US Private Equity Fund Compliance Guide
One of the struggles with implementing a compliance program for a private equity fund is that the Investment Advisers Act is targeted at retail operations dealing with relatively liquid investments. Neither fits well with the private equity model of institutional investors and large, illiquid transactions. Most of the guidance and discussion about how to implement … Read more »
The Corruption of Scott Rothstein
In Miles Away… Worlds Apart, Alan Sakowitz tells the story of the biggest financial fraud in South Florida history, from his unique perspective of a whistleblower. Throughout the book Sakowitz compares his close-knit neighborhood to the Scott Rothstein’s greed. Sakowitz takes us through the narrative of the events leading to the arrest of Scott Rothstein. … Read more »
Book Review: Rewired
I think a big part of compliance is education. It is great to get compliance imposed through internal systems, but you generally need to get the message out to your company about the policies, why they exist, and what they need to do. There is lots of talk about the generation and age group starting … Read more »
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson had the unfortunate luck of writing The Ascent of Money just before the unveiling of the 2008’s Great Panic. At the time he finished writing the book in May 2008, only $318 billion of write-downs had been acknowledged. I was interested in the book because of its focus on the development of our … Read more »
Check out The Checklist Manifesto
As a former transactional attorney, I was trained to use checklists. The transactions were too complicated to keep track of everything in my head. I also needed to communicate with the rest of the transaction team. In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande approaches checklists from the perspective of a surgeon. I had put off reading … Read more »