How I Caused the Credit Crunch by Tetsuya Ishikawa
How I Caused the Credit Crunch by Tetsuya Ishikawa
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Wednesday, 15, Apr 2009 04:50
Icon Books, paperback, £8.99, out April 16th.
In a nutshell...
Finance, hookers and credit derivatives
What's it all about?
Andrew Dover falls from Oxford into an investment bank and the world of $1 million pay cheques, strippers, credit swaps, retail mortgage backed securities and a plethora of now toxic assets.
How I Caused the Credit Crunch charts the breaking of deals, the search for new markets and a few high class brothels.
The twist is author Ishikawa was there. His fictionalised tale - where the names are changed to protect the innocent, the guilty and the publishers from the libel lawyers - takes us into the bubble and how it burst.
Who is it by?
Londoner Tetsuya Ishikawa went to Eton, then Oxford for PPE before a career spanning seven global investment banks. In May last year he was made redundant from Morgan Stanley.
Nowadays he writes for the Guardian staking the case for bankers against a very strong tide.
How I Caused the Credit Crunch is his first novel.
Read Tetsuya Ishikawa in interview on myfinances.co.uk
So, is it any good?
Ishikawa explains his initial attempt to chronicle his experience of those financial weapons of mass destruction, aka credit derivatives, was on the technical side.
But a switch of tack came when he realised stories of £500 tips at the end of champagne binges, live sex shows, bitter trading rivalries, office sex and coke, and mid-morning visits from escorts were as much of the story.
So what is left is a strange mix of the two.
A narrative based on the fall of an innocent along with an eleven page glossary of terms from Option ARMs, monolines, CDO Cubeds and Synthetic CDOs.
Complaints that this assets were too complex for investors or even bank CEOs lay at the heart of crisis. However, Ishikawa seems to weave them into the narrative without their explanation jarring excessively.
These financial products were not simple, but he makes them understandable.
But need he have done so?
The story of life in the inside runs well, but with the ending of the character Dover losing his job and girlfriend almost assured as Oedipus hitching up with his mother, there is no great twist and Damascus revelation.
He admits losing sight of just doing a job and joining "the bandwagon of those who believed in their own hype and superiority".
But while Oedipus pokes his eyes out, the main character watches the crash from his mother's sofa and loses a couple of million before trying to dissect what went wrong and failing to deliver a media friendly head on a plate.
All he offers a blanket blame of "ultimately everyone inadvertently played their part in creating the credit bubble, simply by living and embracing the capitalist system we inhabit".
And even claims "when we are out of the woods, we will appreciate the social and economic progress was made". Easy to say when you sitting on a seven-figure bank balance at 30 and looking toward to a life of financial freedom.
There are many real victims at the end of the crisis, and while Ishikawa allows Dover to meet a few real people - it all seems artificial. It feels he is preaching to his friends at a comfortable dinner party, we are expected to nod along.
Here in lies the problem. For as enjoyable as the book is to a finance geek it tries to be an insider's - or even a whistleblower's - guide and a holiday thriller at once.
At times How I Caused The Credit Crunch bridges the gap, but often it is just short, and left with its legs dangling over the precipice.
It feels as if Ishikawa's tale of Dover is too close to the reality and the underlying story is of salesmen shouting down phones, having business meetings - albeit ones around the world - and in strip clubs drinking stupidly expensive wine.
Does the book explain how he caused the credit crunch? No, it tells the story of one cog in a complex and flawed machine, which he claims at the end is not so bad.
Which is a shame. There is room for a great thriller at the heart of finance. And room for an exposé. Ishikawa tries to do both and just misses.
However, while How I Caused the Credit Crunch - now such a dated term - ends a tad hollow, the ride along the way is enjoyable and informative.
Much like the whole crisis
6.45/10
Daniel Barnes