"More Money Than God shines a fascinating light on What is still the most obscure route to becoming a billionaire---the mysterious world of hedge funds. Sebastian Mallaby's rollicking tour of industry legends---famous and otherwise-tells the improbable story of A. W. Jones, the Vagabond journalist-sociologist and caring anti-Nazi activist who, after World War II, created the first `hedged' investment fund. From there, we get rip-roaring profiles of investing titans from the full-throated gambler Michael Stemhardt to the bold emigre George Soros and the courtly stock picker Julian Robertson to the ill-fated intellects of LTCM and the hedge fund stars of the present day. Even! as Mallaby entertains he advances an unorthodox yet compelling brief: rich as they are, hedge funds are probably the best vehicles society has for assuming risk. Any who disagree will have to contend with the evidence of the recent Wall Street collapse. If one shudders at the prospect of concentrating risk inside giant banks whose chieftains wager other people's money and cavalierly callfor taxpayer bailouts, then, as Mallaby points Out, hedge funds are a necessary antidote."---Roger Lowenstein, author of The End of Wall Street"Sebastian Mallaby takes us into the secretive world of hedge funds and the result is a wonderful story and an education in finance. The book is full of colorful characters playing high-stakes games. Throughout, with his customary intelligence, Mallaby helps us understand this important transformation of the financial industry."---Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World"When Alfred Winslow Jones started the first hedge fund, he had no idea where it would lead. Sebastian Mallaby, who must be the keenest student of hedge funds anywhere, now does---and he shares it with you in this cracking good read"-Dr. Alan S. Blinder, Gordon S. Rentschler memorial Professor of Economics and author of the Quiet Revolution Central Banking Goes ModernWealthy, Powerful, and potetially dangerous, hedge-fund moguls have become the It Boys of twenty-first-century capitalism. Their weekend manisons are fodder for Vanity Fair photographers; their potential to cause chaos preoccupied authorities even before the recent financial cataclysm, Based on esteemed financial writer sebastian Mallaby's unprecedanted access to the industry, including three hundred hours of interviews and binders of internal documents, More Money Than God tells the inside story of hedge funds' origins in the 1960s and 1970s, their explosive battles with central banks in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally their role in the financial crisis of 2007-9.Hedge funds reward risk takers, so they tend to attract larger-than life personalities, Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies began life as a code breaker and mathematician, couthoring a paper on the oretical gemoetry that led to breakthroughs in string theory Ken Griffin of Citadel started out trading convertible bonds from his dorm room at Harvard. Julian Robert-son staffed his hedge fund with college athletes half his age, then he fiew them to various retrests in the Rocktes and raced them up the mountains. Paul Tudor Jones posed for a magazine photograph next to a killer shark and happily declared that a 1929-style crash would be "total rock-and roll" for him. Michael steinhardt was capable of reducing underlings to sobs. "All I want to do is kill myself," one said. "Can I watch?" Steinhardt responded.Finance professors have long argued that beating the market is impossible, and yet drawing on insights from mathematics, economics, and psychology, hedge funds have cracked the market's mysteries and gone on to earn fortunes. Their innovation has transformed the world, spawning new markets in exotic financial instruments and rewriting the rules of capitalismMore than just a history, More Money Than God is a window on tomorrow's financial system. Hedge funds have been left for dead after past financial panics: after the stock market rout of the early 1970s, after the bond market bloodbath of 1994, after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, and yet again after the dot-com crash in 2000. Each time, hedge funds have proved to survivors, and it would be wront to bet against them now. Banks such as Citigroup, brokers such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, Home lenders such as Fannie Mae and Ereddi Mac, insurers such as AIG, and money market funds run by giants such as Fidelity-all have failed or been bailed out. But the Hedge fund industry has survived the test of 2007- far better than its rivals. To a surorishing and unreconized degree, the future of Finance lies in the history of hedge funds Read Less