"Siney Homer... author of the massive tome A History of Interest Rates: 2000 BC to the Present, was a gentleman scholar - a breed on Wall Street that was shortly to disappear."
"They were a bred type - intellectual, introverted, detached, controlled. It didn't work to try to play one off against the other; they were too much on the same wavelength."
"Haghani frequently traded the yield curve of a country against itself. Thus, he might go long on Germany's ten-year bonds and sell its five-year paper, a subtle trade that required command of the math along with a keen appreciation for local economic trends. Traders needed approval from the risk-man"
"The partners did go to considerable lengths to research their trades, the Italian trade being a prime example. Haghani recruited a network of intelligence sources to bolster his knowledge of Italy. He hired--first as a consultant, later full-time--Alberto Giovanni, a former official in the Italian T"
"This verity is well worth remembering: the securities might be unrelated, but the same investors owned them, implicitly linking them in times of stress. And when armies of financial soldiers were involved in the same securities, borders shrank. The very concept of safety through diversification--the"