When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

by Roger Lowenstein

night in London—still afternoon in Greenwich—Andy Siciliano, the UBS manager, decided he had to see the hedge fund first-hand. He hopped the Concorde and bumped into Victor Haghani on the flight. Though both were jet-lagged by the time they arrived, neither man had any intention of sleeping. They shared a limousine to Greenwich, where J.M., Rosenfeld, and the laureates were holding court in the conference room. Goldman was still in the building, like an invading army that had established a beachhead. In the conference room, a bunker mentality prevailed. The partners couldn’t stop talking about how the Goldman traders were calling New York on their cell phones—though of course they couldn’t know what the traders were saying. But the notion that a conspiracy had done them in had become an obsession for the partners. When they finished with Goldman, they heaped their fury on Bear Stearns, disingenuously implying that Bear had sprung its letter out of the blue. Conveniently forgetting how disdainful they had been before, the partners abjectly wondered why their friends had abandoned them.