Business & Investing

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller

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Product Description
Bernie Madoff was a king of the financial world and a beloved philanthropist. But very few people knew that he was quietly running the largest hedge fund in the world, a fund that eventually spread to over forty nations and handled tens of billions of dollars.

Harry Markopolos was a small-known number cruncher at a Boston equity derivatives firm analyzing investment products. A marketer for that firm, Frank Casey, handed Harry a prospectus outlining Madoff’s strategy and questioned him to make a similar product. Harry sat down and looked at the numbers. The numbers didn’t add up. For the next ten years, the investigative team Markopolos recruited warned the government, the industry, and the financial press that the largest and most successful hedge fund in the industry was a total fraud and that the respected and admired Bernie Madoff was a crook. But no one would listen.

This is the thrilling, perfect tale of the pursuit of the greatest financial criminal in history. The incredible investigation takes listeners inside the financial industry, revealing the never-before-told tales behind the headlines. No One Would Listen is the frighteningly right tale of massive fraud, governmental incompetence, and criminal collusion that has changed thousands of lives forever—as well as the world’s financial system.Amazon.com Review
Harry Markopolos and his team of financial sleuths chat about first-hand how they cracked the Madoff Ponzi scheme

No One Would Listen is the exclusive tale of the Harry Markopolos-lead investigation into Bernie Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme. While a lot has been written about Madoff’s scam, few really know how Markopolos and his team-affectionately called “The Fox Hounds” by Markopolos himself, uncovered what Madoff was doing years before this financial disaster reached its pinnacle. Sorry to say, no one listened, until the hurt of the world’s largest financial fraud ever was irreversible.

Since that time, Markopolos openly has testified and questioned the enforcement and fraud investigation capabilities of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), shared a sliver of this page-turning tale with 60 Minutes, and become perhaps the world’s most visible and insightful whistleblower on fraud and conflicts of interest in financial markets.

Throughout the book, Markopolos and his Fox Hounds tell their first-hand tale of investigating Madoff-with the help of bestselling leader David Fisher. They clarify how they learned the fraud, and then how they provided credible and detailed evidence to major newspapers and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) many times between 2000 and 2008, only to have his warnings ignored repeatedly by the SEC.

• Provides a firsthand account of how Markopolos uncovered Madoff’s scam years before it really fell apart
• Discusses how the SEC missed the red flags raised by Markopolos
• Describes how Madoff was enabled by investors and fiduciaries alike
• The only book to tell the tale of Madoff’s scam and the SEC’s failings by persons who saw both first hand

Despite repeated written and verbal warnings to the SEC by Harry Markopolos, Bernie Madoff was allowed to continue his operations. No One Would Listen paints a plain portrait of Markopolos and his determined team of financial sleuths, and what impact they will have on financial markets and financial regulation for decades to come.

A Timeline of a Take-Down
Amazon-exclusive content from leader Harry Markopolos

How long did it take to uncover and expose a $40 billion crook? Ten years.

1998-1999
• 1998: My Firm “discovers” Bernie Madoff
• Late 1999: I am questioned to back engineer Madoff’s returns

2000
• I knew he was a fraudster in 5 minutes
• May: Submission to SEC Boston Regional Office’s Director of Enforcement with 12 Red Flags

2001
• January: Team Member Frank Casey recruits MAR Hedge investigative journalist Michael Ocrant onto the team during a chance meeting in Barcelona, Spain
• March: My 2nd SEC Submission on how I reflect Madoff is running the scheme and his investment process
• I offer to go undercover to help the SEC
• Apr: Michael Ocrant interviews Madoff
• May: MAR Hedge publishes Madoff expose, “Madoff Tops Charts; skeptics question how”; Barron’s publishes, “Don’t Question, Don’t Tell: Bernie Madoff is so secretive, he even questions investors to keep mum”

2002
• Jun: Key trip to UK, France & Switzerland; met with 20 Fund of Funds & Private Client Banks: 14 have Madoff and report “special access to Madoff”; two have admitted Madoff losses – Dexia Asset Management and Fix Family tree Office; 12 have not admitted Madoff losses and all 12 were turned into SEC Chairwoman on Feb. 5, 2009; off-Shore funds attract three types of investors who won’t report losses or file SIPC claims with the US government

2003-2004
• E-mail records of investigation lost; attempting to recover data from non-functioning hard drives

2005
• Jun: Frank Casey discovers Madoff attempting to borrow money from European banks (first sign that Madoff scheme is in distress)
• Oct: Boston SEC’s Ed Manion arranges for 3rd SEC Submission
• Oct: Meeting with Boston SEC Branch Chief Mike Garrity, who quickly investigates, finds irregularities, and forwards my submission to SEC’s New York Office
• Nov: Boston Whistleblower calls NYC Branch Chief Meaghen Cheung and reveals his identity
• Nov: 29 Red Flags submitted
• Dec: I doubt NYC SEC’s ability, dread for my life, and contact Wall Street Journal and go to local law enforcement for protection

2006
• Jan: Vital Partners’ $40 million derivatives Ponzi Scheme goes to examination five years and five months after discovery, causing us to further doubt SEC competence
• Sep: Chicago Board Options Exchange VP tells me that several OEX option traders also reflect Madoff is a fraudster; if SEC had called the CBOE’s marketing office, they would have cooperated

2007
• Feb 28: Neil Chelo obtains a Madoff portfolio which shows zero ability to earn a return
• Jun: Casey obtains Wickford Fund LP prospectus showing Madoff is fleeting of cash and offering a 3:1 leverage via bank loans, another clear warning sign that Madoff is running fleeting of cash
• Jul: Chelo obtains Fairfield Greenwich Sentry LP financial statements for 2004 – 2006 and discovers three year-end audits with three different auditors in three different countries!
• Aug: Chelo conducts a 45 minute telephone interview with Fairfield Greenwich’s head of risk management; hedge funds all lose money except for Madoff!

2008
• Apr 2: Undelivered e-mail to Sokobin, SEC’s Director of Risk Assessment, entitled, “$30 Billion Equity Derivatives Hedge Fund Fraud in New York”
• Dec 11: Madoff runs out of money, turns himself in
• Dec 12: SEC insider calls me and warns “watch your back, Operation Take in-up has begun.”

2009
• Feb 4: My U.S. House testimony followed by SEC’s senior staff and FINRA acting CEO
• Sep 4: 477-page SEC IG Report on the Madoff Fiasco unrestricted
• Sep 10: I testify before US Senate Banking Committee with SEC IG

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The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

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• ISBN13: 9780307453372
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
“Beware of geeks impact formulas.”
–Warren Buffett
 
In March of 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an luxurious New York hotel.  They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but persons numbers meant nothing to them.  They were accustomed to risking billions.  
 
At the card table that night was Peter Muller, an eccentric, whip-smart whiz kid who’d studied theoretical mathematics at Princeton and now managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT…when he wasn’t playing his keyboard for morning commuters on the New York subway.  With him was Ken Griffin, who as an undergraduate trading convertible bonds out of his Harvard dorm room had outsmarted the Wall Street pros and made money in one of the worst bear markets of all time.  Now he was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group, one of the most powerful money machines on planet. There too were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as legendary for his computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and Boaz Weinstein, chess life-master and king of the credit defaulting swap, who while juggling $30 billion worth of positions for Deutsche Bank establish time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the famed MIT card-counting team.  
 
On that night in 2006, these four men and their allies were the new kings of Wall Street.  Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a  new breed, the quants.  Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz –technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers– had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who’d long been the alpha males the world’s largest casino.  The quants believed that a dizzying, indecipherable-to-mere-mortals cocktail of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets.  And they helped make a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse.  
 
Few realized that night, though, that in making this unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.  
 
Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, The Quants tells the inside tale of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they feebly watched much of their net worth vaporize – and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so incorrect, so quick.  Had their years of success been dumb luck, fool’s gold, a excellent run that could come to an end on any agreed day?  What if The Truth they sought — the secret of the markets — wasn’t knowable? Worse, what if there wasn’t any Truth?
 
In The Quants, Scott Patterson tells the tale not just of these men, but of Jim Simons, the ascetic founder of the most successful hedge fund in history; Aaron Brown, the quant who used his math skills to humiliate Wall Street’s ancient guard at their trademark game of Liar’s Poker, and years later establish himself with a front-row seat to the rapid emergence of mortgage-backed securities; and gadflies and dissenters such as Paul Wilmott, Nassim Taleb, and Benoit Mandelbrot.  
 
With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory television journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris…and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future.
  

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Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

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• ISBN13: 9780385528757
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?

The primary hindrance is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have learned that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a fantastic beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind likes the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:  

●      The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-ancient medical practice that was endangering patients.

●      The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping.

●      The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service
            
In a compelling, tale-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and additional fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.Amazon.com Review
Chip Heath and Dan Heath on Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Change is hard.” “People despise change.” Persons were two of the most common quotes we heard when we started to study change.

But it occurred to us that if people despise change, they have a amusing way of showing it. Every iPhone sold serves as counter-evidence. So does every text message sent, every corporate merger finalized, every aluminum can recycled. And we haven’t even mentioned the largest changes: Getting married. Having kids. (If people despise change, then having a kid is an dreadfully dumb choice.)

It puzzled us–why do some huge changes, like marriage, come joyously, while some trivial changes, like submitting an expense report on time, meet fierce resistance?

We establish the answer in the research of some brilliant psychologists who’d learned that people have two separate “systems” in their brains—a rational system and an emotional system. The rational system is a thoughtful, logical planner. The emotional system is, well, emotional—and offhand and instinctual.

When these two systems are in alignment, change can come quickly and easily (as when a dreamy-eyed couple gets married). When they’re not, change can be grueling (as anyone who has struggled with a diet can attest).

In persons situations where change is hard, is it possible to align the two systems? Is it possible to overcome our internal “schizophrenia” about change? We judge it is.

In our research, we studied people trying to make hard changes: People fighting to lose weight and keep it off. Managers trying to fix an entrenched bureaucracy. Activists combatting seemingly intractable problems such as child malnutrition. They succeeded–and, to our surprise, we establish arresting similarities in the strategies they used. They seemed to share a similar game plot. We wanted, in Switch, to make that game plot available to everyone, in hopes that we could show people how to make the hard changes in life a small bit simpler. –Chip and Dan Heath

(Photo © Amy Surdacki)

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Rework

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• ISBN13: 9780307463746
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
Most business books give you the same ancient advice: Write a business plot, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, place this one back on the shelf.

Rework shows you a better, quicker, simpler way to make it in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are really harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you reflect. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on red tape or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Persons are all just excuses. 

What you really need to do is stop talking and start effective. This book shows you the way. You’ll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure lacking breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive thoughts that will inspire and provoke you.

With its straightforward language and simple-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, tiny-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they despise, victims of “downsizing,” and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Seth Godin Reviews Rework

Seth Godin is the leader of Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars, and Permission Marketing, as well as additional international bestsellers. He is consistently one of the 25 most widely read bloggers in the English language. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Rework:

This book will make you uncomfortable.

Depending on what you do all day, it might make you extremely uncomfortable.

That’s a very excellent thing, because you deserve it. We all do.

Jason and David have broken all the rules and won. Again and again they’ve demonstrated that the regular way isn’t automatically the right way. They just don’t say it, they do it. And they do it better than just about anyone has any right to expect.

This book is fleeting, quick, sharp and ready to make a difference. It takes no prisoners, spares no quarter, and gives you no place to hide, all at the same time.

There, my review is nearly as long as the first chapter of the book. I can’t imagine what possible excuse you can dream up for not buying this book for every single person you work with, right now.

Stop reading the review. Buy the book.–Seth Godin

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Outliers: The Story of Success

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• ISBN13: 9780316017923
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most legendary and the most successful. He questions the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too small attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family tree, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he clarifies the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a fantastic soccer player, why Asians are excellent at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.


Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: Now that he’s gotten us talking about the viral life of thoughts and the power of gut reactions, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people make it, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the “self-made man,” he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: “they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, “some deserved, some not, some earned, some just unadorned lucky.”

Outliers can be loved for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots’ culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-ancient culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there’s more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples–and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps–Gladwell invites conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential. –Mari Malcolm

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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

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Product Description
A brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. Truth really is weirder than fiction. Who better than the leader of the signature bestseller Liar’s Poker to clarify how the event we were told was impossible—the free fall of the American economy—finally occurred; how the things that we wanted, like ridiculously simple money and momentously expanded home ownership, were vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.

Michael Lewis’s splendid cast of characters includes villains, a few heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish: high government officials, including the watchdogs; heads of major investment banks (some overlap here with previous category); perhaps even the face in your mirror. In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve. He proves yet again that he is the finest and most amusing chronicler of our times. .

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