“When Genius Failed” by Roger Lowenstein is a book about the rise and fall of a company called Long-Term Capital Management. The events in this story take place in the 90s. We start off learning about John Meriwether, who eventually is the creator of Long-Term Capital Management. Meriwether went to Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois. After this, he went to the University of Chicago for a business degree. Here he worked as an analyst for CNA Financial Corporation. Meriwether graduated from the University of Chicago in 1973. Meriwether began his career by working for Salomon. Here he did great things, earning a lot of money for both the company and himself, and even created an Arbitrage Group. For this group Meriwether wanted to hire …show more content…
He wanted to make it as similar as he could to the Arbitrage Group that he created for Salomon. Meriwether tried to hire as many smart people as possible again. He even took people from Salomon to come work for him. He finally built his little empire back up and was left with a solid group of really smart people. He needed capital to start up this fund and got money from high profile celebrities and institutions (one of these being Nike). At the end of his fundraising he was left with about $1.25 billion …show more content…
This was a great accomplishment because the market was so unstable at this time. A lot of people were impressed with what they were able to do. The book mentioned that the top staffers at Long-Term Capital was making anywhere from 1 to 2 million dollars a year. LTCM was growing tremendously and by spring of 1996, it had $140 billion in assets and over 100 employees. “Banks saw Long-Term as not a credit hungry start-up but as a luminous form of celebrated scholars and brilliant traders.” This quote from the book proves that people were impressed by what Meriwether was able to do and that it was actually