"The source of the trouble seemed so small, so laughably remote, as to be insignificant. But isn't it always that way? A load of tea is dumped into a harbor, an archduke is shot, and suddenly a tinderbox is lit, a crisis erupts, and the world is different. In this case, the shot was Long-Term Capital Management, a private investment partnership some forty miles from Wall Street. LTCM managed money for only one hundred investors; it employed not quite two hundred people, and surely not one American in a hundred had ever heard of it. Indeed, five years earlier, LTCM had not even existed." Introduction, p. xviii

""By buying the bill futures and shorting (that is, betting on a decline in the prices of) the actual bills, Eckstein really had two bets going, each in opposite directions. Thus, he would expect to make money on one trade and...