When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
by Roger Lowenstein
Narrated by Roger Lowenstein
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Two Nobel Prize winners, a roomful of the smartest people on Wall Street, and they still nearly took down the global economy — Lowenstein narrates the whole implosion with the quiet disbelief of someone who still can't believe it happened.
- Great if you want: a Wall Street hubris story with real systemic stakes
- Listening experience: methodical build with a genuinely tense third-act collapse
- Narration: author-narrated; journalistic and measured, suits the material
- Skip if: you want character depth over financial systems analysis
Listen to When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management on Audible →
About This Audiobook
Long-Term Capital Management was founded in 1993 by some of the most celebrated financial minds on Wall Street, including two Nobel Prize-winning economists. Within four years, the fund was managing a hundred billion dollars and generating returns that seemed to validate a mathematical model of risk so precise it appeared infallible. When LTCM collapsed in 1998, it nearly took the global financial system with it. Roger Lowenstein reconstructs the rise and fall with reporting that reveals how arrogance, leverage, and the limits of theory combined to produce catastrophe.
Lowenstein narrates his own book with the controlled urgency of a financial journalist who understands the story he is telling is not just dramatic but prophetic. His intimacy with the material gives the technical explanations unusual clarity, and the human portraits of LTCM's brilliant, overconfident founders are rendered with full biographical complexity. At just over nine hours, this is one of the essential business disaster narratives.