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Roger Lowenstein: 2 ideas worth knowing

2 ideas from Roger Lowenstein, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• Six bankers posed as duck hunters and drafted America's central bank in secret

  In 1910, a small group of the country's most powerful bankers and a senator spent nine days in seclusion on Jekyll Island, Georgia, disguised as a hunting party to hide their ident…

  — Roger Lowenstein, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

• A hedge fund run by two Nobel Prize economists needed a bailout within a year

  Long-Term Capital Management used Nobel-winning option-pricing models to run huge, highly leveraged trades that looked almost riskless on paper. When Russia defaulted on its debt i…

  — Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

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