Roger Lowenstein Books

Buffett’s beginnings were modest yet rich in the soil of Midwestern enterprise. Omaha in the 1930s was a city steeped in pragmatism, a community of small businesses where reputation mattered more than showmanship. It was here that Warren inherited his father Howard’s quiet conservatism and his mothe...

From Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

Buffett’s education was an intellectual pilgrimage. His early years at the University of Nebraska were marked by impatience—he already understood business better than his professors, yet hungered for more rigorous thought. At Columbia Business School, he found it in Benjamin Graham, whose teachings ...

From Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

Every financial era develops a story about why old rules no longer apply. In the early 1990s, that story was built on globalization, faster computers, advanced derivatives, and growing faith in quantitative finance. Markets were becoming more connected, data was more abundant, and financial institut...

From When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

Institutions often fail long before they collapse on paper; they fail first in culture. Lowenstein shows that LTCM was shaped not only by mathematical models but by the temperament of its founder, John Meriwether. At Salomon Brothers, Meriwether had built a formidable bond arbitrage operation and de...

From When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

The danger of a model is not that it is wrong, but that it feels precise. At LTCM, models were central to identity and strategy. The fund’s partners believed that financial relationships followed observable patterns and that enough data could convert uncertainty into calculable risk. Their trades we...

From When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

A great strategy can still be a terrible bet if it is financed badly. One of Lowenstein’s clearest lessons is that leverage—borrowing money to magnify returns—was the force that transformed LTCM from a highly skilled arbitrage operation into a systemically dangerous institution. Because the fund’s t...

From When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management