Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance
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Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance explores Fischer Black’s intellectual journey from Harvard to the offices of ADL, from the University of Chicago to MIT, and then to Goldman Sachs. Years of research and interviews with Black’s business and academic associates, as well as family and friends, are distilled into a scholarly yet personal story of the formation and development of the extraordinary mind and unique character of this unassuming renegade. This poignant book tells the story of one man’s intellectual adventure at the very center of modern finance. It is a story about the birth of quantitative finance and financial engineering. It is also the story about the continuing human quest to defeat the "dark forces of time and ignorance," as John Maynard Keynes famously put it. Publishers Weekly In a 30-year career equally divided between academics (University of Chicago) and Wall Street, Black contributed seminal papers in almost every area of finance and many areas of economics, but few were published in major peer-reviewed journals and many were never published at all. He spent most of his time alone in a room thinking and writing, was uncomfortable in large groups, an undistinguished lecturer and famously eccentric in ways more irritating than amusing or dramatic. All of this gives Barnard economist Mehrling (The Money Interest and the Public Interest) his work cut out for him. He has responded with a book that, beyond providing the facts of Black's life, serves as the best currently available general history of the revolution in finance that took place between 1960 and 1990: the essential ideas and disputes are explained clearly, with a minimum of mathematics and jargon, and the relationships among the leading innovators are explored concisely but in depth. As far as Black goes, Mehrling gives a clear picture of his working life and reveals the strong family ties and close personal friendships of a man often thought to have been emotionless. On the whole, Mehrling's book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of modern finance or the life of an idiosyncratic creative genius. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Acknowledgments. Prologue: The Price of Risk. One: Thou Living Ray of Intellectual Fire. Two: An Idea in the Rough. Three: Some Kind of an Education. Four: Living Up to the Model. Five: Tortuous Economic Intuition. Six: The Money Wars. Seven: Global Reach. Eight: Stagflation. Nine: Changing Fields. Ten: What Do Traders Do? Eleven: Exploring General Equilibrium. Epilogue: Nothing Is Constant. Notes. References. Index.
