The story of how Liz Truss took the country to the financial brink before combusting in a ball of political flames begins not in Britain but on the other side of the Atlantic in New York nearly a quarter of a century ago. It was there, in a boardroom on the ninth floor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that something happened which would send financial markets careering towards, well, where they are today. This was September 1998 and a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was on the brink of collapse.
The astonishing story of LTCM’s rise and fall is chronicled in When Genius Failed, the classic book by Roger Lowenstein, but for our purposes there are two important things
