'Greed is amoral': how Wall Street supermen cashed in on pandemic misery and chaos

• Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis chronicles the cold-blooded response of Wall Street to the COVID pandemic.
• New York finance journalist Scott Patterson reports how savvy investors used the devastation of the pandemic to reap billions in profits.
• Review: Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis (Scribner) Chaos Kings is not so much about the rapacious “greed is good” mentality of the 1980s.
• As the profits flowed from the COVID disaster, there was little hint of any ethical quandary.

The COVID casino

• In the pages of Patterson’s book, we meet colourful characters from up and down Wall Street who closely studied the illness and death spawned by COVID as it spread around the world.
• But most of all, they were “the smartest guys in the room”, who used it for their own financial gain.
• Nassim Taleb, Bill Ackman, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Mark Spitznagel – these are not household names.
• But they all won big in the pandemic casino by operating as crisis-hunting “stock market visionaries”.

On the doorstep of doom?

• But those events were small-time in comparison to what was happening in 2020.
• But his book also reads, in some ways, like a set of interconnected fictional short stories, filled with thrilling twists, turns and revelations.
• The Wall Street protagonists undertake epic journeys, fight mythical beasts and weather calamitous acts of nature, only to return home stronger and richer men.
• But Chaos Kings is not fiction and Patterson does not entirely accept his own heroic narrative.