A. Satyajit Das is a former derivatives trader and risk manager. When asset backed securities emerged in the 1990s as a growth area, Das wrote the huge manuals that Wall Street banks used. Today - due to the 2008 Global Financial Crash or Great Recession - these manuals sit largely unused and unread in university libraries. In 2010 the Volcker Rule was passed as part of the Dodd-Frank reform act that ended the Clinton administration’s allowance for financial and investment banks to engage in proprietary trading. Most of the trading books that John Wiley & Sons (then the specialist publisher) and McGraw-Hill (which had a smaller imprint) also now sit unread - and in the era of High Frequency Trading, Dark Pools, Algo Trading, and retail trading apps like Robinhood - are also very out-of-date.
Das brings this veteran industry background to his book Fortune’s Formula: Australia’s Choices (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2022) which is part of a series on current issues that publisher Louise Adler has championed. It’s one of several economics books that were released around the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia - which in Melbourne led to extensive and still highly criticised extended lockdowns. For me, it’s one of the best books of this event catalyst-based corpus. In only 25,000 words, Das is able to condense a huge amount of macroeconomic, social stratification, economic history, and informed sociological commentary. That’s because after Das wrote those huge derivatives and risk management manuals for Wall Street that no-one reads, he had the upward career trajectory sense to diversify into first becoming a critic of the dangers and excesses of derivatives - and then to further transition into being a public intellectual and financial commentator. Fortune’s Formula is thus also a model of translational research to inform the broader public.
One of the post COVID-19 trends is the expansion of education and the public sphere to include more diverse voices. Given the second Trump administration - and the psychological shock that many liberal commentators felt about both his re-election and the growth of his respective voter blocs - this is a very polarised issue. President Donald Trump’s lawfare-informed attacks have only heightened tensions - in part because many people are unfamiliar with the 1980s Wall Street environment that he dominated (and helped to define) as a highly leveraged real estate speculator - one personified by the corporate raider.
Das is one of the people who would have both identified opportunities and structured the transactions - and who would have risk managed a merger or acquisition that was “in play” to ensure that its event / volatility arbitrageurs and risk premia were fully value captured and harvested. Many more traditional institutions are still also thinking about these evolving industry dynamics as purely a technology play - that OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Google’s Gemini will provide the life/career-changing “silver bullet.” But - like that werewolf, vampire or zombie that always returns as the repressed Shadow - this new technology likely won’t (at least as is fully expected). We are rather in an AI bubble - with people trying to time the market.
Having formerly worked in the highly confidential and commercially sensitive world of university Research Offices (both central and Faculty-based) I also read Fortune’s Formula via this lens. It’s a ‘late’ mid-career book for Das - one that transcends the publisher brief to get something to market quickly for when the COVID-19 extended lockdowns ended and we all returned to the new Normal. Das had spent the previous two decades writing a series of popular books on derivatives, financial crashes, and their economic and sociological impacts. In Fortune’s Formula he hones this craft: paragraph and sentence structures are tight; material facts, causal loops, and systems archetypes are all deeply embedded in the text. It rewards a close reading.
Das is part of a group of very informed financial industry practitioners who have decided to cut through the noise to provide a broader readership with a hint of the kind of focused analysis that you get in an investment bank or a buy-side hedge fund. I would include Das in a group with fellow Australian Alan Kohler, and with ‘Downtown’ Josh Brown, Raoul Pal, and Joel Rubano of the United States, and Anton Kreil who now lives in Thailand. Each of these people have their respective strengths and stances: Pal leverages his sales background with the RealVision platform; Brown has worked in broker firms and is now in wealth management; Rubano has energy and oil markets expertise; Kreil runs the Institute of Trading and Portfolio Management informed by his career at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers; and Kohler spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic delivering his informative nightly financial commentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation showing off his extensive book collection.
Fortune’s Formula and the rest of Adler’s current issues series at Monash University Publishing thus has a deeper implication as well. People desperately want knowledge. The claim that we live in a so-called ‘post-fact’ society is laughable - or at least highly contestable - for those of us who saw how the contemporary mirror-world of conspiracy theories actually evolved as a disinformation-based industry. The publisher and editorial team skills of curation; meta-commentary development on internet and media content (user-generated or not); entrepreneurial scalability on digital platforms and in legacy media; and providing access to diverse audiences is now key. What the COVID-19 pandemic did was to break up the traditional, hierarchical, top-down, gatekeeper model that some industries and organisations still cling to. Today’s expertise is no longer the traditional Teacher-Student or Sage on the Stage style educational pedagogy. Rather, it is both Student-centered - and it takes on a range of new models which transcend yet include Lev Vygotsky, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, or Paulo Freire. Connectionist, distributed, embodied, ensemble, situational, and transformational pedagogies of learning continue to become more relevant with each passing day.
I do still wish though that Fortune’s Formula was available in ebook format as well as in my physical copy. But - if it was - it would likely soon end up on Z-Library or Libgen or Anna’s Archive as pirated digital files. And then, Satyajit Das (and his veteran publisher Louise Adler) would not get their Intellectual Property Rights / intangible assets based royalties income streams. We might then likely have to wait longer for a new Satyajit Das book.