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Over the years, modern financial markets have faced many seemingly disparate financial crises. These crises can all be traced back to the use of leverage and limited liquidity. While Long Term Capital Management, Solomon Brothers, and the hedge funds run by George Soros and Julian Robertson all faced what appeared on the surface to be unique challenges and untimely downturns, fundamentally each of these collapses can be traced to liquidity and leverage. This is the thesis of Richard Bookstaber's new book. Many of the tales have been told and retold, but Bookstaber, who has devoted the past two decades assessing risk for a variety of firms, has a unique perspective on what precipitated these collapses. Writers such as Michael Lewis and Roger Lowenstein attribute many of the problems experienced by Solomon and its offshoot, LTCM, to the personalities and egos involved. By contrast, Bookstaber contends that investments in limited liquidity markets and the increased use of leverage are instead responsible for these collapses, so the risk protocols at Solomon were the culprits, not John Gutfruend and John Meriwether.