The financial industry's invention of complex products such as credit default swaps and other derivatives has been widely blamed for triggering the global financial crisis of 2008. This book takes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives business at the bank before the crisis, providing a detailed firsthand account of the creation, marketing, selling, accounting, and management of these financial instruments-and of how they ultimately created havoc inside and outside the bank. The book explains how financial operators and financial products coexist and how this coexistence is tense because the bank deals with innovative products that yield unexpected reactions on unevenly charted markets. The book is also a case study of economic derivation, but rather than look at derivatives as a class of economic goods, it studies derivation as a process.