This book has been ripening in my head for several years during the literally thousands of meetings I've had with hedge fund managers, mutual fund managers, and policy makers in central banks, as well as ministers and senior bureaucrats in national development entities on five continents. In addition, when I worked for the Minister of Finance of Indonesia and spent two years working at the White House in Ronald Reagan's second administration, I received a “behind the scenes” look at the way in which this thing called monetary policy is made. It is always a mix of politics, accommodation to bankers, a desire to keep ahead of the guy across the pond, spurious national security considerations, and mostly back-of-the-envelope calculations.

That said, over the years a few very smart people in the money management business have challenged me to leave my comfort zone and push forward into the unknown to answer some thorny questions. And sometimes they have inspired me to write the unpleasant truth about financial markets, which, while working in the crocodilian world of investment banking, had put my career as an analyst at risk from time to time.

So I would like to mention a few of these people who have coerced me to lay it all on the line. Dave Dredge, in particular, has been a great mentor over the past 25 years. Jeremy Kranz has been a wonderful interlocutor. Amit Rajpal has been a great sounding board and I consider him the best bank analyst around. Other intellectual leaders who have helped me are Gao Xiqing, Byron Gill, David Courtney, Chris Mikosh, Jack Malvey, Alex Muncerow, Frank Wang, Tomonori Tani, Simon Ogus, and Todd Tibbetts, a great friend for the past 25 years. A very special thanks goes to Fred Feldkamp, who was gracious enough to go through every line of the book and bring out some vitally important conclusions that were lying just beyond the horizon but were not visible to me from the map room. In addition, I am very grateful to Jim Stent, one of the smartest commercial bankers I have met in my 25 years in Asia. Without fear or favor, he went through the book line by line and made valuable changes.

Thanks to Gavin Liu and Christian Ng for editing and fact checking.