It’s probably no surprise that I heard about this book because it’s by an NPR reporter and Planet Money and The Indicator are two of the podcasts that I listen to regularly. So when Planet Money did an episode on the book, I decided to check it out.

The Bond King is the story of Bill Gross, the man who founded Pacific Management Investment Corporation (Pimco) and basically made the concept of trading bonds profitable and successful, hence the title “bond king”. Pimco profited during the 2008 financial crisis, but the atmosphere at the company eventually got too toxic and things went downhill from there.

Personally, while I understand the basics of bonds and how they work, bond trading is a different matter. Quite a bit of what Pimco did, especially the things with derivatives, went right over my head. Childs does her best to make the financial things understandable, but this is ultimately a book about Bill Gross and Pimco and not a Bonds 101 class, so while I understood enough to follow along, I don’t think I finished this book understanding enough about bonds to explain everything that went on.

But what I did understand (and what Childs also mentions at the end of the book) is that toxic companies harm people in many ways. Given that Gross built Pimco up from scratch, it’s hard not to lay the blame for the company culture at his feet. But at the same time, I think many of the top executives (including El-Erian) who were happy to let Gross have full reign while Pimco was making money should take some responsibility for the company culture as well. After all, it did feel like they only started to act when Gross started losing his magic touch with money, although to be fair, he also seemed to get more unstable during this period, so to pick out one thing and say “this is why” is difficult.

Overall, this was an interesting book. I think you’d probably need some basic knowledge of what bonds are to understand what’s going on, but once you have that, it’s easy enough to follow along. After all, the real story isn’t about how bonds work, but how Bill Gross made Pimco successful and how he lost control of it all.

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