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The Bond King
A review of

The Bond King

How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All

Mary Childs • Flatiron Books • 2022

The Bond King’s Rise and Fall

by David Meyer

Mary Childs — cohost of NPR’s Planet Money podcast — details the vertiginous rise and precipitate fall of Bill Gross, the insightful bond trader who foretold the crash of America’s housing market.

Famously prescient bond trader Bill Gross saw through America’s housing bubble of 2007 and made a fortune. But his later erratic behavior led to his ouster from PIMCO, the giant investment firm that Gross had built. Mary Childs — cohost of NPR’s Planet Money podcast — chronicles Gross’s startling rise and fall.

The Bond King

In 2002, Fortune magazine labeled Bill Gross “the Bond King.” In the finance world, Gross was famous for building a bond firm in Newport Beach, California; practicing yoga; penning folksy Investment Outlooks that gave readers his views on the market; and writing the book, Everything You’ve Heard About Investing Is Wrong! Behind his friendly façade, however, Gross could be mean. He infused his bond company PIMCO with paranoia and pettiness. The company had such a bad reputation for pushing trade counterparties too hard that when a trader or executive left PIMCO, he or she had difficulty finding another job on Wall Street.

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