Gillian Tett’s new book, “Fool’s Gold”, is a refreshing and innovative approach to the failings of financial institutions, in that she convincingly ties such failings to the personalities and tribal behavioral patterns of the bankers and economists who putatively cause them. As a trained anthropologist, Tett is well qualified to examine tribal behavior, and her research demonstrates quite clearly that it is alive and well at the corporate level. In her view, the current global credit crisis was unleashed by a relatively small tribe of bankers at J.P.Morgan, a wholesaler of financial services and a significant part of JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM) which is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $2.1 trillion. Tett initiates her hypothesis with an account of how a group of young J.P.Morgan traders conduct themselves at an offsite meeting in Florida in 1994. The reader can imagine that her observations of tribal...