When the world's financial markets went haywire in August last year, US hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management and its `rocket scientist' strategists became objects of scorn. But Liar's Poker author Michael Lewis suggests they may have been as much victims of other firms' envy and greed as oftheir own speculation.

One way to understand the panic of August 1998, and to see how bizarre it was, is to imagine a world with two kinds of dollars, blue dollars and red dollars. The blue dollar and the red dollar are both worth a dollar, but you can't spend them for five years. In five years, you can turn them both in for green dollars. But for all sorts of reasons - a mania for blue, a nasty article about red - the blue dollar becomes more expensive than the red dollar. The blue dollar is selling for $1.05 and the red dollar is selling for 95¢.