Introduction

Financial maneuvering is a form of endeavor favorable to old men: the financial brain, unlike brains adept in various other areas-for example, mathematics, physics, chess, and, quite possibly, armed bank robbery-apparently deteriorates very little, if at all, with the passage of time, even in the eighth and ninth decades of life. (Women, even geniuses at financial speculation like Betty Green, seem never to have entered the arena of large-scale financial predation.) The greatest single undertaking of Juan March-the former smuggler who in the nineteen-twenties had be-come one of ...