Linster I will not trouble to defend, but you are reading Gray uncharitably. By "more deadly" he surely means "duller" ("dull" is an adjective to which "deadly" is often yoked). The claim that immortality would be boring may be false, but it is not obviously ridiculous.

I disagree strongly that "the danger of leverage" is the key message of LTCM. The key message for rationalists has to do with the subtle nature of correlation; the key message for risk managers has to do with the importance of liquidity.

"The danger of leverage" also isn't much of a message. That's like saying the message of the Iraq War is "the danger of foreign policy."

Does "popular belief" hold that LTCM wasn't hedged? Anyone who believes that is very far from learning anything from the LTCM story.

Inventing Money, by Nicholas Dunbar

Subject: The failure of Long Term Capital Management. See also gjm's recommendation of Lowenstein, but Dunbar supplies a briefer and more financially sophisticated treatment.

Lessons: The danger of leverage, which is one potentially very expensive form of overconfidence. The world contains more risks than anyone, no matter how clever, can think of to hedge against. LTCM, contrary to popular belief, did in fact hedge against Russia defaulting on its own bonds, through currency forward contracts. What they failed to hedge against was Russia then suspending payment on the forward contracts, and hiding its hard currency.