Born a son of a Japanese trading- company executive, and exclusively educated in Britain, Tetsuya Ishikawa got his first taste of life in the financial industry in the summer of 1998. That was during his pre-university "gap year," when he worked on the foreign-exchange trading floor at the Tokyo branch of Chase Manhattan Bank, which is now a part of JPMorgan Chase.
Attracted by the industry's prestige, and inspired by the meritocratic culture he experienced during his time with Chase Manhattan, he jumped into banking after graduating from Oxford University in 2001, joining the London office of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO. Though he didn't know it then, in the following six years, as he worked as a "credit banker," he would be taken to the very heart of the financial activities that helped create a credit bubble. But when the bubble burst, shock waves quickly spread worldwide. Several gigantic financial institutions were wiped out or driven into nationalization; Iceland's economy virtually collapsed; and the world is now experiencing possibly the worst ever financial and economic downturn.
Though still a mere 30 years old, Ishikawa — who has also worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — came out last month with a thinly fictionalized account of what has happened to his life, the credit markets and the financial system he worked in.