John Meriwether is famous for nearly detonating the world financial system when his hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management went belly up in 1998.  A year later, he started another hedge fund, JWM Partners.

LTCM lasted five years before blowing up.  This time ’round, Meriwether managed to stay in business for ten.  Bloomberg:

John Meriwether, who roiled global markets when Long-Term Capital Management LP collapsed in 1998, plans to shut his current hedge fund, according to a person familiar with the matter.

JWM Partners LLC is closing its main Relative Value Opportunity II fund after losing 44 percent from September 2007 to February 2009. Meriwether, credited with generating billions of dollars of revenue at the former Salomon Brothers in the 1980s through so-called relative value trades, returned an average of 1.46 percent a year with his new fund since opening in 1999, compared with 2.4 percent for the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fixed-Income Arbitrage Index.

Meriwether’s second collapse didn’t pose the same systemic risks.  JWM Partners was nowhere near as large, or as overlevered, as LTCM.  The only losers this time are his investors.

Meriwether has made one great contribution to humanity, providing fantastic subject matter for, quite possibly, the two best business books of the last 20 years: Liar’s Poker, about his days trading bonds at Salomon Bros; and When Genius Failed, about the LTCM collapse.