The Fix
How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"The first thing you think is where's the edge, where can I make a bit more money, how can I push, push the boundaries. But the point is, you are greedy, you want every little bit of money that you can possibly get because, like I say, that is how you are judged, that is your performance metric"
—Tom Hayes, 2013
In the midst of the financial crisis, Tom Hayes and his network of traders and brokers from Wall Street's leading firms set to work engineering the biggest financial conspiracy ever seen. As the rest of the world burned, they came together on secret chat rooms and late night phone calls to hatch an audacious plan to rig Libor, the 'world's most important number' and the basis for $350 trillion of securities from mortgages to loans to derivatives. Without the persistence of a rag-tag team of investigators from the U.S., they would have got away with it....
The Fix by award-winning Bloomberg journalists Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch, is the inside story of the Libor scandal, told through the journey of the man at the centre of it: a young, scruffy, socially awkward misfit from England whose genius for math and obsessive personality made him a trading phenomenon, but ultimately paved the way for his own downfall.
Based on hundreds of interviews, and unprecedented access to the traders and brokers involved, and the investigators who caught up with them, The Fix provides a rare look into the dark heart of global finance at the start of the 21st Century.
Customer Reviews
A stunning story of industry wide malfeasance
Libor is no more. Most of the traders charged with manipulating the benchmark were acquitted. However, the central figure in this story, trader Tom Hayes, served nearly six years in prison before charges were dropped against him. The question remains. Was he solely to blame? Or was it the system that let it happen?
In The Fix reporters Liam Vaughn and Gavin Finch provide a compelling case that Hayes was merely a chess piece in a system that tolerated the manipulating of Libor. While the argument that everybody was doing it doesn’t fly one man shouldn’t have taken the fall for industry wide malfeasance.