The Spider Network by David Enrich

The Spider Network by David Enrich

Each day your financial life is governed by interest rates--your credit card, your car payments, your mortgage, your college loans. It would be natural to assume that those rates are set in the marketplace, the product of supply and demand and the usual intervention by the Federal Reserve. This is the story of the guys who gleefully realized that you had no idea what was actually going on.

In 2006, an oddball group of bankers and traders from some of the world's largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor--the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions of dollars in loans worldwide--was set daily by a small team of easily manipulated functionaries, and that they could reap huge profits by nudging it to suit their trading portfolios. Tom Hayes, a brilliant but troubled math genius, became the linchpin of a wild alliance that included a French trader nicknamed Gollum; a Kazakh chicken farmer turned something short of a financial whiz kid; a Swiss banker with a tendency to drunkenly accost women in bars; a karaoke-loving executive who would falsely boast about his role in a 1990s rock band; and a not-very-bright broker who spent much of his leisure time wiping out on his motorcycle. Hayes's circle would produce the era's most covert and most substantial financial scandal--until it all unraveled in a spectacularly vicious fashion.

Deeply investigated by award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter David Enrich, The Spider Network is not only a rollicking account of the scam but a provocative examination of a crooked financial system, full of wheeler-dealers able to concoct elaborate connections between dollars and doughnuts, but not their rapacious actions and the law.

David Enrich is the Business Investigations Editor at the New York Times. He previously was the Financial Enterprise Editor of the Wall Street Journal, heading a team of investigative reporters. Before that, he was the Journal's European Banking Editor, based in London, and a Journal reporter in New York. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2016 Gerald Loeb Award for feature writing. His first book, The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off On of The Greatest Scams in History was short-listed for the Financial Times Best Book of the Year award. Enrich grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated from Claremont McKenna College in California. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two sons.