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.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
1 The End of the World 1
2 Tommy Chocolate 5
3 Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts 13
4 A Day in the Life 19
5 Buy the Cash Boys a Curry! 25
6 Anything With Four Legs 39
7 No One’s Clean-Clean 49
8 The Sheep Will Follow 61
9 Escape to London 69
10 Goodbye, Big Nose 77
11 The Call 87
12 Crossing the Street 101
13 “What the Fuck Kind of Bank Is This?” 111
14 Just Keep Swimming 123
15 The Ballad of Diamond Bob 133
16 The Switcheroo 147
17 The Trial 157
Afterword 167
Epilogue: The Wild West 171
Notes 175
Acknowledgments 191
About the Authors 193
Index 195
