He also manages to present the human angle, showing the people involved as individuals with nuance as much as he can.

I highly recommend reading Barbarians at the Gate before this book, so you'll have a more thorough background of the subject matter, and saving Fortune's Formula for after, as it reuses some of the most interesting factoids and will cheapen the experience. Wall Street recklessness continues unabated today, and the major players of the scandal are out of jail following all-too-short prison terms, given the magnitude of their crimes. In contrast, Iceland did not destroy its citizen-conscious socially responsible society when it was decimated by the international financial misdeeds of 2008 (or thereabouts). and asks her where she'll be staying and Cat is too proud to ask anyone for help so she says she has a place to go to but doesn't specify a particular place.I think listening instead of reading made the book more enjoyable as there were many parts of the book that contained "lingo" or "buzz words" that I simply did not know. Part of the disgust with Washington and big business stems from the slew of mergers and acquisitions that began during the seventies and eighties and which resulted in many people losing their jobs as the larger entities pulled cash out of the acquisitions, cut jobs, and moved much of the business overseas for cheaper labor costs. Stewart says, in the wake of these scandals: "Wall Street has given every sign of being severely chastened.

While the rating tells you how good a book is according to our two core criteria, it says nothing about its particular defining features. While you can understand the rationale for some decisions, they were ominously close to the outcome of the actions by the people under investigation. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 sent a powerful "anything goes" message to the financial markets. But Den of Thieves still emerges as an important read for the present-day observer wondering what's wrong with the culture on Wall Street. Nor is it that strange that Michael Douglas modeled his performance after then-businessman and now-president Donald Trump.But that knowledge was used against the SEC by the business media (and others who had been guilty of the same insider trading) as a way to focus attention away from themselves and to make the SEC look bad, paving the way for future emasculation of the agency, already underfunded.

A helpful and/or enlightening book that is extremely well rounded, has many strengths and no shortcomings worth mentioning.

In a nutshell, Den of Thieves recounts the largest insider-trading scandal in the all-about-me 1980s. What I found most striking was the arrogance of the principals, the steadfast self justification - not only would they refute any wrongdoing in their minds they were heroes, and finally how the criminal behaviour was so richly rewarded even post persecution. During the decade ending in 1990, Lipper Analytical Services reported, money invested in the average junk-bond fund grew 145%.