Fool's Gold

The inside story of how the credit crunch unfolded by the first journalist to predict it. Falling house prices. Rising energy and food prices. Job losses. Paralysis over whether interest rates should go up or down. Everywhere we turn, the headlines are now screaming the word 'recession'. But where did it all start? And could it have been prevented? In this fast-paced, revealing book, award-winning Financial Times journalist and social anthropologist Gillian Tett takes us inside the shadowy world of complex finance and derivatives and explains how the business of slicing and dicing debt led us to the devastating global credit crunch. Following a small tribe of exceptionally talented bankers, she shows out the innovations they created initially appeared beneficial, but then led to disaster, as the world of complex credit span out of the control of regulators, politicians - and even the bankers themselves.