Some people might be more familiar with Charles Ferguson's 2011 documentary Inside Job, which went on to win an Oscar, but this book provides an even more incisive account of the global financial crash of 2008, with Ferguson brilliantly joining the dots of culpability, from business to academia to politics, using revealing interviews, court documents and corporate archives. Ferguson's fury is engaging, and palpable – he writes of the reasons why it was "still important" to write this book, namely because "the bad guys got away with it", even though there is a huge amount of evidence that those "bad guys" (principally bankers) "knew exactly what was going on, and that it was highly fraudulent". This is a fascinating, cohesive and important book, laying out not only what went wrong in 2008 but also the deeper psychosis entrenched in the systems that prop up the world's economy, and how it continues. It is as fast-paced as any good thriller, yet this compelling story is, sadly, not fiction.
