True Banking

The cohost of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs. Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century.

Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators' path to conquest. Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.

In 2006 an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor - the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide - was set daily by a group of easily manipulated administrators, and they could reap huge profits by nudging it fractions of a percent to suit their trading portfolios. This group generated incredible riches - until it all unraveled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.

Listen to what happened next in the follow-up to the best-selling The Wolf of Wall Street, now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese. In the 1990s Jordan Belfort became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock chopper. He was the Wolf of Wall Street, whose life of greed, power and excess was so outrageous it could only be true; no-one could make this up! But the day Jordan was arrested and taken away in handcuffs was not the end of the madness. Catching the Wolf of Wall Street tells of what happened next.

Den of Thieves tells, in masterfully reported detail, the full story of the insider-trading scandal that nearly destroyed Wall Street, the men who pulled it off, and the chase that finally brought them to justice. Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart shows for the first time how four of the biggest names on Wall Street - Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine - created the greatest insider-trading ring in financial history and almost walked away with billions.

How did a bank, which boasts ‘we’re committed to helping protect the world’s financial system on which millions of people depend, by only doing business with customers who meet our high standards of transparency’ come to facilitate Mexico’s richest drug baron? And how did a bank that as recently as 2002 had been named ‘one of the best-run organisations in the world’ become so entwined with such a criminal? Too Big to Jail is an extraordinary story brilliantly told by writer, commentator, and former editor of The Independent.

The Ponzi Housing Scheme is the financial crime of the 21st century. It makes Madoff look like an amateur because of scale. The crime was sophisticated in it's plan. This crime violated laws on the books. It violated laws that should be on the books. And it violated the trust that people have with the banking community, and this violation reaches to the highest bankers in the land and off our shores. This crime is complex, but it is not rocket science. The proof of culpability can be known.

The year was 2004, and India's economy was booming. Around the same time, a nonbanking financial company applied for and received a license to operate as a private bank. Yes Bank was born. Its rise was phenomenal, and it soon became the fourth-largest private bank in the country, with approved permissions to operate in Singapore, London, and Dubai. The returns were also immense. That is, till the skeletons began tumbling out of the Yes Bank lockers. Stories of the bank's reckless lending were going around, and allegations of bribery and corruption became rife.