From the author of the best-selling F.I.A.S.C.O., a riveting chronicle of the terrifying rise of financial skulduggery and the damage it is doing. F.I.A.S.C.O. was 'Blood in the Water on Wall Street', this is blood and guts everywhere.

The still-unfolding financial story is scary. One by one major companies - Enron, Worldcom, Anderson, Global Crossing are imploding, prey to greed, fraud and illegal finance and accounting. The global financial system is at a perilous crossroads.

By 2002, the closing bell of the NY Stock Exchange was barely relevant, as securities traded 24 hours a day, around the world. The largest markets were private and weren't regulated at all. Companies' reported earnings were a fiction, and financial reports were chock full of disclosures that would shock the average investor if she ever even glanced at them, not that anyone - including financial journalists ever did ? Simply put the appearance of control in the financial markets has become a fiction.

What Enron did was no different to what hundreds companies - aided by their auditors - do all the time, what they put on their balance sheet and what they hide off it, and how they exploit unfathomable derivatives.