Open Secret

A bestselling financial reporter exposes the decades-long banking conspiracy that swindled ordinary investors out of billions Following her national bestseller Too Good to Be True, the inside story of the Bernie Madoff scandal, Erin Arvedlund brings her reporting chops and deep financial expertise to the first book to tell the full story of the Libor scandal. In 2012, news broke that a group of young, chummy bankers had, for years, been colluding to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate—the interest rate that determines how money is borrowed and lent throughout the world. They set the Libor higher or lower to suit each others’ needs, while ordinary savers and investors suffered without even knowing it. It was a classic “open secret” among competitors that cost countless victims as much as $1 trillion. Arvedlund takes us behind the scenes of elite firms like Barclays Capital, where twenty-something masters of the universe played fast and loose, while their bosses looked the other way. She also examines the failures of prominent regulators and other officials.