“[Enrich’s] impressive reporting and writing chops are on full display in The Spider Network… From the start, the book reads like a fast-paced John le Carré thriller, and never lets up.” — William D. Cohan, New York Times Book Review

“With an unerring eye for detail, Enrich shows in this masterful work how a toxic stew of greed, arrogance and a lust for power led to a criminal scheme of unparalleled dimensions. It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the dirty underbelly of the financial world.” — Kurt Eichenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Informant

“Mr. Enrich effectively uses the unique access he secured to the mildly autistic UBS trader, Tom Hayes, who became the fall guy for the unfolding scandal, to produce a surprisingly human narrative....” — Jonathan A. Knee, New York Times DealBook

“A damning look at the culture of trader chicanery… Enrich has sidestepped the temptation to slip into author-as-prosecutor mode, instead going the wry tour guide route to lucidly (and often hilariously) usher readers through the Looney Tunes world that wrought l’affaire Libor.” — John Helyar, coauthor of Barbarians at the Gate

“David Enrich is a masterful financial story teller using real time communications from the central figures. He weaves into his narrative not only what happened, but how it happened and why. Michael Lewis has a new rival.” — Sheila Bair, former chair of the FDIC and bestselling author of Bull by the Horns

“An absorbing read that provides both a meticulous dissection of an immense scandal as well as a fascinating human story.” — Bethany McLean, author of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here

“Dare I say it, but The Spider Network will snare you in its web of deceit, lies, corruption, manipulation and colorful characters. David Enrich’s brilliant investigative expose will reverberate from Wall Street to Main Street.” — Harlan Coben, bestselling author of Home and Fool Me Once

“David Enrich has written an incredibly entertaining, globe-straddling inside account of how one trader turbocharged a greedy cabal that scammed savers and borrowers everywhere. A must read if you want to understand how big banks and traders really work.” — Marcus Brauchli, former Executive Editor of the Washington Post and Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal

“So how did a socially awkward English math whiz mastermind manipulation of lending rates on a global scale? … In David Enrich’s gripping tale, the characters have nicknames worthy of the Mafia, and their ethical compasses aren’t much better.” — Paul Ingrassia, Pulitzer Prize winner, bestselling author of Crash Course

“A thrilling tour de force of reporting, revelation and reasoning. For anyone who wants to understand what really went on inside a scam of epic proportions, The Spider Network is unmissable.” — Iain Martin, author of Crash Bang Wallop

Each day your financial life is governed by interest rates—your credit card, your car payments, your mortgage, your college loans. It would be natural to assume that those rates are set in the marketplace, the product of supply and demand and the usual intervention by the Federal Reserve. This is the story of the guys who gleefully realized that you had no idea what was actually going on.

In 2006, an oddball group of bankers and traders from some of the world’s largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor—the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions of dollars in loans worldwide—was set daily by a small team of easily manipulated functionaries, and that they could reap huge profits by nudging it to suit their trading portfolios. Tom Hayes, a brilliant but troubled math genius, became the linchpin of a wild alliance that included a French trader nicknamed “Gollum”; a Kazakh chicken farmer turned something short of a financial whiz kid; a Swiss banker with a tendency to drunkenly accost women in bars; a karaoke-loving executive who would falsely boast about his role in a 1990s rock band; and a not-very-bright broker who spent much of his leisure time wiping out on his motorcycle. Hayes’s circle would produce the era’s most covert and most substantial financial scandal—until it all unraveled in a spectacularly vicious fashion.

Deeply investigated by award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter David Enrich, The Spider Network is not only a rollicking account of the scam but a provocative examination of a crooked financial system, full of wheeler-dealers able to concoct elaborate connections between dollars and doughnuts, but not their rapacious actions and the law.