Flash Crash

Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek investigative reporter Liam Vaughan – winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for financial journalism – details the saga of eccentric financial criminal Navinder Sarao, who employed deceitful trading tactics to amass tens of millions of dollars. Yet even as his millions stacked up, the socially awkward young man went on living with his parents and eating at McDonald’s.

Vaughan knows international finance intimately, but it never awes him. He presents Sarao’s life as a trader and his ultimate conviction by US authorities – who accused him of sparking a brief but dramatic stock market crash – as a minor but resonant tragedy. Vaughan doesn’t regard Sarao as evil but rather as a natural product of the modern financial system.