Simply terrific. Easily the best of the post-crash financial books

Greg Zuckerman was the first to tell the world about John Paulson's sensational trade . . . He's written the definitive account of a strange and wonderful subplot of the financial crisis

A must-read for anyone fascinated by financial madness

A forensic, read-in-one-sitting book

Extraordinary, excellent

Compelling

Zuckerman takes us to Wall Street's heart of darkness, where mushroomed a $1 trillion subprime mortgage market that only the few, the brave, the smart dared short. This is at once a great page-turner and a great illuminator of the market's crash.

Much, much more than a brilliant account of Paulson's trade of the century; this book also provides a highly enjoyable and lucid journey through the analytical and emotional maze that constituted the financial markets on the eve of the Great Recession. Compulsory reading.

A magnificent insider look at how Paulson and others profited off of subprime's demise... insightful and gripping.

Brilliant... a colourful monetary and financial history...Lords of Finance will help to educate as it entertains.

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, enormous power was wielded by a quartet of central bankers...Ahamed provides a compelling and convincing narrative of these bungling, tortured bankers vainly trying to reconcile their conflicting duties to their countries and to the global economy. The strength of this book is in humanising the world's descent into economic chaos.

[a] fascinating and timely history

Incredibly vivid

I've read lots of books about economics this last year. This is one of the very best... Superb

A fluent and indirect paean to Keynesian economics... this resonates with the contemporary turmoil in global financial markets

Ahamed unravels the story of the most terrible financial collapse in history from the perspective of the four men who were largely responsible: the leading central bankers in the United States, Britain, France and Germany

[a] very readable portrait of the bankers who allowed the Great Depression to happen

Possibly the most important political book that I have read since The Spirit Level

He has prised the lid off an important and terrifying can of worms

Lively and well written book

A welcome account of how the sun is never allowed to set on the British empire's old islands, whose fiscal pirates hoard the tax-free treasures of the rich

Shaxson delves into capitalism's secret nooks and tells us about how a culture of secrecy can perpetuate itself. Very interesting

A compelling read [...] an important and very much a live topic, it'll take you a few hours to read the book but it will be a worthwhile investment of time

What makes this such a good read for the layman is that the author employs all his journalistic skill (he used to work at Reuters) to illustrate his arguments and uses real examples to real examples to illustrate complex issues

This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the world we live in

This engrossing book about the offshore banking racket, with its eye-opening scrutiny of tax havens and the suited scoundrels who profit from them, will make you think again about the murkier side of the City...This first-rate forensic work ends with a plea that the closed City "must be abolished and submerged into a...fully democratic London"

[An] informed polemic against finance capital

Now more than a decade old, this is still the best introduction to the world of tax havens