Bank Memoir

Born into one of America's most illustrious trading families, Sam Israel was determined to strike out on his own. After apprenticing with one of the greatest traders of the 1980s, he founded his own fast-growing hedge fund, promising investors extraordinary returns. But it was all an elaborate charade.

Stress Test is the story of Tim Geithner’s education in financial crises. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then as President Barack Obama’s secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner helped the United States navigate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, from boom to bust to rescue to recovery.

Over 4,000 students gathered at the University of Michigan to hear Republican Party candidate Ron Paul speak. As he began to address the topics of monetary policy and the coming depression, a chant rose from the crowd, "End the Fed! End the Fed!" As dollar bills were lit on fire and thrown into the night skies, it became clear that the real problem, one that nobody in the media was talking about, was the central bank-an unconstitutional entity and a political, economic, and moral disaster.

In this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triumphant eras, Agnes Poirier unspools the stories of the poets, writers, painters, and philosophers whose lives collided to extraordinary effect between 1940 and 1950. She gives us the human drama behind some of the most celebrated works of the 20th century, along with the origin stories of now legendary movements, from Existentialism to the Theatre of the Absurd, New Journalism, bebop, and French feminism.

Explorer, naturalist and president of Britain's Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks was a larger-than-life character best known for his promotion of science. In 1768 Banks joined Captain James Cook's expedition to the South Pacific. The 30,000 specimens he brought back generated enormous interest, as did the sometimes racy written account of the journey, which chronicled his frequent amorous exploits.

Terry Moogan found himself as a young adult embroiled in a life of crime, hijacking Securicor vans as a means of rebellion. His actions eventually led to his arrest and an 18-year prison sentence, during which he engaged in daredevil escapes. Moogan’s life took a huge turn when, after working as a butler on the Queen Elizabeth II cruise ship, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton took him under their wing.

In 2006, hedge fund manager John Paulson realized something few others suspected - that the housing market and the value of subprime mortgages were grossly inflated and headed for a major fall. Paulson's background was in mergers and acquisitions, however, and he knew little about real estate or how to wager against housing. He had spent a career as an also-ran on Wall Street. But Paulson was convinced this was his chance to make his mark. He just wasn't sure how to do it. Colleagues at investment banks scoffed at him and investors dismissed him.

Dennis Banks, an American Indian of the Ojibwa Tribe and a founder of the American Indian Movement, is one of the most influential Indian leaders of our time. In Ojibwa Warrior, written with acclaimed writer and photographer Richard Erdoes, Banks tells his own story for the first time and also traces the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

In six weeks in 1940, France was overrun by German troops and surrendered. One junior French general, refusing to accept defeat, made his way to England. On 18 June he spoke to his compatriots over the BBC, urging them to rally to him in London. At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered into history. For the rest of the war, de Gaulle frequently bit the hand that fed him. He insisted on being treated as the true embodiment of France, and quarrelled violently with Churchill and Roosevelt. But he managed to have France recognised as one of the victorious Allies.

Luke 'Milky' Moore is a fun-loving Australian country boy who transforms into a high-rolling playboy, a prison inmate, and a successful criminal lawyer - all because of a bank error. Milky's story starts in a dark place. After the 2008 stock market crash, Milky loses his job, life savings, suffers serious injury in a massive car accident, and struggles to make his house payments. And of course, his girlfriend leaves him. But at this lowest point, his bank accidentally throws him a lifeline.

Norco '80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men - led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian - attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in US history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco '80 transports the listener back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.

Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed "too big to fail" to almost every large corporation in America - to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club - an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs - explains why.

Steven Mandis charts the evolution of Goldman Sachs from an ethical standard to a legal one and uncovers the forces behind what he calls Goldman's "organizational drift". Drawing from his firsthand experience; sociological research; analysis of SEC, congressional, and other filings; and a wide array of interviews with former clients, detractors, and current and former partners, Mandis exposes the pressures that forced Goldman to slowly drift away from the very principles on which its reputation was built.

Banking on It is the firsthand account of one woman's quest to rebuild Britain's broken banking system. After a lengthy career at the top of some of Britain's leading banks, Anne Boden had become disillusioned with the status quo - the financial crash had broken trust in the whole sector, but there seemed to be little appetite to make the most of emerging technologies to revolutionise customer experience. Increasingly frustrated with the inertia within the industry, she decided to shake things up herself by doing something totally radical - setting up her own bank.

This account describes how a 28-year-old from Watford, Nick Leeson, plunged Barings Bank into ruin. In 1994, Leeson seemed to be making the company millions of pounds a week, but he explains how the cover-up of a colleague's small error led to the crash of Britain's oldest merchant bank.

In March 2021, an obscure financial technology company called Greensill Capital collapsed, going into administration. As it unravelled, a multibillion-dollar scandal emerged that would shake the very foundations of the British political system, drawing in swiss bankers, global CEOs, and world leaders, including former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. At the centre was an Australian financier named Lex Greensill. Pyramid of Lies charts the meteoric rise and spectacular downfall of Greensill and his company.

A bright young Texas lawyer determined to make it on his own leaves the DA's office to pursue a career as a criminal defense attorney. Just months later, he finds himself at the center of an international ecstasy drug trafficking ring. As a charismatic negotiator, Lawyer X ignores danger and resurrects a deal gone bad. Caught red-handed in Paris, France, he lands in prison indefinitely.

Although we have long intellectual traditions of wrestling with mortality, few have ever heard of natality, the term political theorist Hannah Arendt used to describe birth's active role in our lives. In this ambitious, revelatory book, Jennifer Banks begins with Arendt's definition of natality as the "miracle that saves the world" to develop an expansive framework for birth's philosophical, political, spiritual, and aesthetic significance. Banks focuses on seven renowned Western thinkers to reveal a provocative countertradition of birth.

In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was 13 years old, her father robbed 11 banks, until the police finally caught up with him while he was sitting at a bar drinking beer, a bag of stolen money plainly visible in the backseat of his parked car. Dubbed the "Mario Brothers Bandit" by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars. In her powerful, provocative debut memoir, Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father.

Caught between the Mob and the feds in a plot to save the casinos in Havana from Castro's revolution, Wolfe Rabin pulls the biggest money-laundering scheme in history, but his hubris leads to the conspiracy unraveling in a sensational trial. At a time when there was a jukebox in every restaurant, diner, bar, barracks, arcade, and canteen, Rabin's trajectory from inventor to promoter to outlaw is set against the Mob's growing infiltration of the jukebox industry.