In the mid 1990s, at a vast hotel complex on a private Florida beach, dozens of bankers from JP Morgan gathered for what was to become a legendary off-site meeting. It was a wild weekend. But among the drinking, nightclubbing and fist-fights lay a more serious purpose - to assess the possibility of building a business around the new-fangled concepts of credit derivatives. The group at the heart of this revolution was an intense team, made up of individuals with a supreme sense of loyalty to each other and to the bank - for years, nothing could break them apart. But when, finally, the team dispersed, the innovations spread far beyond their original intentions, producing perversions in the mortgage market that ultimately culminated in disaster. Part real-life thriller, part investigation and expose, this searing narrative takes us deep inside the shadowy world of complex finance - A PERFECT STORM for the credit crunch

Prizes

Winner of Spear's Book Awards: Financial Book of the Year 2009.

** 'A truly gripping narrative ... The fact that Tett is able to reproduce such raw private communications is a tribute to her journalistic abilities' Dominic Lawson, SUNDAY TIMES ** 'Her blow-by-blow story is an impressive piece of detective work. She pulls back the curtain on a closed, unaccountable world of finance' Will Hutton, GUARDIAN ** 'An absorbing 15-year gallop across the Wild West of the world's financial markets ... Tett sketches a system in the grip of a great error, emanating outwards from a cadre of elite traders who were able to repel any attempt to monitor, question or restrain them' Stephen Foley, INDEPENDENT ** 'A very readable, well-informed account of the way investment bankers invented, promoted and profited from the ... financial products that were at the heart of the financial collapse' Vince Cable, Daily Telegraph

Gillian Tett is Assistant Editor for the FINANCIAL TIMES where she has worked for fifteen years. She won the British Press Award for the Financial Journalist of the Year in 2008 and 2009. She often appears on programmes such as TODAY and NEWSNIGHT and lectures widely.