... history and explanation of financial markets, manias, and panics to help the general reader understand and cope with the calamity of 2008. He has been widely published and quoted in financial ... larger-than-life characters. Above all, the reader needs to feel that there is a dark and sinister cabal of powerful men (the baddies are seldom women) behind events and that the author has, through ... Hatayama of Abeam Consulting in Tokyo, economists Bernard Connolly and Matthew Saal, payments experts Eric Grover and Michael Lewis, as well as Angus Walker, Antony Elliot of Fairbanking, historian...