The Wall Road Journal’s award-winning business reporter unveils the bizarre and sinister story of how a math genius named Tom Hayes, a small number of outrageous confederates, and a deeply corrupt bank operating system ignited one of the greatest financial scandals in history.

In 2006, an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the world’s largest finance institutions made a startling realization: Libor-the London interbank offered price, which determines the interest rates on about The Spider Network: The Crazy Story of a Mathematics Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the biggest Scams in Financial History trillions in loans worldwide-was arranged daily by a little group of easily manipulated functionaries, and they could reap large profits by nudging it to match their trading portfolios. Tom Hayes, a brilliant but stressed mathematician, became the lynchpin of a crazy alliance that amongst others included a French trader nicknamed “Gollum”; the broker “Abbo,” who liked to publicly strip naked when consuming; a Kazakh chicken farmer switched something short of economic whiz kid; a broker known as “Village” (short for “Community Idiot”) and fascinated with human-animal sex; an professional called “Clumpy” due to his patchwork hair thinning; and a broker uncreatively nicknamed “Big Nose.” Eventually referred to as the “Spider Network,” Hayes’s circle generated untold riches -until it all unraveled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.

The Spider Network isn’t just a rollicking account of the scam, but a provocative examination of a financial system that was crooked throughout, designed to promote envelope-pushing behavior while shielding higher-ups from the consequences of their subordinates’ rapacious actions.