All The Devils Are Here and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle . Learn more


or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
or
Get a £0.25 Amazon.co.uk Gift Card
All The Devils Are Here: Unmasking the Men Who Bankrupted the World
 
 
Start reading All The Devils Are Here on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

All The Devils Are Here: Unmasking the Men Who Bankrupted the World [Paperback]

Bethany McLean , Joe Nocera
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
RRP: £14.99
Price: £12.74 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £2.25 (15%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Temporarily out of stock.
Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your account will only be charged when we ship the item.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition £5.99  
Hardcover --  
Paperback £5.99  
Paperback, 2 Dec 2010 £12.74  
Audio, CD, Audiobook --  
Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Trade in All The Devils Are Here: Unmasking the Men Who Bankrupted the World for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.

Frequently Bought Together

All The Devils Are Here: Unmasking the Men Who Bankrupted the World + The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron + The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Price For All Three: £25.72

Some of these items are dispatched sooner than the others. Show details

Buy the selected items together
  • Temporarily out of stock.
    Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your account will only be charged when we ship the item.
    Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions

  • The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron £6.99

    In stock.
    Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions

  • The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine £5.99

    In stock.
    Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions



Product details

  • Paperback: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Viking (2 Dec 2010)
  • Language Unknown
  • ISBN-10: 0670920371
  • ISBN-13: 978-0670920372
  • Product Dimensions: 23.5 x 15.5 x 3.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 102,899 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bethany McLean
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.

Visit Amazon's Bethany McLean Page

Product Description

Review

The best business book of the year ... a masterpiece. (Huffington Post )

When the financial crisis of this decade is being taught in business schools, All the Devils Are Here could be the textbook. (Time )

Great stuff (Financial Times )

Impressive. [A] balanced and balanced and complex portrayal of the roots of the crisis. (Economist )

Dozens of authors have written about the credit crunch , [but] McLean has gone one better. She is pointing the finger of blame. (Sunday Times )

A thorough account of the origins of the financial crisis. Helps explain the most troubling headlines of the moment, as well as those that are certain to come. (New York Times )

Joe Nocera is the best business writer alive (Jim Cramer )

Product Description

According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, no-one has put all the pieces of the financial crisis together. The finger was pointed at greedy traders, cowardly legislators and clueless home buyers, but many devils helped bring hell to the economy.

All The Devils Are Here goes back several decades to explore the motivations of everyone from CEOs and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers and Wall Street traders. It exposes the hidden role of companies including AIG and Goldman Sachs. It delves into the powerful mythology of homeownership. And it proves that the crisis ultimately wasn't about finance at all; it was about human nature.

Bethany McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room was the best Enron book on a crowded shelf. All the Devils Are Here will be remembered for finally making sense of the meltdown.


Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 31 people found the following review helpful
A gripping read. 4 Jan 2011
Format:Paperback
I read this book from cover to cover in three days, when I was supposed to be working. I feel that it was time well spent!

After a gripping prologue, the book begins slowly enough, setting out all the players and riders. And if you just happen to not be an investment banker, you may need to keep a page open on Wikipedia, to remind yourself now and then just exactly how does a Credit Default Swap work and what is the difference between a Collateralised Debt Obligation and a synthetic CDO. But trust me, nearly every non-investment banker I have spoken to, did not know what a CDO and a CDS was until 2007. Then we all got to learn this stuff in a hurry!

The further you get into this book, the better it gets. The pace picks up and gets faster and faster, until, right at the end, we get to disaster after disaster, as deluded CEOs desperately try to wriggle this way and that, in a glorious 'dance macabre' as the dominoes fall.

This truly gripping yarn of delusion, foolishness, incompetence, hysteria, fraud and utter, unbridled avarice explains how we went from well-intentioned moves to provide safe investments and finance for affordable housing, to a world in which one company discovered that 30% of its loans were grossly inflated and going to dilapidated houses that nobody was moving into and nobody wanted. This exciting book tells us how mortgage companies and banks bundled debts into these CDOs, typically each CDO being worth about a billion Dollars and sold them off in bundles. We learn how the strange mathematics and the even stranger logic of taking a huge pile of very bad debt and, by lumping it together in these giant CDOs, the rating agencies could be paid to rate this stuff as triple-A! CDOs that were supposed to be just 10% sub-prime mortgages, the rest being safe mixed debt, from commercial to credit cards, turned out to be 85% sub-prime junk papers.

If there has to be a criticism of this book, it has to be that no mention is made of the madness that was happening in the rest of the World. France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia and of course the UK all had their own versions of this credit bubble. In the UK, houses were sold at up to thirty times annual earnings and based on the lunacy of self-assessment and in some areas, valuations increased by 400% in ten years. The Germans have stricter mortgage laws, so they had to import the madness from the US. In the UK, huge banks folded or (e.g. Lloyds and RBS) had to be taken into government ownership. Perhaps that could be a new chapter in a second edition?

But this is the pure American story of how giants, such as Ameriquest, Countrywide, AIG and Fannies Mac and Mae were brought to their knees by their own greed, whilst smaller fry, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and many, many small mortgage brokers, fell in a giant game of dominoes.

This is the story of the day the banks fell for their own Ponzi scheme!

Just buy this book. If you can't buy it, borrow it - but you can't have mine, as there's already a line waiting to read it!
Was this review helpful to you?
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By J. Morris TOP 500 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
All the Devils are here is the latest offering from Bethany Mclean & Joe Nocera, the team that bought you The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron that was subsequently adapted into a brilliant documentary.

What follows is a dramatical description of the workings that allowed the financial crisis of 2008 (still propagating today) to occur. Who the movers and shakers were that lobbied congress for reviews of mortgage laws and the CEOs that lobbied for increased independence and fought to 'securitize' mortgages on a wholesale scale. It lays out the precedents throughout financial history that culminated in the near-collapse of the global economy. It's extremely well written and reads much like a financial drama, with Mclean & Nocera relaying interviews with the main proponents who all seem to blame each other whilst accepting none themselves.

The blurb claims that "no-one has assigned blame for the financial crisis...until now" which is a big claim as I truly have no idea about the veracity of all of the facts with the majority of the information being based on interviews with people that are known for their duplicity. Aside from this, this is a highly informative and educational read, coupled with high-stakes financial drama that will illuminate the murky corporate structures of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac & Countrywide in a way that wasn't immediately clear to me. Recommended.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
whitewash 13 Jan 2012
By D&D TOP 50 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
The authors have indeed done extensive interviewing and told a complex story well. Yes indeed, the book is excellently researched, comprehensive and authoritative. For these seeming achievements the book certainly appears to deserve 5 stars.

A superb reprise at the start of chapter 18 explains: "...the creation of CDOs was the apotheosis of the previous 25 years of modern finance. They were stuffed with risk yet...large chunks of them were considered as safe as Treasury bonds...[even though] they existed solely to make complex bets on securities that existed somewhere else in the system (which, as often as not, were themselves bets on securities that existed somewhere else in the system).

"The...rating agencies'...profits depended on stamping these complex bets with a triple-A rating...They were made possible by the invention of the credit derivative, the most glittering innovation in finance. And their raw material - the debt upon which everything else was built - was mortgages, quite often poorly underwritten subprime mortgages. The stew was now complete.

"On another level, synthetic CDOs were a classic example of how things never really changed on Wall Street. The sellers of synthetic CDOs had a huge informational advantage over the buyers, just as bond sellers have historically had an advantage over bond buyers. Buying a synthetic CDO was like playing poker with an opponent who knew every card in your hand. Conflicts abounded...Just as a cash CDO was the perfect mechanism for laundering risky mortgages, so was a synthetic CDO the perfect vehicle for laundering positions a firm wanted to get off its books." Plenty of traders were aware that their subprime holdings were junk.

In chapter 22: "...as the mortgage market descended into utter chaos [during that awful summer of 2007] and decades of wrongheaded policies, craven behavior, foolish mistakes, and misguided beliefs had come together to create a financial volcano that was beginning to stir" - the authors imply there wasn't really any conspiracy, just bad luck.

The book does repeatedly place blame but seems to deliberately point only at the patsies. A few pages later it does (inadvertently?) reveal some truths: "the banks' dirty little secret was now out in the open. It wasn't just Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac] that had been creating moral hazard all these years. So had the nation's big banks. They had taken on terrible risks, built up immense leverage [bets], and created such tight interconnections with their derivatives books that the failure of any one of them could bring down all the others. When things got bad, they assumed they had an "implicit government guarantee..."

The book would have you believe that many originally unrelated and tiny acorns of corrupt practices proliferated - by chance - into mighty oaks of fraud and that all these just happened to intertwine into a cataclysmic debacle (about which Obama claims "no laws were broken" - thereby condoning the widespread deceptive sales practices). Where they cannot be totally swept under the carpet, a few of the more major manipulators are mentioned, but mainly in passing and with forgiving descriptions. Greenspan, for example, is repeatedly excused because of his "free market" views. For this whitewash, throughout the book, it really deserves zero or even negative stars, so my 3 stars are on the generous side.

Repeatedly it excuses the national government at every level, the government regulators (considered "a joke" by Wall Street, which had spent hundreds of millions to achieve that outcome), the Federal Reserve and even Wall Street generally. Why no mention of the fact that the US Federal Reserve is no more federal than Fedex and has no reserves but is the single most profitable business in the US?

Why no mention that the so-called Federal Reserve - and our own Bank of "England" - is fully owned by private banks, the very financial terrorists who created the meltdown covered in this book and to whom this so-called Federal Reserve (as discovered since the publication of this book) then handed over 12 TRILLION - without conditions! (search on "the world's biggest scam" for more, just in case you missed this towering inferno of a crime, which has also - of course - gone unpunished) [later note: staggering as this amount is, David Wilcock explains that it is now 26 trillion - search on Wilcock + "26 trillion"]

Why such scant coverage by mainstream media (msm) of this theft of 12 TRILLION? Why no mention of the huge gap between the off-ledger or shadow banking system and the on-the-books banking system (only the masses are unaware that off-balance sheet activities and separate conduit vehicles have created a second shadow banking system as large as the visible system)? Day in and day out the msm deflect our attention to the odd burglary or murder or (briefly) to rioting (while denying that riots have anything to do with the increasing poverty).

The City of London's hypothecation and rehypothecation practices have recently come into the lime light, via MF Global and JPMorgan, and it may come as a surprise to many that the City, along with Washington D.C. and the Vatican, are not in practice subject to the laws of the country in which each is situated. The real degree of supervision is minimal at best so it's an economy that rewards only insider trading, which is why the British government is so keen to avoid outside control. This book, focused on Wall Street, fails to address how this enables and encourages much of the still-continuing and massive crime spree, but perhaps a future edition might, as the story is still far from over?

In the meantime, some ad hoc suggestions:
"Currency Wars" by James Rickards, who is famous, among other things, for his ability to accurately predict the Fed's moves ahead of time
"Treasure Islands" by Nicholas Shaxson reveals much about offshore tax havens
"Creating Wealth" by Hallsmith & Lietaer is a practical and comprehensive guide for everyone who wants a vibrant local economy without destroying the planet, and its people, in the process
"Natural Capitalism" is another great book on future possibilities, based entirely on existing successes, with overview case studies of these provided as uplifting examples.
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Mammon's reckoning
Following golden threads of venality, stupidity, corruption, cowardice and a kind of corporate greed that would have made Gordon Gecko blush, McLean and Nocera here trace the roots... Read more
Published 3 days ago by Adam Brooks
None so blind as those who won't see....
This seems to be a very thorough expose and analysis of the financial crisis in the USA from the time the seeds of disaster were sown, through the devil-may-care days when nobody... Read more
Published 1 month ago by R. A. Caton
A Worthy Avalanche Of Detail
Wow, this book is certainly an in-depth look at the mechanics behind the global crash of a few years back. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Paul Pinn
Brilliant - Buy this book!
Just finished reading and wow, great book. As a relative financial layman with an active interest in understanding the reality of this crisis rather than the media scapegoating I... Read more
Published 2 months ago by curious george
Complex look at a very compolex problem
Yes, this book does do what it says on the tin. It tells you who the key players were who created the financial crisis.And it does so in great and well-researched detail. Read more
Published 2 months ago by M. W. Hatfield
Longer than the recession
This book takes a long time to read; the blow-by-blow technical detail is so exhaustive that it will be wasted on most general readers. Read more
Published 2 months ago by S. Day
Interested and detailed
This went into a lot of detail but remained readable throughout.

The technical aspects were well explained and seemed to be accurate. Read more
Published 2 months ago by The Emperor
Interesting read - but would have been good to have more analysis of...
This is an interesting book that's written in an engaging and lively manner. It's very good on the nitty-gritty of what went wrong at banks, mortgage companies, Fannie and Freddie,... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Ukyo Katayama
why are the puppeteers missing?
This book, subtitled "unmasking the men who bankrupted the world" does no such thing.

At the end the authors correctly state: "People also felt that a great crime had... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Lara Boyde
First rate
Having already read several books on the crash, including Gillian Tett and Michael Lewis, I got this one based on Amazon recommendations. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Picky reader
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 

Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Look for similar items by subject


Feedback


Amazon.co.uk Privacy Statement Amazon.co.uk Delivery Information Amazon.co.uk Returns & Exchanges