You know what happened during the financial crisis … now it is time to understand why the financial system came so close to falling over the edge of the abyss and why it could happen again.Wall Street has been saved, but it hasn’t been reformed. What is the problem?Suzanne McGee provides a penetrating look at the forces that transformed Wall Street from its traditional role as a capital-generating and economy-boosting engine into a behemo...

How did Wall Street become a self-serving and ultimately destructive profit machine that imploded? Wall Street's real job is to be our "financial utility"—good financial plumbers that funnel capital to companies so the economy can expand and create jobs and also provide the means for individual investors to build portfolios that will increase personal wealth.But Wall Street went haywire and became (in Jon Stewart's words) a "bizarro" place that lost touch with most of Amer...

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, ches...

With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris, and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future.In March of 2006, four of the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those numbers meant nothing to them. Th...