Crash Bang Wallop: The Inside Story of London's Big Bang and a Financial Revolution that Changed the World - Hardcover

Martin, Iain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1473625068 ISBN 13: 9781473625068

Publisher: Sceptre, 2016

The one book you need to read if you want to understand the financial world.

For fans of Michael Lewis's THE BIG SHORT and Andrew Ross Sorkin's TOO BIG TO FAIL, CRASH BANG WALLOP tells the gripping story of the most daring financial experiment in modern history.

Big Bang was the dramatic moment in October 1986 when London became a testing ground for a new type of global finance. It embodied a wider revolution and the birth of a new age of fully electronic trading, transcontinental commerce and wealth creation on a titanic scale. Big Bang had huge repercussions not just for the world of finance but for culture, society, attitudes to money and value, and how ordinary people around the world lived and worked. These changes mark the moment the modern world was born.

Published on the 30th anniversary of Big Bang, Crash Bang Wallop is the definitive, unflinching story of what really happened during one of the most daring and ambitious financial experiments in history. Drawing on deep archival research and exclusive new interviews, Iain Martin expertly charts the rich history of the City and explores the dramatic upheavals of the '80s and their consequences.

In an afterword titled 'The Fate of the City and the Future of Money', Martin assesses what is next for the City in the wake of Brexit and on the eve of the next revolution in global finance.

For anyone who wants to understand money, markets or the men and women behind it all, this timely, entertaining and revelatory work is essential reading.

Review:

Fascinating . . . it is worth raising your eyes from the Brexit mud-slinging to read a new book on the history of the "Big Bang" financial reform . . .UK politicians should take heed of Martin's book. (Financial Times)

An exciting story, told with verve (Sunday Business Post)

With a journalist's eye for a good tale and a narrative style that rips along, Martin has turned an unloved part of British history about an unloved industry into a fascinating yarn. (The Times)

As historical accounts of modern finance go, this is a corker. (Breaking Views Reuters)

For anyone interested in finance . . . this is a readable history of how the City became the world's money hub. (Sunday Times)

Highly readable and well-informed (The National)

It is refreshing to read this lively account of a series of actions that add up to one of the undoubted, if not undisputed, successes of modern government action . . . a timely reminder of how the City of London got to where it is now (New Statesman)

Martin's great trick in the book is his ear for echoes of the present in stories from the past, making the old City feel remarkably familiar today . . . Above all, Martin has a warmth for his subject, and its cast of characters, without excusing their feelings . . . With the journalist's eye for a good tale and a narrative style that rips along, Martin has turned an unloved part of British history about an unloved industry into a fascinating yarn. (Philip Aldrick The Times)

His book confirmed to me that the City is a financial centre like no other (Literary Review)

Book Description:

The gripping story of the financial revolution known as 'Big Bang', which transformed international business and changed our world, for fans of Michael Lewis' bestselling The Big Short and Liaquat Ahamed's prizewinning Lords of Finance.

• Publisher: Sceptre
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1473625068
• ISBN 13: 9781473625068
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352