The German regulators and the German journalistic and finance community tried so hard to protect their unicorn, in a mix of arrogance with incompetence, that they failed to see the problem with it: it was indeed a mythical creature that doesn't exist. It is a world of private clubs and exclusive vacation properties where gossip is the coin of the realm. When I finished shaving him, he took my face in his hands, kissed me gently on the edge of my forehead above my right eye.

As McCrum’s tour casts light into the shadowed recesses, he shows how paper moon shysters and brutish thuggery are by no means relegated to organised crime. Their hall of mirrors was constructed by generating revenue through mis-labeling transaction categories to process otherwise illegal payments; faking income then using the “profit” to acquire failing companies for multiples above market value (and bribing former owners into complicity); and cowering dissenters through aggressive PR counter-messaging, legal action, and phishing attacks from cyber security contractors. I’d dashed home from school stuffed my saddle bag, checked the tires on my bicycle, kissed my mom on the cheek, received at least ten warnings about cycling safety. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. The great Moses Maimonides said, grandfather intoned, quoting the 12th-Century teacher of the Torah, "‘If I am not for me, then who is for me?One aspect of the book I quite enjoyed, was that it challenges the stereo type of Germany as a clean, boring financial system. I picked this up in the same spirit as I did Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (about Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos start-up) and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (about the Sackler family and their drug OxyContin, a catalyst drug to the opioid crisis), namely to learn about something that had very bad intentions/consequences and that I didn't know much about to begin with. I so badly wanted to make my mark in the world by levelling the legal playing field for those who needed justice. These are the things the author decided not to dwell on: What role did the German regulator and supervisor had in the whole affair? There were so many boring threads the author pulled on and then left the most exciting ones unexplained.

The situation that presented itself to me now was this: two older people, who had worked very hard all their lives and who needed money to survive, were desperately in need of help. There's a perfect example of this early in Money Men: A Hot Start-Up, a Billion-Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Future, when its author, the Financial Times journalist Dan McCrum, is ingesting lessons in fraud detection from hedge fund investor Leo Perry.McCrum began publishing a series of blog posts outlining the results of his investigations at FT Alphville in 2015. There's a cat and mouse game between the company and McCrum that ought to be exciting, but by describing the hundreds of other cats and mice all playing small (or unknown) roles, it feels like reading a company's annual report.