Between 2000 and 2007, the total GDP of Earth grew from $36 trillion to $70 trillion. Now we’re in a mess, with banks nationalised, businesses going bust and unemployment and inequality increasing. In this special double bill, leading writers and commentators explore this crisis of our time. In Whoops! novelist and biographer John Lanchester travels with reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts and innocent bystanders to understand this decline. He is followed by journalist Adam LeBor whose The Believers looks at Bernie Madoff, possibly the greatest con man in history, revealing how an underlying sense of insecurity makes some of the richest individuals in America crave ever more status and peer acclaim. LeBor is in discussion with Alex Preston whose first novel This Bleeding City, tells the story of a hedge fund trader working in the crash.
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