Flashboys: Cracking the Money Code review riveting third instalment of Michael Lewis's exposé of the international money markets

A new breed of parasitic financial players has discovered a novel way of fleecing the global public many times over in the blink of an eye

When the stories of our times are told, there will be no more seminal documents than the books of Michael Lewis. Flashboys completes a trilogy that charts the very human story of the global corruption of financial markets over the last 30 years, perhaps the most significant and least understood crime of our age. It began in Big Bang Britain in the late 1980s when Lewis, a smart young art history graduate of Princeton University, took a job, like many of his smart young peers, in the City of London with American investment bank Salomon Brothers. He was employed as a bond dealer, barely knowing what a bond was, and watched at first hand how a new generation of traders "big swinging dicks" was the term they favoured changed the rules of investing. In his first book, Liar's Poker, these were changes that Lewis traced directly to the savings and loan scandal that rocked America in the early 1990s, and to the creation of junk bonds, the shape of the derivative economy to come.

When the global financial crash of 2007-8 happened, Lewis once again found a way to examine its genesis in the sub-prime mortgage markets of Wall Street, and to tell the story from the inside through the couldn't-make-it-up histories of those few who had seen the apocalypse coming and made their billions as a result. The Big Short remains both the best-informed primer to the event that shadows all our lives and a barely believable page-turner that uncovers in colloquial detail the worlds of the men they are nearly all men who created it and profited from it.

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