Description

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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 revealing work is essential reading.

About the Author

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Iain Martin is a commentator on politics and economics. He has been editor of the Scotsman and of Scotland on Sunday andDeputy Editor of the SundayTelegraph. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail and Standpoint magazine. His first book, Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS, and the Men who Blew Up the British Economy, was shortlisted for the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and won the Debut Book of the Year prize at the 2014 Political Book Awards.

Praise For…

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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.—The Times

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