Books

Swimming With Sharks: My Alarming Journey Into The World of The Bankers offers a unique insight into the working of the global financial sector through interviews with investment bankers, banking staff in legal, risk & compliance, IT and HR, as well as regulators, recruiters, credit rating agency employees, and even therapists. Aimed at general interest readers with as little background in finance as the author had before undertaking his research, it is, fundamentally, a book about human beings and the challenges and temptations they face.

Praise for Swimming with Sharks

'It gets under the skin of individual bankers like no other book I have read.' – Ian Fraser, Huffington Post

'An exploration of the inner workings of banking that's both enormously entertaining and utterly terrifying. Proceeding in his fair-minded, unsensationalist way, Joris Luyendijk ends up showing how the financial system has evolved to offer all the wrong psychological rewards for all the worst behaviour – and how we may be teetering on the brink of a greater crisis than those we've already seen. It's not (mainly) that bankers are bad people. It's far scarier than that.' – Oliver Burkeman