This is the story of the banking excesses of the 1980s, from the viewpoint of an insider involved in merchant banking. As the banks struggle to restore their solvency, taxpayers, customers and shareholders have to shoulder the cost of an extraordinary string of financial disasters. The author offers some hope that current banking losses will not trigger a world depression, as they did in the 1930s, but he does suggest that this new crisis will force banking reform onto the political agenda.