Along Came A Scapegoat

David Enrich’s The Spider Network makes Libor mastermind Tom Hayes seem borderline sympathetic.

- Nick Summers

For anyone burning to see financial wrongdoers put behind bars, Tom Hayes might seem like an ideal white-collar villain. As a superstar derivatives trader at a series of investment banks in London and Tokyo, Hayes masterminded a conspiracy to manipulate a benchmark interest rate that underlies hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of loans. British prosecutors—armed with gigabytes of evidence showing Hayes caught in the act, plus his own taped confessions—put him on trial in 2015; he’s now serving an 11-year sentence. It was an epic downfall, and David Enrich, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, recounts it well in The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History (HarperCollins, $29.99). One thing readers won’t get out of this exhaustively reported tale, however, is schadenfreude.