The invention of offshore banking.

Mike Picarella wanted to protect a co-worker from humiliating sexual harassment. He didn’t expect his own life to be destroyed in the process.

Hervé Falciani, a computer engineer working at HSBC, stole the bank’s list of secret accounts. But was he out to expose tax cheats or get rich himself? Perhaps both.

The first known infiltration of the finance fraternity Kappa Beta Phi.

Excerpted from Young Money.

Searching for the alleged Kazakh Bernie Madoff.

On the dangerous state of U.K. banks—“an existential threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal”—and how it can be fixed.

Libor, ISDAfix, and how the big banks do business.

"Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit. In the midst of a conversation, she said to me, “Do I understand the thrust of your position? You are not certain you exist?” I hesitated a moment, and I said, “I can’t be sure.” And she then said to me, “And who, by chance, is answering that question?” With that little exchange, she undermined the philosophical structure I had built for myself. "

How Sherry Hunt soaked the banking giant.

Anyone who wants to know what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about need only look at the way Bank of America does business. It comes down to this: These guys are some of the very biggest assholes on Earth. They lie, cheat and steal as reflexively as addicts, they laugh at people who are suffering and don't have money, they pay themselves huge salaries with money stolen from old people and taxpayers – and on top of it all, they completely suck at banking. And yet the state won't let them go out of business, no matter how much they deserve it, and it won't slap them in jail, no matter what crimes they commit. That makes them not bankers or capitalists, but a class of person that was never supposed to exist in America: royalty.

The CEO of the US’s biggest bank doesn’t have much charisma or a track record, but he’s “doing as well as any little Dutch boy can—sticking his fingers in the dike.”

“For years, the most profitable industry in America has been one that doesn’t design, build, or sell a single tangible thing.” The case for why investment banking is socially useless.

A reporter heads to Nauru, a tiny island nation in the Pacific, to track down the hub of a worldwide money-laundering operation—a shack filled with computers, air-conditioners, and little else.