Swimming with Sharks, Joris Luyendijk (ISBN 9781783350650, Guardian Faber Publishing)

The Dutch version of this 2015 book (Het kan niet waar zijn) has been on my pile of books to read for a long time. I got to know Luyendijk through his column in De Standaard. And so I decided to buy his book. That ended up on the pile because I am a collector with more money than time for books. A while ago I bought ‘People like us’, also by Joris Luyendijk and when I had to choose a new book to read last weekend, this one was still at the top of the pile. Then it occurred to me that I had “Swimming with Sharks” lying around somewhere and I still hadn’t read it. That gap has been plugged. The book is the result of roughly 200 interviews that Luyendijk conducted from people who worked in The City in London. He did this for The Guardian with the idea of ​​making the financial world understandable to readers and finding out what went wrong when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008. His blog from then can still be read on the website of The Guardian. Put simply, the frightening conclusion is that things went wrong not because of a few bad apples, but because of structural flaws in the system that have not been resolved. So it could happen again. Very clearly and fluently written and in my opinion an absolute must read.