Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

There was a dance between financial markets and the people who worked in them. The people shaped the markets, but then the markets in turn shaped the people. The markets that were about to shape Sam Bankman-Fried had themselves, over the previous decade or so, been reshaped in ways that mostly reduced the sounds they made. The 2008 financial crisis wasn’t exactly responsible for what was going on, but it had played a role. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that had once taken the most interesting trading risks had become clunkier and more heavily regulated. They were being shoved into the boring Wall Street role once played by the big commercial banks. The trading action had moved into a new class of private trading firms shrouded in secrecy.