The Asylum

In the tradition of Too Big to Fail and Liar’s Poker, author Leah McGrath Goodman tells the amazing-but-true story of a band of struggling, hardscrabble traders who, after enduring decades of scorn from New York’s stuffy financial establishment, overcame more than a century of failure, infighting, and brinksmanship to build the world’s reigning oil empire—entirely by accident.

The book explores the lurid culture of Nymex traders, their activities rife with cheating, overindulgence in drugs, prostitutes, and illegal gambling, and how the price of oil is determined less by OPEC and more by a few hundred speculators in Manhattan who are exempted from regulation by several loopholes.