Fortune's Favored

Historical fiction at its heroic best, set against the backdrop of Wall Street during a time when the most outrageous illicit profits were made at the expense of trusting investors. The scope and scale of corporate transgressions in the late 1990s-such as those involving Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom-surpassed anything the U.S. had seen since the years leading up to the Great Depression. The collapse of Enron marked the largest bankruptcy in he nation's history, only to be eclipsed six months later by the downfall of WorldCom under Ebbers.

Highly regarded companies were employing convoluted and often fraudulent accounting tactics to inflate earnings, conceal losses, and artificially drive up stock prices. The root of the problem was not merely a few "bad apples," but systemic and structural flaws that demanded a federal statutory remedy-namely, a lack of auditor independence, lax standards of corporate governance, and significant conflicts of interest among securities analysts.