The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI

Friday February 22, 2008

•  central banking •  finance •  international affairs •  international finance •  international trade •  public affairs • 
  • Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993).

The authors are Time magazine reporters who followed and broke the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal in the early 1990s. The book tells the story from their perspective, provides extensive and well researched background. At the same time, they present the scandal as they uncovered bits of it and give a chronology of their work reporting the BCCI story.

Beaty and Gwynne’s book handles arcane financial transactions and political history with an easy to understand simplicity. Published in 1993, the book resonates with familiar themes and complications which continue to affect United States foreign policy, today.