"Not surprisingly given his reporting chops, Roddy Boyd has written in Fatal Risk a seminal account of how AIG willfully-and irresponsibly-came to insure much of the risk in the financial world in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Fatal Risk is must reading for anyone who wants to be entertained and to understand."
-William D. Cohan, author, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World and House of Cards

"Read this book if you want to know how one of the world's largest companies played with risk and got burned."
-Charles Gasparino, anchor, Fox Business Network

"Fatal Risk is as in-depth as any autopsy of AIG will ever be."
-Felix Salmon, columnist, [...]

"Woody Allen once said that his idea of pure Hell was to be buried alive with a life insurance salesman. But for the rest of us, pure Hell almost became being buried alive by the biggest insurance firm on earth. Here's the final reckoning of how that happened, when a bunch of little snowballs started rolling downhill until they gathered themselves together into the biggest insurance conglomerate avalanche on earth: AIG. Roddy Boyd has made this tale must reading for every member of every finance committee in Congress; at least they'd learn how the people of Wall Street really think."
-Christopher Byron, author, Martha Inc.

The inside story of the company at the center of the financial maelstrom and how it brought down the entire economic system

Written by star investigative reporter Roddy Boyd, Fatal Risk is the first book to tell the complete story of AIG's pivotal role in the 2008 financial crisis. Relying on insider information available to no other reporter-including the personal notes and records of key players-he takes you behind the scenes at AIG, Goldman Sachs, and the New York Fed, to shine a light on how the company was run, how the same qualities that made it a global insurance and financial giant led to its downfall, and, ultimately, how its collapse nearly brought about the unraveling of the world financial system.