Between 2007 and 2009, the utterly unforeseen crash of several of the world’s biggest commercial banks almost wrecked the global economy, which is still recovering from it. Terrified governments immediately gave the banks trillions of public dollars invented from thin air, but were never seriously criticised for the bailout or for abandoning their own neo-liberal ideology. All the banks involved had been taking wild risks, but their accounts had always been approved by the world’s biggest accounting firms — KPMG, PwC, EY, and Deloitte. The Big Four control 99 per cent of the audit market, which totals $100 billion annually, but auditing is a secondary activity for them; the consultancy business alone is worth $250 billion a year.
How it all began
Two outstandingly clear and…
