[1] The book describes how the deregulation of the financial industry and the systemic incentives for managers to "loot" limited liability companies led to the build-up and eventual collapse of the credit bubble during the 2000s.

Smith argues that free market economists hold much of the blame for the 2008 financial crisis due to their outsized (and unchecked) influence over policy makers.

In particular, she takes issue with faux empirical approaches used by economists and the masking of complex social phenomena in simple mathematical equations, based on assumptions that are openly acknowledged to be wrong or in error.

The book makes the case that overreliance on the assumption of a "self-correcting" free market led to a period of unregulated speculation, accounting tricks, and public looting.

[3] Steven Poole, reviewing the book for The Guardian, said Smith discussed "subprime, greedy bankers and the like, with often riveting results [...] She initiates the reader elegantly into the jargon (eg a "repo haircut", not Harry Dean Stanton's barnet), and has a gift for summing up pages of crunchy analysis with a vivid précis, calling the post-bailout rules in the US "a looter's wet dream", and that country itself (after a former IMF official) "a banana republic in denial.