Today those markets increasingly work like Las Vegas casinos. In one kitschy scene, Mezrich describes a glitzy New York business party featuring a performance by singer Tom Jones. The Merc, a male-dominated world where billions are made and lost trading oil futures, offers tough-as-nails traders (known as "meatheads") a high-stakes game of risk and reward. In "Rigged," the folks with the most brains and guts (i.e., those who are least risk-averse) win big. While readers might want to categorize Mezrich's social Darwinism as a kind of macho adolescent fantasy, his fictional worldview fairly reflects our national mania for financial speculation.
The book's hero is David Russo of Brooklyn, who studied at Oxford and later Harvard Business School. As Mezrich repeatedly reminds us, Russo is more street-smart and scrappy than intellectual. As a member of the Oxford crew team, he once punched a rival rower in the face, nearly being expelled for his breach of conduct. He can hold his liquor too, and can, if challenged, exchange expletive-laden insults with anyone. On his first day at the Merc, in September 2002, Russo witnesses the competitive, roughhouse chaos of the trading floor: "The Merc was Atlantic City - on crack." Needless to say, Russo will need more than his Harvard degree to thrive here.
Mezrich brings us inside the locker-room world of Merc traders. Fortunately for Russo, most of them are ambitious, trash-talking Italian kids like him. After Russo stands up to a bouncer in a bar frequented by meatheads, he's slowly accepted into their subculture of expensive liquor, strip clubs, and swaggering money worship. Yet not all the traders like Russo.
