Jean-François Gayraud is a chief superintendent on France’s national police force. He holds a doctorate in law and is a graduate of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and of the Institut de Criminologie of Paris. He is the author of Le Monde des mafias and La Grande fraude (Editions Odile Jacob).

Can financial crises have a criminal origin? Are there delinquent banks that work for organised crime, particularly for drug cartels? Has high-frequency trading allowed certain crooked Wall Street traders to invent the perfect crime?
The powerful, global rise of finance is a unique event in history and a major characteristic of the present age. In the 1980s, deregulation and market liberalisation further and noticeably accelerated the trend toward globalisation.
World finance has now become a complex transnational ecosystem involving several participants. Particularly, it seems to be in the process of becoming a large dysfunctional, anomic territory, producing, under a friendly and innocuous guise, what is actually a ‘capitalism of fraud’, the ‘gangsterization’ of the economy.
Jean-François Gayraud reconsiders financial capitalism in the light of criminology.

• Using the same approach as in his earlier works, Gayraud reveals the ‘geo-economy of organised crime’.
• Dozens of pertinent examples: the ‘yakuza recession’, money-laundering in Mexico and Colombia, the HSBC and BCCI scandals, etc.