This is the story of how bankers with help from the members of Wall Street’s Opacity Protection Team (this includes politicians, economists, think-tanks, rating firms, investment charter constrained asset managers and the financial regulators) undermined the global financial system by reintroducing opacity. The result of reintroducing opacity was the worse financial crisis since the Great Depression and the slowest economic recovery. Transparency Games is about the bankers of Wall Street and the City of London creating and maintaining a veil of opacity to hide behind as they rig the global financial markets for their benefit. Their bad behavior isn’t constrained to simply misrepresenting financial products like toxic subprime mortgage-backed securities, but includes rigging the global interest rate, foreign exchange, commodity and equity markets so the bankers’ bets pay off. The bankers’ bad behavior affects everyone. Whether you are buying electricity or a house or you are investing in your pension plan, opacity lets the bankers take money from you that they are not entitled to. In addition to misrepresenting securities and rigging the global financial markets for their benefit, the veil of opacity also allowed bankers to manipulate the response to the financial crisis that began on August 9, 2007. They used it to sell the idea banks should be bailed out using taxpayer money for fear financial contagion would trigger a second Great Depression. Naturally, part of bailing out the banks was not holding the bankers accountable for their misbehavior or stopping their looting. Transparency Games offers an inside look at how Wall Street and the City of London bankers reintroduced opacity and cynically fight any legislative or regulatory attempt to restore or retain transparency in the financial system. Filled with engaging anecdotes, the book illustrates the principles of transparency using clear plastic and brown paper bags. Based on meticulous research, the book examines the role of transparency in our financial system; the flaw in the design of our financial system that allowed opacity to creep back in; and the response to our current financial crisis that retained opacity for the benefit of Wall Street and the City of London bankers rather than restoring transparency and saving Main Street. It is told by an individual who had the temerity and tenacity over two plus decades to actually fight to bring transparency to all the opaque corners of the global financial system. Based on this experience, Transparency Games introduces the solution for fixing the design flaw in the global financial system. The solution is the Transparency Label InitiativeTM. This solution restores transparency by using a label to steer investors away from blindly gambling. This effectively ends Wall Street and the City of London bankers’ ability to hide behind the veil of opacity where they rig the global financial markets for the bankers’ benefit. This solution also ends bank bailouts due to the fear of financial contagion and the problem of Too Big to Fail.