This work tells the story of the Securities and Exchange Commission's battle for and against Wall Street during the 1980s. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in "The Washington Post", the book is built around the exploits of John Shad, a man who rose from humble beginnings in Utah to become a wealthy financier and chairman of the SEC during the deregulatory period of Reaganomics. Shad's freemarket policies fuelled the great bull market while planting some of the seeds for the 1987 stock market crash. This tale of how the SEC tried, and frequently failed, to protect ordinary investors from unscrupulous financiers embraces all the big business stories that made headlines during the 1980s.