A weekly publication covering the frauds, collapses, and catastrophic decisions that shaped the financial world — and the patterns repeating right now.
Every week, somewhere in the financial world, a decision is made that has been made before. A risk is ignored that has been ignored before. A fraud is constructed on a foundation that has collapsed before. The names change. The mechanisms evolve. The underlying pattern — hubris, misaligned incentives, the willingness of institutions to believe what they want to believe — remains essentially unchanged.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. In finance, it rhymes with uncomfortable precision.”
Going Concerned exists to tell those stories properly. Not as cautionary headlines or Wikipedia summaries, but as the full account — the cast of characters, the sequence of decisions, the moments when it could still have been stopped, and the reckoning that followed. Each issue takes one event from the dark history of money and reconstructs it with the rigour of financial journalism and the pace of a thriller.
The subjects range across three centuries: from the South Sea Bubble of 1720 to the collapse of FTX in 2022, from Charles Ponzi’s original scheme to Bernie Madoff’s refinement of it forty years later. What connects them is not the era or the instrument but the pattern — and the pattern is always repeating right now.
Editorial scope
What Going Concerned covers
Corporate Fraud
The companies that lied to their shareholders
Enron, Parmalat, Wirecard, WorldCom — and the auditors and regulators who should have caught them.
Banking Collapse
The institutions that were too leveraged to survive
Lehman, Bear Stearns, Iceland’s entire banking system — and the weekend the world changed.
Rogue Traders
One person. One hidden account. The same flaw, repeated.
Barings, SocGen, UBS — the same fatal governance failure across thirty years of financial history.
Ponzi Schemes
From Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff
The original 1920 scheme to Madoff’s $65bn refinement — and the SEC that received warnings and never acted.
Crypto Collapse
The same old frauds in new wrappers
FTX, Terra Luna, Three Arrows Capital — running at the speed of the internet and collapsing just as fast.
Political Economy
The countries that borrowed too much
Currencies that collapsed, governments that made catastrophic economic decisions — and why they keep making them.
By the numbers
48k
Subscribers
Finance professionals, investors, analysts, and curious minds
46%
Open rate
Industry average is 21%. Going Concerned readers open it every week.
52
Issues published
A full archive of financial history, searchable and free to read
300+
Years of history
From the South Sea Bubble in 1720 to the collapses of 2024
Editorial approach
How we research and write every story
Every Going Concerned story is built on primary sources — court transcripts, regulatory filings, contemporaneous reporting, and the published accounts of people who were in the room. We do not republish Wikipedia. We do not summarise existing summaries.
Each issue reconstructs a single event: who made which decision, when, with what information, and what they chose to ignore. The goal is not to moralise but to understand — because understanding is the only thing that might, occasionally, produce a different outcome.
Where the historical record is disputed, we say so. The standard is the one that has always mattered in financial journalism: get it right.
Editorial standards
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Primary sources only
Every claim is sourced to court records, regulatory filings, or contemporaneous reporting.
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No sensationalism
The facts of financial history are already extraordinary. We do not exaggerate them.
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Corrections policy
Errors are corrected promptly and transparently at the top of the relevant issue.
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Editorial independence
Sponsors have no influence on editorial decisions. Ever.
Sponsorship & advertising
Reach 48,000 finance-literate readers
Going Concerned’s audience is senior, financially literate, and highly engaged. Our readers are professionals who make decisions — about investments, products, services, and careers. Sponsorship placements are limited deliberately to maintain their impact.