This book is about the world's largest ruins and the reasons why people, companies and states lose huge amounts of money. The first part of the book ("Fortune is fickle") talks about people who honestly lost in a fair fight - about those who made fortunes on their own and lost them because they were simply unlucky. In the second part (“The Adventure Failed”) we are talking about those who lost, because for them business was first of all a game, a funny adventure - and in a game it’s always there are winners and losers. The third part (“Empires are not eternal”) is about how the descendants of great tycoons disposed of the billions of their fathers and grandfathers. Some, by the way, disposed of it quite honorably, although they lost their status as the richest people in the world. The fourth part (“Why do you, girls?..”) is “gender-related.” It talks about how women ruin others and how they try to ruin them themselves (which is not always successful). The fifth part (“The Fifth Column”) talks about company employees ruining their organizations, and about other “internal diseases” of enterprises , undermining their “health.” The sixth part (“Memento mori”) is devoted to global devastation, economic upheavals, as a result of which not just individuals and companies, but entire countries and peoples went bankrupt. Today, when a global crisis has broken out in the world, it’s time to remember the causes of the Great Depression and the lessons of the 1998 crisis. And finally, the seventh, “theoretical” part (“Bankruptcy as an exact science”) talks about what happens to people and companies in case of official bankruptcy and about the relevant legislation and procedures, as well as about the evolution of relations between creditors and debtors.