In this documentary, CBC News' Brian Stewart meets Hernando de Soto, an economist from Peru who became famous interpreting the destructiveness of shadow economies in the developing world. Now his ideas are helping to explain the house of cards that the Western economic giants built.

In his book, The Mystery of Capital, de Soto explains how an absence of property rights leads to poverty in developing countries. People who can't show ownership in anything are condemned to live in illegal shadow economies and this includes billions of the world's poorest.

Today it turns out the largest shadow economy of all was here in the West, in Wall Street and the banking system — in hundreds of trillions of dollars of unregulated financial transactions, which might yet cause massive banking collapse in the world.