Did you know, in Lewis' latest book, "Boomerang," the subtitle is, "Travels in the New Third World." Lewis is not referring to Asian or Latin American countries here?
He's talking about European countries that drank the elixir of seemingly endless and cheap credit prior to the bursting of the recent financial bubble.
To say that cheap credit transformed the economies in Greece, Ireland and Iceland, for example, is to understate the impact of the financial bubble on these countries.
Review:
Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller s ability to make virtually any subject both lucid and compelling. In his new book, Boomerang, he actually makes topics like European sovereign debt, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank not only comprehensible but also fascinating.
The book could not be more timely given the worries about Europe's deepening debt crisis and the recent warning issued by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the I.M.F., that 'the current economic situation is entering a dangerous phase.' Combining his easy familiarity with finance and the talents of a travel writer, Mr. Lewis sets off in these pages to give the reader a guided tour through some of the disparate places hard hit by the fiscal tsunami of 2008, like Greece, Iceland and Ireland, tracing how very different people for very different reasons gorged on the cheap credit available in the prelude to that disaster.
The book based on articles Mr. Lewis wrote for Vanity Fair magazine is a companion piece of sorts to The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, his bestselling 2010 book about the fiscal crisis. Like that earlier book its focus is narrow. It doesn t aspire to provide a broad overview of the debt crisis but instead hands the reader a small but sparkling prism by which to view the problem, this time from a global perspective.
At times Mr. Lewis can sound a lot like Evelyn Waugh: shrewd, observant and savagely judgmental, dispensing crude generalizations about other countries, even as he pokes fun at himself as a disaster tourist. Mr. Lewis s ability to find people who can see what is obvious to others only in retrospect or who somehow embody something larger going on in the financial world is uncanny.
And in this book he weaves their stories into a sharp-edged narrative that leaves readers with a visceral understanding of the fiscal recklessness that lies behind today s headlines about Europe s growing debt problems and the risk of contagion they now pose to the world. "
Lewis also visits Germany, apparently to get a quick view from the other side of the Eurobanker's table. Americans, like non-German Europeans, seem incapable of writing about the Germans without lampooning them. Often they appear as ham-fisted martinets, other times as guttural buffoons.
Sometimes they are portrayed as evil geniuses who harbor fond memories of Hitler or the Kaiser and are still bent on ruling the world. Lewis manages to find a different tack. Taking his cue from a sociologist who developed the observation, Lewis informs us that Germans have a national obsession with all things scatological. In their literature, their songs, their humor and their everyday speech, it seems the Germans, more so than other cultures, are focused on excrement.
The theory then attempts to explain the German love for order and cleanliness as reaction formation against this private compulsion in the other direction. Getting us back to finance, Lewis takes the idea a step further by suggesting that the Germans have worked very hard to keep their own financial system pristine, while facilitating "dirty" finance outside of their own borders.
He fully redeems himself in the final chapter, however, where he takes us back to the United States. He finds the ultimate portrait of financial disaster in his own adopted home state of California. Here, his writing rises again to its tragicomic best. Lewis's celebrity nowadays is such that he can get his journalistic foot into almost any door he chooses.
And indeed, he opens this chapter in the company of none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Mr. Universe, former pop movie icon and, of course, former "Governator" of California, all professional heights he reached after arriving in America as an obscure immigrant from Austria in the late 1960's. For his meeting with Lewis, Arnold arrives offhandedly dressed and without any entourage or security whatsoever.
He's invited Lewis to go biking with him, and now leads him on a spin through the chaotic exurbs of Southern California. Afterwards, barely winded, and unfazed by multiple traffic hazards, he takes his shaken new charge back to his office to tell him all about California and its intractable problems.
He's talking about European countries that drank the elixir of seemingly endless and cheap credit prior to the bursting of the recent financial bubble.
To say that cheap credit transformed the economies in Greece, Ireland and Iceland, for example, is to understate the impact of the financial bubble on these countries.
Review:
Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller s ability to make virtually any subject both lucid and compelling. In his new book, Boomerang, he actually makes topics like European sovereign debt, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank not only comprehensible but also fascinating.
The book could not be more timely given the worries about Europe's deepening debt crisis and the recent warning issued by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the I.M.F., that 'the current economic situation is entering a dangerous phase.' Combining his easy familiarity with finance and the talents of a travel writer, Mr. Lewis sets off in these pages to give the reader a guided tour through some of the disparate places hard hit by the fiscal tsunami of 2008, like Greece, Iceland and Ireland, tracing how very different people for very different reasons gorged on the cheap credit available in the prelude to that disaster.
The book based on articles Mr. Lewis wrote for Vanity Fair magazine is a companion piece of sorts to The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, his bestselling 2010 book about the fiscal crisis. Like that earlier book its focus is narrow. It doesn t aspire to provide a broad overview of the debt crisis but instead hands the reader a small but sparkling prism by which to view the problem, this time from a global perspective.
At times Mr. Lewis can sound a lot like Evelyn Waugh: shrewd, observant and savagely judgmental, dispensing crude generalizations about other countries, even as he pokes fun at himself as a disaster tourist. Mr. Lewis s ability to find people who can see what is obvious to others only in retrospect or who somehow embody something larger going on in the financial world is uncanny.
And in this book he weaves their stories into a sharp-edged narrative that leaves readers with a visceral understanding of the fiscal recklessness that lies behind today s headlines about Europe s growing debt problems and the risk of contagion they now pose to the world. "
Lewis also visits Germany, apparently to get a quick view from the other side of the Eurobanker's table. Americans, like non-German Europeans, seem incapable of writing about the Germans without lampooning them. Often they appear as ham-fisted martinets, other times as guttural buffoons.
Sometimes they are portrayed as evil geniuses who harbor fond memories of Hitler or the Kaiser and are still bent on ruling the world. Lewis manages to find a different tack. Taking his cue from a sociologist who developed the observation, Lewis informs us that Germans have a national obsession with all things scatological. In their literature, their songs, their humor and their everyday speech, it seems the Germans, more so than other cultures, are focused on excrement.
The theory then attempts to explain the German love for order and cleanliness as reaction formation against this private compulsion in the other direction. Getting us back to finance, Lewis takes the idea a step further by suggesting that the Germans have worked very hard to keep their own financial system pristine, while facilitating "dirty" finance outside of their own borders.
He fully redeems himself in the final chapter, however, where he takes us back to the United States. He finds the ultimate portrait of financial disaster in his own adopted home state of California. Here, his writing rises again to its tragicomic best. Lewis's celebrity nowadays is such that he can get his journalistic foot into almost any door he chooses.
And indeed, he opens this chapter in the company of none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Mr. Universe, former pop movie icon and, of course, former "Governator" of California, all professional heights he reached after arriving in America as an obscure immigrant from Austria in the late 1960's. For his meeting with Lewis, Arnold arrives offhandedly dressed and without any entourage or security whatsoever.
He's invited Lewis to go biking with him, and now leads him on a spin through the chaotic exurbs of Southern California. Afterwards, barely winded, and unfazed by multiple traffic hazards, he takes his shaken new charge back to his office to tell him all about California and its intractable problems.
