Coming to grips with financial and economic meltdown

The turmoil that over recent years has engulfed the global financial system and threatens economies across the world is for ordinary folk mostly a frustratingly complex and confusing subject. Now there is a book that at least helps us to come to grips with the origins of the crisis as we brace ourselves for its full impact.

Michael Lewis’s Boomerang; Travels in the New Third World is a tragi-comic romp through Europe, in which he relates how the cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

His investigation of bubbles across Europe is brilliantly, sadly hilarious. He also turns a merciless eye on America: on California, the epicentre of world consumption, where we see that a final reckoning awaits the most avaricious of nations too.

One critic describes it as “the ultimate book of our times. It's time to brace ourselves for impact. And, with Michael Lewis, to laugh out loud while we're doing it.”

He tells us to think of banks as belonging to the public sector and not think that even the United States is immune from the great reckoning that lies ahead.

The message seems clear: if the financial storm began in the United States and is now  wreaking havoc across Europe, it is worth remembering that its route is likely to be circuitous. The final reckoning will happen right where it began.

What others say

The New York Times: “Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller’s ability to make virtually any subject both lucid and compelling. In his new book, 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 IMF, 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. … 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 generalisations about other countries, even as he pokes fun at himself as a disaster tourist.”

The Washington Post: “In Boomerang, his latest book on the planet’s seemingly endless financial implosion, journalist Michael Lewis drops in on Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Germany, and chronicles the mess they’ve made of their markets and money. Yet even as ‘Boomerang’ captures the essence of the international economic crisis — as a sort of travelogue version of Lewis’s must-read The Big Short — it also offers an odd collection of searing, sometimes funny but mostly head-scratching judgments and stereotypes about the offending countries. Lewis not only shows us what the Greeks and Icelanders and Irish and Germans did to get into trouble, but he attempts to unveil their souls, too. And it’s not a pretty sight.”

The Christian Science Monitor: “… you won’t know whether to laugh or cry while reading it”..

Lewis says that the idea for “Boomerang” came to him “accidentally,” while talking to a hedge fund manager who believes that Europe could be on the verge of a series of “sovereign defaults” – the bankruptcies of entire nations. To check the situation out, Lewis hopped on a plane and began his personal tour.

“What he ended up compiling is a saga of staggering selfishness, greed, and incompetence that somehow manages – because it is Lewis doing the telling – to be every bit as engaging as it is horrifying.”

(Boormerang (ISBN 9780393081817) is published by W.W. Norton & Company and available in South Africa from Kalahari.com a R249.95)