Michael Lewis- Financial Disaster Tourist

Former Salomon Brothers bond trader Michael Lewis has morphed into the country’s most talented financial writer, someone with a remarkable gift for making complex financial issues simple to understand.  His new book Boomerang, a collection of recent essays for Vanity Fair, is an up close and personal look at the places that got the drunkest in our most recent credit fueled bender- Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and … California.  These places, and their bankers, were the folks responsible for our present, durable financial crisis.

You meet a remarkable cast of characters- an Icelandic cod fisherman who morphed, with a few days of training, into an expert in currency hedging and then dealmaking, the abbot of an obscure Greek Orthodox monastery who swapped the Greek government a worthless lake in exchange for billions of dollars in commercial real estate, a bankrupt Irish property developer who drove an cement mixer onto the grounds of the Irish Parliament and disabled it, and the financial advisor to Vallejo, California, a bankrupt city in the San Francisco Bay area.  Boomerang is written in pitiless, plain English, and by the time you’ve finished it, you’ll understand not only how deep the hole is into which we’ve all fallen, but why we got there. 

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