By Matthew Gass
Michael Lewis’s last book, The Big Short, sought to tell the story of the 2008 financial crash through the eyes of a handful of people who people who saw it coming. They tried to warn a lot of people, but they also made huge and risky bets on the outcome which paid off enormously.
Many might view such people with contempt. Lewis portrays them as the only sane people in the room and saves his outrage for the people who made huge and risky bets and lost, dragging the financial system down with them and leaving a cost of which is still being counted.
His latest book, Boomerang tackles the places where that cost is being counted the hardest. This book has no such heroes and villains. While it is still made up of a compelling cast of characters, including austere German bureaucrats, unlikely Icelandic bankers and Arnold Schwarzenegger, it is hard to find anyone you could call a winner. Few seem actively malevolent either. Instead this book has the feel of a vast and tragic comedy of errors.
Each chapter takes the form of a case study (or Vanity Fair article) on the countries which suffered the most unique crashes: Iceland; Greece; and Ireland, the country which holds their fate in its hands, Germany, and their closest American equivalent, California.
While this creates a broad tapestry of economic mayhem, the structure of the book suffers as a result. The overarching theme is how individual countries responded to the glut of cheap money that was available between 2002 and 2007 and how they ultimately paid the price, but this can get lost in the disconnected stories used to display it. The result is closer to an attempt to psychoanalyze these countries, to show what they did when they thought they could do anything.
The stories themselves are fascinating and offer a powerful narrative to what went wrong in some of the world’s most screwed up economies. Each story is a fascinating insight into how unique each meltdown was. The tales of savvy Greek monk’s crooked property deals and Ireland’s horrifying experience of meeting their bumbling central banker in a live TV interview are funny and refreshing at the same time as being somehow scarier than images of rioters on the streets of Athens.
That said it is difficult to tell how useful these anecdotes are at divining the financial subconscious of entire nations. To the book’s credit this problem is addressed directly, in a surreal retelling of the author’s conversations with his overqualified German driver in his attempts to link Germany’s unique role in Europe with its scatological obsessions.
Boomerang is easily the most accessible, readable and enjoyable account of the sovereign debt crisis I have yet to read. While it lacks the focus and character of Michael Lewis’s earlier works (I’d be surprised to see it get a Brad Pitt movie) I still strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the Eurozone collapse and the psyche of the world economy in general.
Picture from telegraph.co.uk
Boomerang is published by Penguin
