Ever since Michael Lewis chucked the life of a Wall Street bond salesman to write the semi-autobiographical Liar's Poker in 1989, he has burnished his reputation as the planet's most entertaining business writer by regaling us with the absurd human stories that lie beneath corporate upheaval.
He defined an era of excess on Wall Street with his depiction of two Salomon Brothers bond titans bluffing each other in an audacious million-dollar bet on the serial numbers of a dollar bill. In The New, New Thing, he captured the fatal exuberance of the dotcom bubble in the late 1990s by joining a Silicon Valley pioneer on his massive computerized sailboat, which shortly after leaving its Amsterdam berth, lost its mast to North Sea winds.
In Boomerang, a travelogue through the globe's economic ruins, Lewis takes us into the lives of the hapless and misguided government officials, bankers and speculators who stoked the 2008 financial fires we wishfully and wrongly believed had been doused by massive government bailouts. Turns out, taxpayer dollars only stalled the carnage. Like a boomerang, the crisis is now is swinging back with a vengeance and this slight, poignantly humorous 212-page book tells even the most informed student of global economics why it was inevitable.
Lewis's guided tour of financial hot spots is a little bit like hiking through the world's remote gastronomic regions with Anthony Bourdain. Just as the New York chef travels to distant outposts to devour such delicacies as raw seal eyeballs with local Inuit or sheep testicles with Moroccans, Lewis gets up close and personal with the economic meltdown. Like Bourdain, he applies a biting wit that infuses a rare pleasure into the unpleasant business of digesting grim economic tales.
In Iceland, he finds a nation of swaggering fishermen who channelled their love of risky deep-sea catching tactics into financial speculation. To understand the madness that allowed such a small country to amass debts that equalled 850 per cent of its GDP, Lewis introduces us to Stefan Alfsson, a one-time trawler captain who, at the age of 30, quit fishing to become a currency trader. Fired after Iceland's 2008 banking meltdown, Alfsson shrugs off the setback: "If you don't take risks you don't catch the fish."
Moving to Greece, Lewis finds a banking system that had the good sense to avoid toxic subprime loans, but the bad luck to make dangerously large loans to a government that never had a hope, or probably any intention, of repaying its staggering debts. By the time the crisis hit, the average government employee was earning three times more than his or her private-sector counterpart, and payrolls on state enterprises such as the national railroad amounted to more than four times annual sales.
To illustrate the extent of the moral collapse in Greece, Lewis travels to an ancient monastery perched on the Aegean Sea, where he spends time with wildly bearded and religiously disciplined monks whose real-estate manoeuvres with valuable state land helped bring down the government.
Lewis's tour through Europe's most vibrant economy, Germany, is his least insightful. Captivated by the country's public obsession with cleanliness and private fascination with dirt and excrement (don't tell Bourdain), Lewis becomes preoccupied with unravelling this contradiction as a way of explaining why the healthy country continues to support so many of its broken Euro partners. It is a slim premise that fails to explain why the country is straining so hard to keep the fractured European Union together.
There are many colourful characters in Lewis's road trip through the financial crisis, but don't look for heroes. The closest thing that he finds to a triumph is a Dallas-based hedge-fund owner who made a fortune betting that spiralling government debts would topple the world's overheated economies. When Lewis visited Kyle Bass in 2008, to find out why the Texan rightly predicted the economic crisis would return, he found an eccentric and paranoid investor who warehoused gold bars and nickels and for fun raced around his ranch in an army jeep shooting beavers with sniper rifles.
In an era of dysfunctional capitalism, Lewis reminds us that winners can be just as unhinged as losers.
Jacquie McNish is a senior writer for Report on Business and co-author of Wrong Way: The Fall of Conrad Black.