Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis’s first book on the current financial crisis, The Big Short (2010), was both a bestseller and a hit with most reviewers — but not with me. I felt Lewis had strained but failed to recapture the voice of Liar’s Poker (1989), the wonderfully entertaining account of his own career as a Salomon Brothers bond salesman that broke the mould for writing about the follies of the money world. The problem, I felt, was that the people he chose to write about — a selection of sociopathic hedge-fund geeks who bet that the tottering trillion-dollar edifice of US mortgage-related paper would collapse, as it duly did — just weren’t comic material, however sharp their market insights.
So it is a relief to report that Lewis has not only regained his top form, but has managed to channel something of the great right-wing humourist P. J. O’Rourke as well. Boomerang is ‘financial-disaster tourism’, a whirlwind circuit of post-crash Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California, and a worthy successor to O’Rourke’s wickedly perceptive Eat the Rich (1998), which voyaged in similar mode from Albania to Hong Kong via Tanzania to mock the entire pseudo-science of economics.