Adventure Time
Mar. 4th, 2012 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileSo, because I have enjoyed Michael Lewis' books on financial fuckery thus far, and because the interview he gave on the Daily Show in the fall was very entertaining, I picked up his newest book, Boomerang: Adventures in the New Third World. I found it well worth the nine dollars it cost on Kindle, even if it was a bit short; however, this is apparently because I do not subscribe to Vanity Fair (and I'm not even sure I know anyone who does).
This book is, mostly, a short, cute little travelogue. While Lewis retains his preternatural ability to discuss the complexities of high finance in ways that make sense to outsiders and are somehow entertaining, this book contains a somewhat lower ratio of financial nerdery to Adventures With Michael anecdotes than the other books of his that I'd read. This seems to be, in part, because the debt crises in Greece, Iceland, and Ireland--to name the countries covered in the first three chapters--were simpler fuck-ups than the subprime housing crisis, because most of the people involved were not finance people, so things didn't need to get that complex before they had no idea what they were doing: the Icelanders sold things back and forth to each other at continually inflated values; the Irish built tens of thousands more houses than they could ever hope to find people to live in; the Greeks fudged their numbers and avoided paying their taxes. The Germans, it seems, mostly just managed to have missed the memo that finance is full of lying scumbags, and bought a lot of really crappy bonds. And California is an ungovernable mess.
Ergo, as short as this book is, much of it is full of Michael Lewis' kind-of-adorable adventures getting smacked into by Icelanders (Icelandic men, specifically), discussing all the different German slang expressions that involve poop with his German interpreter/chauffeur, hanging out with Greek monks on an island where no women are allowed, and making cheerfully overgeneralized-to-the-point-of-being-kind-of-racist sociological observations on each country's National Character and why the state of its gender roles--either in its mainstream culture or as it manifests in the global boys' club of high finance--helped make it financially irresponsible. (His talk with Kristin Petursdottir, who founded Iceland's first woman-run bank which just so happened to be one of the few banks left standing after the crash, is particularly funny in a head-desky sort of way.)
After flying, driving, boating, and chicken-playing around Europe gawking at abandoned housing complexes, Lewis comes back to the U.S. to poke around some of its most spectacularly dysfunctional cities, most of which are in California.
I will note that one thing this book most emphatically is not, is a primer on what's wrong with the globalized financial system in general. It's basically a companion piece made of leftover slightly-off-topic material from The Big Short and his other Wall Street stuff, which discuss where all these ridiculous financial products were coming from, and even The Big Short was designed not to rehash the same angles as other well-known books that were just straightforwardly about how the housing bubble happened. (I have several of those in the TBR pile; I will read them eventually! I just... like reading funny stories about the people on the sidelines going "WTF WHAT ARE THESE ASSHOLES DOING" better.) So it occasionally comes off as a little soft on the American high finance assholes who crashed the global economy, but I think it's just supposed to be understood that we've already covered the American high finance assholes who crashed the global economy in the other books.
This book is, mostly, a short, cute little travelogue. While Lewis retains his preternatural ability to discuss the complexities of high finance in ways that make sense to outsiders and are somehow entertaining, this book contains a somewhat lower ratio of financial nerdery to Adventures With Michael anecdotes than the other books of his that I'd read. This seems to be, in part, because the debt crises in Greece, Iceland, and Ireland--to name the countries covered in the first three chapters--were simpler fuck-ups than the subprime housing crisis, because most of the people involved were not finance people, so things didn't need to get that complex before they had no idea what they were doing: the Icelanders sold things back and forth to each other at continually inflated values; the Irish built tens of thousands more houses than they could ever hope to find people to live in; the Greeks fudged their numbers and avoided paying their taxes. The Germans, it seems, mostly just managed to have missed the memo that finance is full of lying scumbags, and bought a lot of really crappy bonds. And California is an ungovernable mess.
Ergo, as short as this book is, much of it is full of Michael Lewis' kind-of-adorable adventures getting smacked into by Icelanders (Icelandic men, specifically), discussing all the different German slang expressions that involve poop with his German interpreter/chauffeur, hanging out with Greek monks on an island where no women are allowed, and making cheerfully overgeneralized-to-the-point-of-being-kind-of-racist sociological observations on each country's National Character and why the state of its gender roles--either in its mainstream culture or as it manifests in the global boys' club of high finance--helped make it financially irresponsible. (His talk with Kristin Petursdottir, who founded Iceland's first woman-run bank which just so happened to be one of the few banks left standing after the crash, is particularly funny in a head-desky sort of way.)
After flying, driving, boating, and chicken-playing around Europe gawking at abandoned housing complexes, Lewis comes back to the U.S. to poke around some of its most spectacularly dysfunctional cities, most of which are in California.
I will note that one thing this book most emphatically is not, is a primer on what's wrong with the globalized financial system in general. It's basically a companion piece made of leftover slightly-off-topic material from The Big Short and his other Wall Street stuff, which discuss where all these ridiculous financial products were coming from, and even The Big Short was designed not to rehash the same angles as other well-known books that were just straightforwardly about how the housing bubble happened. (I have several of those in the TBR pile; I will read them eventually! I just... like reading funny stories about the people on the sidelines going "WTF WHAT ARE THESE ASSHOLES DOING" better.) So it occasionally comes off as a little soft on the American high finance assholes who crashed the global economy, but I think it's just supposed to be understood that we've already covered the American high finance assholes who crashed the global economy in the other books.