This thin little book (only 212 pages) packs a depressing punch. Michael Lewis sets out to explore the causes and ramifications of the financial collapse in 2008 and reaches any number of disturbing conclusions. The new third world Lewis visits? Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and the United States, with an emphasis on California.
Germany, Lewis notes, isn't quite so broke as the rest, but their bankers were gobbling up risky (read: stupid) loans with as much voracity as anyone in the world and, given the state of so many other euro-based economies, Germany is hardly unaffected. As a side note, he does a nice job explaining that the EU was created largely to prevent Germany ever again attempting to dominate the rest of Europe, but as just about the only large, solvent economy in the Eurozone, Germans now have the ability to impose their will on others - the Greeks, for example - and require them to become more German (hello, harsh austerity measures) if they hope to retain any semblance of an economy. The problem, of course, is that it's not clear that they do. As Lewis has on good record, every single member of the Greek parliament is lying to evade taxes.
The entire premise of the book is, essentially, that the world is broke, our political and financial systems are broken, and good luck and Godspeed to anyone hoping to fix it. Lew maintains this message steadfastly right up to his concluding sentence, which is oddly, "as idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off." Such optimism seems misplaced to me, but maybe that's just my pessimism shining through.
Four stars.
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