...with two books about runaway markets and collapsing economies from acclaimed business writer Michael Lewis. At the beginning of the month, we'll look at Liar's Poker, Lewis' own memoir of the leveraging of America and the irrational exuberance of the Wall St. culture. Later, we'll look at Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, a collection of essays about major financial collapse since 1987.
It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time.
In this shrewd and wickedly funny book, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake's progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging D*ck — a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars' worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.
A born storyteller, Michael Lewis shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. The bond traders, wearing greed and ambition as badges of honor, might well have swaggered straight from the pages of Bonfire of the Vanities. But for all their outrageous behavior, they were in fact presiding over enormous changes in the world economy. Lewis's job was to transfer money, in the form of bonds, from those outside American who saved to those inside America who consumed. In doing so, he generated tens of millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers, and earned for himself a ringside seat on the greatest financial spectacle of the decade: the leveraging of America.
The idea for Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity was conceived by novelist and McSweeney's editor Dave Eggers, who suggested to Lewis that he put together a collection of newspaper and magazine articles on the subject of modern market crashes, beginning with Black Monday, 1987. The resulting book covers four panics: that of 1987; the Asian crisis of the late 1990s; the explosion of the Internet bubble; and the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse. "Each section," as Lewis says, "opens with a piece or two that captures the feeling in the air immediately before things went wrong. It then moves on to the many attempts to come to grips with the strange and unexpected seeming disaster that just occurred." Writers in the collection include, along with Lewis himself, experts like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, John Cassidy of The New Yorker, Franklin Edwards of Columbia University, Robert J. Shiller of Yale, and the humorist Dave Barry. All the writers have been chosen not only for their erudition and intelligence but for their readability and the easy accessibility of their language as well. Even econo-dolts will understand what they're talking about.
"Financial panics have become almost commonplace," Lewis notes in his introduction; "events that are meant to occur once in a millennium now seem to occur every few years. Could this be because the financial system was built on an idea that badly underestimates the risk of catastrophes -- and so conspires with human nature to create them?" He dates this syndrome to the crash of 1987, which he calls the beginning of the Age of Financial Unreason, and suggests that that event did not mark the end of something but the beginning of something else, something we are still groping to come to terms with.
And, for those of you whose minds run to topical synergy, in the history forum we will be reading Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the 100 Days That Created Modern America. Hopefully, by looking at the Wall St. culture, the economic behaviors that can precipitate collapse (and, if you go to the history forum, a historical example of response to such a catastrophic collapse), we can hopefully bring a full historical and economic understanding to bear on the challenges of Barack Obama's first 100 days.
Choisya wrote:
I have ordered Panic! Monty and look forward to the discussion.
Great! I'm glad to hear it. And, although strictly speaking I think B&N would prefer you got all of your copies of books through them, brand new, if you're interested you should be able to track down a copy of Poker pretty easily either used or in libraries. It's not exactly a new release.
Well, if B&N would pay postage to the UK I would! I did get it s/h - I buy most of my books s/h these days, being a credit crunched pensioner
L_Monty wrote:
Choisya wrote:
I have ordered Panic! Monty and look forward to the discussion.
Great! I'm glad to hear it. And, although strictly speaking I think B&N would prefer you got all of your copies of books through them, brand new, if you're interested you should be able to track down a copy of Poker pretty easily either used or in libraries. It's not exactly a new release.
I regret to report that I have had to abandon reading this book because the print is too small!! I bought a ('green') Penguin UK paperback edition which appears to mean that 'sustainability' is maintained by using a smaller font, therefore less paper!
Choisya wrote:Well, if B&N would pay postage to the UK I would! I did get it s/h - I buy most of my books s/h these days, being a credit crunched pensioner
L_Monty wrote:
Choisya wrote:
I have ordered Panic! Monty and look forward to the discussion.
Great! I'm glad to hear it. And, although strictly speaking I think B&N would prefer you got all of your copies of books through them, brand new, if you're interested you should be able to track down a copy of Poker pretty easily either used or in libraries. It's not exactly a new release.
