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  • Published: 6 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141970479
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 360
Categories:

Boomerang

The Biggest Bust

  • Michael Lewis



A brilliant tragi-comic romp across post-crash Europe that shows what happens next

Having made the U.S. financial crisis comprehensible for us all in The Big Short, Michael Lewis realised that he hadn't begun to get grips with the full story. How exactly had it come to hit the rest of the world in the face too? Just how broke are we really?

Boomerang is a tragi-comic romp across Europe, in which Lewis gives full vent to his storytelling genius. The cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piñata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack. The Irish wanted to stop being Irish. The Germans wanted to be even more German. Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles across Europe is brilliantly, sadly hilarious. He also turns a merciless eye on America: on California, the epicentre of world consumption, where we see that a final reckoning awaits the most avaricious of nations too.

This is the ultimate book of our times. It's time to brace ourselves for impact. And, with Michael Lewis, to laugh out loud while we're doing it.

  • Published: 6 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141970479
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 360
Categories:

Praise for Boomerang

Fascinating...the book could not be more timely...a sharp-edged narrative that leaves readers with a visceral understanding of the fiscal recklessness that lies behind today's headlines

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Michael Lewis's bravura journey through Europe's economic underbelly brilliantly charts the consequences of a world plagued by debt...highly enjoyable...nicely politically incorrect, often very funny, and shot through with genuine insight

Robert Harris, Sunday Times

Brilliant ... he has a novelist's gift

Spectator, Books of the Year

Lewis' investigation of bubbles across Europe is brilliantly, sadly hiliarious

GQ magazine

He writes with the wit and observational eye of a travel writer

Richard Fitzpatrick, Irish Examiner

He writes quite brilliantly and understands the complex financial matters whereof he speaks. As polemical prose goes, it is hard to beat

Howard Davies, Management Today

Lewis is the finest storyteller of our generation

Malcolm Gladwell

He is so good everyone else may as well pack up

Evening Standard

Michael Lewis meets some extraordinary characters in his excursion through the barely controlled madness that is modern finance ... lucid, entertaining

Tony Barber, Financial Times