Today I am reviewing Michael Lewis' new book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. I have been a fan of Michael Lewis’ novels since reading Liar’s Poker, an account of the author’s four-year stint working for Salomon Brothers in the late '80s. Lewis’ unique style blends journalism with entertainment, highlighting interesting personalities and situations, while providing enough detail to provide the casual observer useful insight without boring him.
Boomerang is a follow-up to Lewis’ 2010 novel The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, in which Lewis returned to Wall Street to identify the causes of the ongoing financial crises. While that book focused largely on issues related to sub-prime mortgages in the United States, Boomerang shifts to a more global focus. Lewis travels to Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and the United States (California) to answer the question: Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, what did these people do with it?
The answers are fascinating, but perhaps most interesting is the path Lewis takes to reach these answers. He uses each chapter as a case study, using interviews and on-the-ground journalism to showcase the people and events that symbolize what that country did with the free flowing credit that was available leading up to the crisis, and how they reacted once the taps were closed.
Which way entire nations jumped when the money was made freely available to them obviously told you a lot about them: their desires, their constraints, their secret sense of themselves. How they reacted when the money was taken away was equally revealing.
While the media usually focus on the similarities between different regions’ current economic problems (i.e. too much debt), Lewis does a good job of focusing on the dissimilarities, pointing out the unique paths each country took to arrive at the present. Lewis explains why Iceland is like a hedge fund, how California is ungovernable and how in Ireland the banks sank the government while in Greece the government sank the banks.
I recommend Lewis’ book. It is a quick read, and I can guarantee you won’t be bored. If you want to learn more (in a less interesting, but perhaps more informative manner), check out John Mauldin’s Endgame: The End of the Debt SuperCycle and How it Changes Everything (Read my review here), which also looks at countries and regions individually to assess how they arrived in their current predicaments and what options they are left with.
Here’s a video interview with Michael Lewis that gives a taste of the book:
