Liar's Poker, The Big Short and Boomerang

Michael Lewis is the writer who makes the world of finance and big money deals both accessible and entertaining. You may have seen The Big Short, the Oscar-winning film documenting the financial crash of 2008 with its starry line-up of Steve Carell, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale, but it’s still worth reading the books. Yes, Lewis offers two related books on that crash, and you need to read them.

Remember Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s first book, which dramatised the crazy excesses of 1980s Wall St, where he worked at the time. It was rather like the Wolf of Wall Street without the 18 certificate. Then he wrote about other stuff: the internet in The New New Thing, baseball in Moneyball, also a great film. But the 2008 crash brought him back to Wall St and the City. He knows how to make potentially dull stuff into a good read, so if you feel you ought to know about the global financial crisis but can’t face reading about it, The Big Short is the book for you. It’s a neat little paperback (or ebook, obviously) that explains the whole sorry mess with clarity and wit. It’s wholegrain but feels like cake: you’ll enjoy reading it and you’ll feel really virtuous afterwards. Like all his books, it’s thoroughly researched, and Lewis captures with insight and humour the strange parade of loners, dissenters and general misfits he met for this book.

His other book on the global financial meltdown, Boomerang, came out of the research for The Big Short, and it’s a real page-turner. There’s a chapter on each country and its madness – how US mortgage lending caused Greece to go bust, the precarious finances of the European country-sized state of California, and how even some sober-seeming Germans lost their heads, and their liberty. He’s sharp and very funny on national quirks – the chapters on what happened in Ireland and Iceland made me laugh out loud even as I gasped, “How could they get away with that?! And how did we not notice at the time?”