By John Lanchester, for New York Review of Books, Dec. 8, 2011 issue

Review of Michael Lewis' new book: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World.

The review writer is the author of five books including, most recently, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. In 2008 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.


Excerpt:

.....Michael Lewis has already written a very good book, The Big Short, about the mechanics of the crash, by casting around for people who didn’t just foresee it, but who made huge bets that it would happen, and profited vastly when it did.¹

Boomerang is about what he has come to see as the larger phenomenon behind the credit crunch: the increase in total worldwide debt from $84 trillion in 2002 to $195 trillion now. The thesis is that “the subprime mortgage crisis was more symptom than cause. The deeper social and economic problems that gave rise to it remained.” It is these deeper problems that are dominating economic news at the moment, and led to the desperate measures announced at the European summit on October 27 and to the aborted Greek plan to hold a referendum that followed....