Panic!

The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

By: Michael Lewis

Narrated by: Blair Hardman, Jesse Boggs

Length: 7 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

A masterful account of today's money culture, showing how the underpricing of risk leads to catastrophe. When it comes to markets, the first deadly sin is greed. Michael Lewis is our jungle guide through five of the most violent and costly upheavals in recent financial history: the crash of '87, the Russian default (and the subsequent collapse of Long-Term Capital Management), the Asian currency crisis of 1999, the Internet bubble, and the current sub-prime mortgage disaster.

With his trademark humor and brilliant anecdotes, Lewis paints the mood and market factors leading up to each event, weaves contemporary accounts to show what people thought was happening at the time, and then, with the luxury of hindsight, analyzes what actually happened and what we should have learned from experience.

As he proved in Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, and Moneyball, Lewis is without peer in his understanding of market forces and human foibles. He is also, arguably, the funniest serious writer in America.

©2008 Michael Lewis (P)2008 Simon & Schuster Audio

Michael Lewis where are you?

This book is as if it were designed for a newspaper. It has no substance. The narrator is not Michael Lewis.

Great brief history on modern finance!

Great brief history on modern finance! You may not agree with all of the anecdotes but you'll lik likely appreciate thoughtfulness, research, and well crafted story.

Interesting, but not as much as other Lewis books

Most of this book are newspaper articles from various stock market (or other) crashes from the 1980's up until the housing crisis of 2007-2009. Michael Lewis features some of his own articles written at the time of each crash and includes other well know financial commentators like Paul Krugman, and then offers some insight as to how and why each crash occurred.

The content is not as interesting as some of Michael Lewis's other books, but it is still worthwhile for anyone that is interested in better understanding the stock market, and particularly wants to understand how crashes and panics occur. Anyone looking for a more entertaining story should instead read Moneyball or The Big Short.

Insightful but Don't Miss His Sequel

Michael Lewis is at his best writing about the business and personalities he has known first hand from his Wall Street experience. This book paints an in-depth and disturbing picture of the Wall Street "doomsday machines," as Lewis aptly calls them. What we see in the "sub-prime" collapse are our major investment banks--with a few notable exceptions--so driven by competitive and ego-centered pressures for ever-larger profits and bonuses that prudent and responsible management oversight was abandoned. The shame in this case is that the consequences of their irresponsibility fell not only on the banks' shareholders but on the country as a whole, because the painful day of reckoning has wreaked havoc throughout the credit markets. It is abundantly clear from this account that business as usual the old Wall Street way can no longer be tolerated by the country, and reform is inevitable. Let us hope the reform is sensible and responsible.

I gave the book only three stars, because the best chapters (by Lewis himself) are already available on the internet. Further, his best piece on the subprime crisis was not included in the book. You can find it, however, on the Conde Nast, Portfolio.com website--an article in the December 2008 edition, entitled, appropriately, "The End."

Interesting collection of articles

First of all if you don't know, this is a collection of articles, not a written book.

This collection is however very interesting and well structured to give a good understanding of the financial crises that the world has experienced in the past two decades.

great insight as to the unpredicted volatility

I really like the book and would recomend it. It was enlightening to learn about the extreme volatility that has occurred that exceeds the algorithms used in prediction.

Just a Hint of Lewis Inside all the Panic

"No one believes the original assumptions anymore. It's hard to believe that anyone-- yes, including me-- ever believed it."
- John Seo, Fermat Capital, Quoted in 'Panic' by Michael Lewis

I'm not giving this book 3 stars because the writing is bad. Much of the writing is very, very good. I'm just giving it three stars because it technically is only an anthology edited by Michael Lewis. It is just a a collection of stories written by the author and many other financial writers divided into Four major parts/panics:

1. 1987 Black Monday
2. 1997 Asian financial crisis
3. 2000 Dot-com collapse
4. 2007-8 Global Financial Colapse

Lewis, apparently, got the idea of this anthology from a discussion with Dave Eggers. Dave offered up a "McSweeney's Intern" to compile and I'd assume edit and get permissions, Lewis would contribute an introduction and some transition writing, and obviously, some of his own pieces from each of these four panics. The book's proceeds would go to 826 National to fund relief in New Orleans (you can't strike a bargain with Eggers without it ending up benefiting someone) and boom! Book.

Anyway, if I was reading/listening to it as a textbook, I'd give it four stars, but it just seems a bit too easy, too forced, not enough original Lewis material to really give it much beyond the three stars I gave it. If you want great writing on panics, I'd just go read some of Lewis' original long-form pieces, books (Liar's Poker, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt), etc. If you want a survey from a bunch of good financial writers on recent panics, well ok, this one will do it and the money does go to a good place.

great book.

indefinitely useful and surprising. it's true. and that alone is the hardest part. good or bad. ooo or ah. give it buy. I dare you

plenty of the same names through all panics.

It's anthology. So, you don't get a buck full of Lewis' writing, but in total it is an excellent book to read now, over decade after 2008.

What is so striking are the names that stay throughout everything. You hear names like Summers, Greenspan and Geitner who among others are around for much of the ups and downs. Which seems really odd.

Reporting of Lou Dobbs and Paul Krugman is in here. Which is striking b/c they are both hacks now. Once they weren't.

There is a section in here about Amazon and Besos' follies. Well, this one is a miss, but a reminder that all too often contemporaries are awful predictors of the future.

I didn't like it about half way through, but now that I finished, I think its a great read. If for no other reason it gives the 2008 perspective of 1987 to 2008.

Good - But you need to know what you are getting.

What the description doesn't tell you is this is a series of articles written over the past 20 years - many of them not by Lewis. If this will annoy you, steer clear.

With that said, there are some really good articles here. As for many of them being 'old', the value they provide is perspective. It will be years before we have perspective on the 2008 melt down. It's a bit easier to have perspective of the financial crisis of '87, '97, and 2000. With these, we can start having some with the 2008 situation.

Lewis, selects articles written in the boom preceding the bust and in the midst of the crisis. His narrative adds his own analysis and perspective around these articles.

The primary themes and lessons of these events are: 1) The markets are very complicated and very few people understand them - even after the fact. 2) Often these busts are caused by groups attempting to exploit a condition supported by market technicalities. 3) People often believe the current event is "the end of the world" or the "the end of Capitalism". 4) The environment of the the Global Economy seems to be increasing the frequency and strength of these boom bust cycles. 5) As painful as they are, they don't foretell the end of the world and we'll be better off when we recognize this reality not Panic!