Boomerang

Travels in the New Third World

By: Michael Lewis

Narrated by: Dylan Baker

Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

From the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Big Short, Liar’s Poker and The Blind Side!

The tsunami of 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.

The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.

The trademark of Michael Lewis’s best sellers is to tell an important and complex story through characters so outsized and outrageously weird that you’d think they have to be invented. (You’d be wrong.) In Boomerang, we meet a brilliant monk who has figured out how to game Greek capitalism to save his failing monastery; a cod fisherman who, with three days’ training, becomes a currency trader for an Icelandic bank; and an Irish real estate developer so outraged by the collapse of his business that he drives across the country to attack the Irish Parliament with his earth-moving equipment.

Lewis’s investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American listener to a comfortable complacency: Oh, those foolish foreigners. But when Lewis turns a merciless eye on California and Washington DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

©2011 Michael Lewis (P)2011 Simon & Schuster

Critic reviews

“No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Lewis.” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)

He makes it look easy.

This book is must reading in my opinion because its account of the almost automatic abuses that seem happen when it's too easy to get money...as in Iceland and Ireland and Greece. In Iceland, fishermen became bankers and ruined the country is record time. In Ireland, easy drove up real estate prices so high that they bore no relationship to true value as measured by rentals. In Greece, its seems everyone from top to bottom was spending money they didn't have. The unaffordable pensions, the universal tax evasion, the false budgets and false statements of tax collections in Greece are unbelievable. In the US, he explores the finanicial condition of municipalities. In Ireland, the Irish government pays off bonds issued by privates banks to private individuals and viritually bankrupts itself. In California, he visits bandrupt towns where the police and fire fighters salaries and pensions that are imposed by a ridiculous system are impossible to pay. What is amazing is how easy the author makes it look to gather this incredible incredible information. He goes almost as a tourist and conducts some interviews. But I dont't think he could not have done this without a lot of preparation.

Very interesting and informative

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

This book was definitely a great buy. Very informative. Kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time I was listening to it!

Interesting Overview of a few global economies

Is there anything you would change about this book?

It was an enjoyable and very interesting listen. This book was made up of some interesting facts and observations regarding behaviors and cultural differences between countries.I think the book was missing a few conclusions or even bring some thoughts to an end. I felt the book opened up a whole lot of questions without really giving some kind of an answer.

Would you recommend Boomerang to your friends? Why or why not?

I would have recommended to friends until the author went into great detail about German and their alleged feces fascination. Trying to make some logic about why Germans got into sub-prime...

One of Lewis's Best

Be warned that this is a collection of articles, but the insights in this book (about finance, human nature, national identity) are priceless.

As a bonus, Boomerang is HILARIOUS!

Financial trainwrecks worldwide

Economics books can be depressing, especially the more you learn about how the world's markets move. I read Michael Lewis's The Big Short a few years ago. In that book, he covered the subprime mortgage market that lead to the 2007 housing bubble collapse, and the most shocking takeaway there was not that people were greedy and short-sighted, but that all the "experts," the brokers, the realtors, the bankers, the Federal Reserve officials, the "Big Money Men" - didn't actually have a clue! You or I could probably have taken over one of those big, complicated "investment instruments" and run it with about the same chance of success or catastrophic failure.

Boomerang looks at international markets, but here's a spoiler: it's the same story! We like to think that somewhere up there there are actual grown-ups in charge. People who know what they're doing. Sure, they may make mistakes now and then, but they aren't really going to run the economy off a cliff because they're too stupid or greedy to know better.

As the Irish found out after their own housing market bubble burst: not so much.

But the fairly pedestrian housing bubble of Ireland is less fascinating than the banking speculation that did in Iceland. It all started when they decided they didn't want to be fishermen anymore. They had a lot of cheap geothermal energy, so looked around for a way to make money off of it, and decided on aluminum manufacturing.

As funny as that is, the second problem was a much bigger one - Icelanders didn't actually have any aptitude or desire to be aluminum smelters. So they wound up becoming investment bankers instead.

Onwards to Greece, which was and is a real financial basket case. Here, Lewis surprisingly does not blame the bankers, but makes a compelling argument that the bankers were actually the grown-ups who were trying to manage the economy, while it was the Greek population, with no real tradition of civic duty or sense of communal obligation, that looted the entire country's economy.

Then Lewis comEs back to the U.S., and looks at the dire financial woes of San Jose and Vallejo, two California cities with income levels that would be the envy of many countries, and both of whom are financial basket cases. Their main problems are public pensions for firefighters and police.

Lewis examines all these places, and goes on a bike ride with former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who comes off rather sympathetically here. According to Lewis, Schwarzenegger was basically an honest guy who tried to get things done without catering to special interests. Sure, he had his political biases, but he genuinely wanted to reform the state's finances. The response from California voters, when they voted down every one of his measures, was an unambiguous "F you." And so Schwarzenegger finished his term in office essentially gelded. Now he's happy, unremorseful, and still rich... and California's economy is still screwed. Though not as screwed as Ireland, Iceland, and Greece.

This book won't really give you a deeper understanding of economics, and it doesn't really offer any solutions. (The solution is for people to stop being so short-sighted and stop buying things they can't pay for on a national scale. Hahahah right.) But if you want a closer look at economic trainwrecks, Lewis explains them in a very understandable way that will leave you with very little optimism about anything improving.

Shockingly insightful

Any additional comments?

Puts a new perspective on the financial crisis -- and the cultural psychology that made it inevitable.

Shame on us.

The story was good and I always enjoy Michael Lewis' books but this one had a different flavor to it. The book develops background on Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Germany's financial problems through unusual people and situations. Nearly every person was so financially naive as to be embarrassing. Wall Street was (again) portrayed as blood sucking vampires with no redeeming virtues as we pushed off our worthless assets onto people who trusted the word and guarantees of the USA and Wall Street.

A Trip Around the Financial Ruins

The fallout from the Financial Crash of 2008 is seen from what happened in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and the United States. This is a collation of a series of articles that Michael Lewis has been publishing in US Magazines where he became a tourist through the rubble of the world.

Although I had read one of these stories before, this is a very enlightening and entertaining series of stories. I found myself laughing out loud several times. And considering the seriousness of the story that is being told, that says a lot about Mr. Lewis's ability to write cogently and clearly.

How did Iceland come to have debts 7 or 8 times its total GDP? How did a 10th Century monastery in Greece come to have a billion Euro real estate portfolio? Why did the Irish go from welcoming some of their ex-patriots back home to exporting people again? Why are the Germans obsessed with feces? What is the brokest city in the brokest state in the United States?

All these questions and more are answered in this very entertaining book.

Another entertaining/informative Michael Lewis

A fascinating and engrossing look at the worldwide causes and effects of the finaicial crisis. Mr. Lewis gives us insight into the cultures and behaviors of the different peoples that contributed to the collapse of the financial system. He makes it clear that pointing the finger at a few individuals or countries is misguided and that the problem is rooted more in our cultural programming than we generally consider. Extremely enlightening.

We must consider the future

We have to consider those of us who will follow. Michael showed us how we are so very well.