It’s nice to be able to laugh at your troubles. But the troubles of the world in the past few months have not been laughing matter at all. Despite that, Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour by Michel Lewis is a humourous exploration of the European crisis, even if a little darkly so. Lewis takes a tour of Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Germany, trying to examine the ingredients that went into the making of their respective crises that pretty much blew over the whole world. Of course, the book winds up with the US — the examination of global economic crisis cannot possibly be complete without a mention of the great big place where Pandora’s box was opened first of all.

Lewis, with his earlier book The Big Short had taken pot shots at the US and its financial crisis and told a truly terrifying story in a tragi-comic way. He goes pretty much the same way here, but it’s the European nations that are at the receiving end of his viciously funny observations. Vicious, because Lewis tends to explain a lot of national financial follies in terms of the characteristic traits of the inhabitants of that nation, giving a weird sort of explanation to why they acted the way they did. But that’s more behavioural analysis than economic. And might even sound a little prejudiced at times.

That said it is rather hilarious — in a hysterical sort of way — to watch how nations shot themselves in the foot, and how some ‘national traits’ may (or may not) be directly relatable to it. One of my favourite anecdotes, among the many, many that the book is peppered with, is the incident directly leading to Lewis’ decision to begin his analysis with Iceland. Kyle Bass, a hedge fund manager in Dallas, Texas, who made a fortune out of the 2008 crisis, and then again in 2011, tells Lewis that it was “Iceland that got me going” as he’d been in interested in the country since childhood, when he used to play the game Risk. ‘I loved playing Risk. And I would always put all my armies on Iceland. Because you could attack anybody from there.”

Iceland, he added, “was held up by geographers as a country with a special talent of survival against long environmental odds… How, after a thousand years of getting things right and overcoming all these natural obstacles, did they get it so wrong?”

And so begins the tour. A tour of what cheap credit did to the world. As Lewis defines it, “ Entire countries were told, ‘The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.’ Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. The Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and be investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania.”

Getting into the minds of the world’s melting economies can be a good enough reason to get your hands onto the book. All the better if you can be a little sadistic and have a good laugh at their expense! zz

zehranaqvi@mydigitalfc.com