Financial Times
October 7, 2011
No question about it, Michael Lewis meets some extraordinary characters in his excursions through the barely controlled madness that is modern international finance. The author of scary but amusing bestsellers such as The Big Short and Liar’s Poker, Lewis devotes his latest book to the ever more alarming debt crisis that might either destroy the euro and the European Union or, somehow, propel a quantum leap in economic union.
In Iceland he meets a trawler captain who gave up fishing to work in the currency trading department of Landsbanki, a bank that collapsed in 2008. Freely admitting that he had no financial training, the fisherman confides to Lewis with a laugh: “I never had any respect for bankers ... To this day one of my favourite phrases is: never trust a banker.”
In the opposite corner of Europe, Lewis spends time with the abbot of a Greek monastery who has a sharper eye for business. On the basis of a supposed 14th-century donation by a Byzantine emperor, the abbot persuades the government to recognise his monastery’s claim to a lake in northern Greece. The abbot then exchanges the lake for some prime government real estate and makes a fortune for the monastery’s restoration – until the outraged authorities freeze its assets.
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