Panic – The Story of Modern Financial Insanity - Softcover

Lewis, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393337987 ISBN 13: 9780393337983

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

When it comes to markets, the first deadly sin is greed. In this New York Times bestseller, Michael Lewis is our jungle guide through five of the most violent and costly upheavals in recent financial history. 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, with the luxury of hindsight, analyzes what actually happened and what we should have learned from experience.

About this title

Review:

It's hard to imagine a more timely book.

From the Back Cover:

'Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich ...'

From Black Monday to the Asian financial crisis, from the internet bubble to mortgage meltdown, our lives are ruled by crazy cycles of euphoria and hysteria that manage to grip the world but are all-too-soon forgotten.

In this unique collection of articles Michael Lewis - ex-trader and bestselling chronicler of greed and frenzy in the markets - casts a sceptical eye back over the most panicked-about panics of recent decades. He tells a story of boom and bust, deranged greed, outsized egos and over-inflated salaries, where the only thing that can ever be predicted is our constant inability to predict anything.

Using contemporary accounts from commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman, plus many of his own best writings, Lewis conveys the mood before each catastrophe, what it was like in the heat of the moment, how, afterwards, we tried to explain away the chaos - and then failed to learn from it before the whole process started all over again.

Panic! gives us a completely new insight into how markets really operate - and who really knows what they're talking about.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0393337987
• ISBN 13: 9780393337983
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400