Review of Michael Lewis’s ‘Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World’

In 2008, the satirists at the Onion released a straight-to-video comedy that included a faux news segment on little-known national stereotypes. Dutch people love speaking to telemarketers. Puerto Ricans can dangle from steel beams for hours on end. Irish men have enormous nipples. And poncho-clad Peruvians always swoop in at the last second and save the day.

Well, turns out they missed a few. In “Boomerang,” his latest book on the planet’s seemingly endless financial implosion, journalist Michael Lewis drops in on Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Germany, and chronicles the mess they’ve made of their markets and money. Yet even as “Boomerang” captures the essence of the international economic crisis — as a sort of travelogue version of Lewis’s must-read “The Big Short” — it also offers an odd collection of searing, sometimes funny but mostly head-scratching judgments and stereotypes about the offending countries. Lewis not only shows us what the Greeks and Icelanders and Irish and Germans did to get into trouble, but he attempts to unveil their souls, too. And it’s not a pretty sight.

(Norton) - ‘Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World’ by Michael Lewis

Lewis’s financial-disaster tourism begins in Iceland, where “an entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, ‘We can do that.’ ”

And for a while, it seemed they could. From 2003 to 2007, Iceland’s banking system, stock market and real estate sector all boomed. But it was an illusion, a web of cronyism in which bankers lent each other vast sums to buy stuff — Beverly Hills condos, private jets, Elton John singing at your birthday party — at insanely inflated prices. It was all among friends, because, as Lewis writes, Iceland “is less a nation than one big extended family.”

Then the bubble burst and the banks imploded, collectively leaving each Icelander on the hook for some $330,000 in banking losses. The country’s problem, according to Lewis, is one of national character. These aren’t a bunch of sweet Scandinavians, he warns, but a people with “a feral streak in them, like a horse that’s just pretending to be broken.” (The evidence is that several men bump into the visiting Lewis on the street, without apologizing.)

The Icelanders thought they were special — during the boom, the president gave speeches extolling “our heritage and training, our culture and home market” — but they weren’t. Lewis pokes fun at the lack of sophistication among the country’s financial elites, not just the fishermen turned investment bankers, but the philosophers, veterinarians and poets making up the government’s economic team.

These men might have saved themselves, however, if they had gotten out of the way and let Iceland’s women run the show. “One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it,” Lewis concludes.

Greece, his next stop, offers the book’s most fascinating tale: how the kindly monks managing the millennium-old Vatopaidi monastery jutting out over the Aegean Sea became the nation’s poster children for greed and corruption.