From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With clarity and a conversational style often (sometimes deliberately) lacking in the financial industry and its coverage, British journalist Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) takes readers on a comprehensive global tour of 2008's economic meltdown, focusing on each guilty parties' contributions to-and missed opportunities to halt-the worldwide crisis. Starting with the political buildup and then marching through the field of "banksters," regulators, mortgage companies and everyone else in a position to know better, Lanchester illustrates exactly how loans from predatory and incompetent players wound up being sold as triple-A investments, and how a subsequent housing market dip toppled the financial system. By prioritizing the financial sector and tenets of laissez-faire capitalism (to the point that it "became a kind of secular religion"), those in charge of the markets failed to identify the growing systemic dangers; meanwhile, those responsible to the public acted as if benefits for financial institutions also benefited every economic participant, no matter how small. Laypeople seeking to understand the crisis, and what it means for their own bank account, will find Lanchester's volume an oasis of understanding in a sea of partisan spin and convoluted financial language.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
“Lanchester's book is also noteworthy for a splendid choice of language and metaphor not usually found in writing on economics and finance…All economic writing should be so evocative.” —
Benjamin M. Friedman, The New York Review of Books“Warning to bankers everywhere in the world. You better buy every single copy of
I.O.U. because Lanchester’s painted the target on you that the rest of us so desperately wanted to see." —
James J. Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money“Few if any [finance] books will be as pleasurable—and by that I mean as literate or as wickedly funny—as John Lanchester's…Before you begin to cry, pick up a copy of
I.O.U. Good humor and good company will be the things that’ll get us through.” —
Dwight Garner, The New York Times“Lanchester's gift is to see the big picture in new ways.” —
Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post Book World“[T]his elegantly crafted little book…manages to be, by turns, acidic, frightening, and sharply funny. What it is not is boring….it all makes perfect sense. A.” —
Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly"Lanchester understands perfectly that the man behind the curtain was no wizard–that markets, far from being God-given instruments of perfection, were human constructs. ...[He] is adept at explicating financial complexities with street level analogies."–
Roger Lowenstein, NewRepublic.com“Witty, lucid, solicitous of the average person's difficulty in grasping the conceptual underpinnings of international finance....Lanchester manages to know enough to explain the terrain clearly and yet he never loses his perspective…Lanchester had me in the palm of his hand…” —
Laura Miller, Salon.com“[A] writer with literary bona fides…[Lanchester] has the intellectual heft and the chops, as a jazz musician might say, to deliver a resounding book about the crisis….An elegant and wonderfully witty writer, Mr. Lanchester approaches his subject with a newcomer’s verve. It’s infectious….frame[s] the Great Recession in startlingly original terms.” —
Devin Leonard, The New York Times, Sunday Business“[Lanchester] brings his mischievous wit to bear on the Great Credit Crackup in his boisterous primer….His method: to boil complex instruments and linkages down to anecdotes, outlandish images and acerbic asides that strip away those layers of bank jargon. The result is the perfect read for anyone still wondering what went wrong and why.” —
James Pressley, Bloomberg News“In
I.O.U., the only truly entertaining book I've read on the subject, the British writer John Lanchester theorizes that after the Cold War, capitalism could go wild because Western governments no longer had to worry about competing with communism. This is a fascinating idea…” —
Jacob Weisberg, Newsweek
