Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [85]
When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once. They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford. They are saying, less obviously, that their present wants are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty. But in making that bargain they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they’ll figure it out. They don’t always do that. But you can never rule out the possibility that they will. As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the end of every book I write there always seem to be people who deserve more than to be thanked at the end of a book. This one is no different. Act II of the financial crisis was set in places it would never have occurred to me to go. I’d like to thank Graydon Carter and Doug Stumpf, at Vanity Fair, for encouraging me to go there, and Jaime Lalinde, for researching these places so well that I sometimes felt he, not I, should be writing about them. Theo Phanos offered me not only friendship and encouragement but the shrewd views of an interesting money manager, from start to finish. At W. W. Norton, Janet Byrne has appeared from nowhere to improve my prose and, to the extent it is possible for an editor to do this, save me from myself. Starling Lawrence remains my touchstone.
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Lewis
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Vanity Fair, where the pieces in this book appeared, in slightly different form:
“Wall Street on the Tundra,” April 2009; “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” October 2010; “When Irish Eyes Are Crying,” March 2011; “It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!,” September 2011; “Too Fat to Fly,” November 2011.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Michael (Michael M.)
Boomerang : travels in the new Third World / Michael Lewis. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-08181-7 (hardcover)
1. Global Financial Crisis, 2008–2009. 2. International finance. 3. Financial crises—United States—History—21st century. I. Title.
HB37172008 .L49 2011
330.9’0511—dc23
2011028241
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-393-08224-1
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