Boomerang

Greece is the chapter people remember, and Lewis writes it as something close to a moral autopsy. When the cheap money came, the Greek state used it to paper over a fiscal culture that had quietly become dysfunctional. Public payrolls swelled. Salaries and pensions were promised on money that wasn't there. And underneath it all sat a tax system that a large share of the population treated as optional — where, by many accounts, evasion was less a crime than a national sport, and the honest were regarded as the fools.

Lewis's most memorable reporting takes him to a monastery. The monks of Vatopedi, on the isolated peninsula of Mount Athos, had somehow turned a lake nobody wanted into a portfolio of valuable state real estate through a series of property swaps with the government. It was a scandal that helped topple a Greek administration. Lewis uses it as a parable: a country where even the monks were running an angle, where the line between shrewd and corrupt had dissolved, and where the borrowed billions simply lubricated a machine already built to serve everyone and no one at once.

Germany is the book's counter-example, and its most peculiar case. While Iceland and Greece were binging, the Germans were doing what they had always done: working, saving, running trade surpluses, keeping their own personal balance sheets in disciplined order. By the numbers, Germany was the responsible adult of Europe. And yet German banks turned out to be holding astonishing quantities of the worst assets the crisis produced — American subprime bonds, Icelandic bank debt, Greek paper. The tidy nation had somehow become the world's most reliable buyer of other people's garbage.

Lewis reaches for an explanation that is deliberately uncomfortable, drawing on the observation of a cultural anthropologist he cites: a German fascination, expressed in an unusually earthy national humor, with the clean surface and the filth beneath it. His playful thesis is that Germans wanted to stay clean on the outside while remaining strangely willing to handle the dirt — to keep their own conduct impeccable while trusting, almost touchingly, that a bond stamped triple-A by an American agency was exactly what it said it was.

The tour ends at home, and this is where Lewis pulls the camera back. Cheap credit, in every country he visited, functioned like a truth serum. It didn't invent the appetite; it removed the obstacle between a society and its appetite, and then stood back to watch. The Icelander's recklessness, the Greek's mutual distrust, the German's rule-worship — none of these were created by the money. They were merely, for a few years, affordable. What the boom exposed was character, collective and stubborn, of the kind no economic model has a column for.

California makes the case at the level of the town. Lewis travels through cities like Vallejo, which went bankrupt, and finds municipalities that had promised their police and firefighters pensions and salaries no future could plausibly fund — not because anyone was villainous, but because in the good years no one at the table had an incentive to be the one who said no. The commons had quietly been divided among whoever showed up to claim a piece. Easy money had let a whole civic culture stop weighing the future against the present.

Boomerang is a slim book that behaves like a mirror. Lewis went abroad to report on money and came back with something closer to a set of national portraits, each rendered through the single decision the cheap credit forced. Iceland reached for glory, Greece for evasion, Germany for rules, California for the pleasant fiction that no one need ever say no. The loans were identical; the confessions were not. That is the whole of his argument, and he lets the four stories carry it rather than announcing it.