The author of Liar's Poker talks to himself about how to make the Occupy Wall Street movement better. His strategy: boycott the banks!

For the world leaders convened in Davos, the payoff to which Lewis refers has yet to materialize as the eurozone teeters on the brink of total collapse, and yes, this kind of blind faith in the market’s ability to correct itself does seem a bit idiotic in the midst of what appears to be an ever deepening crisis within the structures of globalized capitalism itself. It seems that with Boomerang, Lewis’s widely praised gift for simplifying may have been taken a little too far.

for trying to understand the current crisis of sovereign debt, Boomerang is the rare combination of gripping, hilarious, and required reading. Lewis’s ability to demystify a wickedly complex subject is matchless, and he is the rare author who can change your settled point of view.

BOOMERANG - A travelogue, if you will, through the world’s ruined economies that is both hugely entertaining as well as immensely depressing. An Icelandic fisherman walks off the boat to become a currency trader while Greek monks play fast with state land in an overheated real estate market contributing significantly to that country’s crisis. The author of “Moneyball” follows the cheap credit as it floods the globe and fools rush in.

Lewis’ story is an example of how a complicated issue can be made easy to understand. One wishes that other writers could be so adept in giving us step-by-step guides into many of the complexities of finance. But then, Lewis is no stranger to that world. He worked at an investment bank in the 1980s, an experience that formed the backbone of his bestseller, Liar’s Poker. The Big Short takes a totally different tact by following a group of intrepid investors who had their own rebel view of how another part of Wall Street works.

It’s remarkable that so many people have discounted, accepted, or simply overlooked Lewis’s ethnic condescension. Just because his targets are white doesn’t mean he deserves carte blanche.

“One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem,” Michael Lewis writes in his new book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World.

The rabble has been driven from the public parks. Our adversaries, now defined by the freaks and criminals among them, have demonstrated only that they have no idea what they are doing. They have failed to identify a single achievable goal.

Using his uncommon ability to make virtually any subject interesting, the author takes us on a surreal trip through some of the countries hardest hit by the 2008 fiscal tsunami — including Greece, Iceland and Ireland — and in doing so, makes understanding today’s headlines about European sovereign debt both fascinating and lucid.

Michael Lewis has already written a very good book, The Big Short, about the mechanics of the crash, by casting around for people who didn’t just foresee it, but who made huge bets that it would happen, and profited vastly when it did.1

Boomerang is about what he has come to see as the larger phenomenon behind the credit crunch: the increase in total worldwide debt from $84 trillion in 2002 to $195 trillion now. The thesis is that “the subprime mortgage crisis was more symptom than cause. The deeper social and economic problems that gave rise to it remained.”

Jesse Draper interviews bestselling writer Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, The Big Short, and The Blind Side. They discuss everything from his new pilot for HBO to his bad habit of eating too many cookies. They also talk about his new book, Boomerang, and then they actually throw a boomerang together.

Lewis is so entertaining that it’s easy to miss that he’s writing some of the sharpest, deepest, and most memorable indictments of our global financial corruption. He’s like the Jon Stewart of print: Loose, but drum tight. Funny, but dead serious.

Michal Lewis's new book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, does not disappoint. “One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis,” writes Lewis, “is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem.”

Author Michael Lewis says the U.S. and many European nations suffered a moral failure that led to economic collapse.

He spoke with Goodreads about the precarious state of the world's economy and what fascinates him about contrarians.

Hedge fund manager Kyle Bass had made a fortune betting against the subprime mortgage market when it collapsed in 2008. And now Bass is set to make lots more — from a Greek default.

Bass' story is chronicled in Michael Lewis' latest book, Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, which tells the stories of the fiscal recklessness in both Europe and the U.S. that led to the current debt crisis.

At its heart, of course, “Moneyball” isn’t about baseball. It’s not even about statistics. Rather, it’s about challenging conventional wisdom with data. By embedding this lesson in the story of Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, the book has lured millions of readers into the realm of the geek. Along the way, it converted many into empirical evangelists.

To research his new book, Boomerang, Lewis went on what he has called a "financial disaster tour." He surveyed some of the most financially challenged countries in the world from Iceland and Ireland to Greece and the United States.

Lewis, author of Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short, crafts his travel tales such that they echo or foretell of problems within American borders. Here are ten lessons for the U.S. that can be gleaned from his book, which will be released Oct. 3.

Even if you already saw and loved Moneyball this weekend, it’s still worth your time to read the book by author and financial journalist Michael Lewis. The movie does a great job constructing a narrative from what appears, on first glance, to be a somewhat un-cinematic story, but the source material drives home some of the thematic points in ways that the movie can’t. Reading the book after the movie doesn’t feel like a retread, but rather a closer look at Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) and his Oakland A’s.

It seems that Michael Lewis is everywhere. His new book, coming next week, Boomerang; Travels in the New Third World, (Norton, 10/3; S&S Audio), on the global financial crisis, gets strong praise today from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times; “Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller’s ability to make virtually any subject both lucid and compelling.”

Michael Lewis followed the A's through the 2002 season. In 2003, Terry Gross spoke to Lewis at the beginning of the baseball season and asked him to talk about the prevailing wisdom that teams with the most money to spend on players win the most games.

A great sports movie for people who can't stand sports movies.

Brad Pitt's new film is melancholy and complicated—and that's what makes it great.

Lewis’s book is less a narrative than a riveting Gladwellian case study in which a single outlier occasions a series of meditations on the risk-averse institution of baseball. This is not something that screams adaptation, Pitt says, citing “the difficulty of making a movie whose front window is dressed with economics and science and math.” You can’t simply hack away all the nuances to reboot the story as an inspirational sports weepie the way, for instance, the adapters of Lewis’s The Blind Side did; Moneyball’s nuances are its narrative.

Like the cheesiest of summer teen movies, Michael Lewis's Moneyball tells a story of how the geeks and the freaks outsmarted the jocks. But rather than being set in a high school or summer camp, Lewis's 2003 piece of classic reportage treads rather less well-explored ground: behind the scenes in major league baseball.

At 7,500 words strong and encompassing 66 titles, this is the only second-half of 2011 book preview you will ever need.

Michael Lewis' next book will be out in October; the subtitle is Travels in the New Third World. It's a business book about the economic bubbles he's been writing about in Ireland, Iceland, Greece, and the US.

"Moneyball" has passed through some very accomplished hands on its way to screens; we'll have to wait until September before its release. Since Michael Lewis hit bestseller lists with the book, he's been able to write another book that has already been made into a successful film. That was his 2006 book, "The Blind Side," whose film adaptation brought Sandra Bullock the best actress Academy Award.

With the recent financial crisis (and growing fears about the future of overseas economies, such as those in Europe) fresh on the minds of business professors, business schools are asking future business leaders to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. The book that appeared most often is The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W. W. Norton, February 2011) by Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker (W.W. Norton, reprint, March 2010), an autobiographical account of his disillusionment while working on Wall Street during the heady 1980s, and The Blind Side (W.W. Norton, movie tie-in edition, October 2009), which was turned into an Oscar-winning film starring Sandra Bullock.

Lewis is a world-class storyteller and he can be very, very funny, but what sets his books apart is that he combines these skills with a genuine understanding of the brain-melting complexity of the economic systems he is describing. In his hands, all those abstract terms you’ve been puzzling over on the news – credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, mortgage-backed securities, and so on – become real as you watch his plucky band of misfits slowly figure out that the emperor has no clothes.

I can’t believe I waited until it was in paperback to read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. I’ve been a big fan of Lewis’ ever since I read Trail Fever (now called Losers), his chronicle of marginal figures in the 1996 presidential race. In The Big Short, he follows a few key players who fully foresaw the subprime mortgage crisis. He allows you to understand real-life complexities while crafting a narrative that is much neater and more satisfying than real life could possibly be, the way he’s done several times before. I’m not sure anyone is better at what they do than Michael Lewis is at what he does.

Best-selling author Michael Lewis and W.W. Norton, the publisher of “The Big Short,” Lewis’s book about the financial meltdown, got blindsided on Friday by a federal defamation suit filed by a financier who claims that his quotes in the book were fabricated.

The suit is already receiving pushback from some bloggers who say Chau's suit misrepresents Lewis's book.

Displeased with his depiction in “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis’s best-selling book about the mortgage crisis, a New Jersey asset manager is suing the author, the publisher and one of the main figures in the book.

Lewis writes so well that he can make drama out of structured financial products. In fact, I think I would read a phone book written by him. Man, I hope Michael Lewis writes a phone book soon.

For an ethical catastrophe of an entirely different order, it’s tough to beat Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short.’’ Lewis explores the 2008 financial crisis from the perspective of the few financiers who understood what was going on, bet against the global economy, and made a killing. The financial material here is complex enough to make a particle physicist blanch, but Lewis has a knack for making hard things look easy: sabermetrics, collateralized debt obligations, writing bestsellers. In his hands, the fate of the subprime mortgage market becomes a bedtime story for grownups, complete with underdogs, cliffhangers, villains, and good guys. Caveat emptor: There’s no happy ending. But that’s hardly Lewis’s fault.

Sebastian Faulks (novelist) and Stryker McGuire (journalist) chose The Big Short. David Vann (novelist) chose Trespass.

Book of the Year: The Big Short by Michael Lewis. Best Fiction: The Lonely Polygamist. Best nonfiction: Packing for Mars

This year we took our annual slugfest to the pub underneath our new office and came up with a list of the year's top 100 books that could be our best ever. It wasn't any easier with a drink in hand to pick, and agree upon, the best books of 2010, but we did it.

Editors' Picks: Top 100 Books. The Lonely Polygamist, Packing for Mars, The Big Short, Great House.

Author and Vanity Fair contributor Michael Lewis' next book will be called Boomerang and will focus on "the effects of the US financial crisis on large and small European countries and how their difficulties impact in turn on the US," according to Publisher's Marketplace.

The financial crisis dominated the shorlist of six books nominated for the 2010 Business Book of the Year Award announced on Thursday. Among the nominees is Michael Lewis for "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine," in which he attempts to trace the origins of the meltdown. The book comes just over 20 years after his international bestseller "Liar's Poker," in which he sought to expose the greed of the City and Wall Street in the 1980s as a kind of cautionary tale.

Of all the stories I've heard about the recent financial crisis -- the high-risk mortgage loans, the CDOs, the credit default swaps, the Icelandic crisis -- the story of the collapse of the Greek economy by Michael Lewis in the October issue of Vanity Fair is the craziest. And it's the only one involving monks.

Michael Lewis wrote a great book published by W.W.Norton and Company called The Big Short. He is a great writer. He wrote Money Ball as you know. The book really does a great job in trying to explain what happened to our economy over the last three years; what the heck a derivative really is; and why “quants” rule the world. It is a great read. I recommend it highly.

In the midst of a floor speech on regulatory reform, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) interrupted himself for a sort of commercial announcement.

“I’m going to plug a book: Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short.’”

Michael Lewis tells this story through their antithesis on the short or negative side of the market. His characters are exceedingly reminiscent of Daniel Ellsberg, a smart yet quirky fellow who confronted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with skepticism and finally—in deep disgust—took it upon himself to leak what became known as the “Pentagon Papers.” Lewis’s heroes face down authority, but not in meetings and with memos or in the back of Air Force planes. Instead they run around trying to find ways to place bets on the collapse of the entire system of “subprime” mortgage financing in this country. They face an amazing wall of incomprehension—a wall constructed from group-think.

In March, negative Amazon Kindle critics overwhelmed the reviews section for the new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis--urging customers to boycott his book for its lack of a Kindle edition.

Comparing Lewis' book sales to one of his recent competitors, it appears that the negative reviews didn't cripple Lewis' sales. According to Nielsen BookScan data, Lewis sold 60,000 hardcover copies of his book the same week as the Amazon boycott. The next week he sold 40,000 copies.

The 4/19/10 Monitor Books podcast includes an interview with Michael Lewis, author of "The Big Short"

Since his first book, the autobiographical “Liar’s Poker,” Lewis has tackled big, engaging stories — the 1980s Wall Street collapse, the 1996 presidential campaign, the dot-com boom, the use of quantitative analysis in baseball — by finding and developing characters whose personal narratives reveal a larger truth. He’s done it again. The story of the crash is, overwhelmingly, a tale of failure. But Lewis managed to find quirky investors who minted fortunes by making unpopular, calculated bets on a financial meltdown. Ditching the aloof irony of his earliest works, he constructs a story that is funny, incisive, profanity-laced and illuminating — full of difficult-to-like underdogs whose vindication and enrichment we end up cheering.

As we know, the machine broke down, causing a global financial crisis. In his latest book, The Big Short, Lewis takes us inside the machine and shows us how it worked. As you would expect, he does this superbly. We see how it created money out of the debts of millions of people who couldn't afford to pay them. The machine is what we now call the sub-prime mortgage boom.

Call him “the Nicholas Sparks of nonfiction.”

Michael Lewis is on a roll. His book on the financial crisis, The Big Short, is topping best seller lists, the movie based his football book, The Blind Side grossed $287 million worldwide and won an Oscar for Sandra Bullock. The tie-in has been on best seller list for months.

Now, it looks like a movie of his book on baseball, Moneyball, will finally begin production.

Columbia Pictures is locking in a July start date for the Bennett Miller-directed Moneyball.

Mr. Lewis has given us a compelling tale of the brave few who not only saw what was coming but took big risks to be proved right.

a magnificent account of financial shenanigans that cost the public dear

Bestselling author Michael Lewis creates a gem of a story. His latest book, The Big Short, is set in the late stages of the recent housing bubble, a period already chronicled in more than 100 non-fiction titles published in the past 18 months. But Lewis finds an ingenious new path. To treat his new book as another Wall Street expose doesn't begin to do justice to the audacity of his story.

Michael Lewis' non-fiction writing has had some pretty dramatic effects: His first book, Liar's Poker, is credited with helping bring down the head of Salomon Brothers investment bank in the 1980s. Moneyball changed the game of professional baseball. And most unlikely of all, The Blind Side ended up winning an Oscar for Sandra Bullock. His latest, The Big Short, chronicles the 2008 financial collapse.

We've asked Lewis to play a game called "Pyoo! Pyoo! Pyoo! Pyoo!" Three questions in honor the 50th anniversary of the first patent for the laser.

The Big Short follows a handful of prescient contrarian investors who doubted the subprime bubble and sought out ways to bet against it (called "going short" on Wall Street). Contrarian investment is an old institution, but these people aren't just contrarian in their views on the market -- they're genuinely a little odd. Most of them are proudly obnoxious, one realizes halfway through that he has Asperger's, all are tough as nails, some still manage to be sweet, and all are, ultimately, likeable (if only slightly, in the case of the bond salesman who set out to find people willing to bet against the bubble that his employer had created).

Appearing on CNBC’s Power Lunch, Lewis says the more people learn about what really happened, the angrier they will be.

In an extended series of interviews Lewis talks in detail about what led up to the crisis, why Wall Street is still broken, the Goldman bubble, AIG’s "insane acts" and more.

Writer Michael Lewis is the author of Moneyball, Liar's Poker, and The Blind Side, books with vastly different subjects but a common theme: Outsiders with innovative ideas who find astonishing success. Lewis's newest book continues that narrative. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine chronicles the 2008 financial collapse through stories of the people who realized what was happening to the U.S. economy while it was happening — and then made vast fortunes by betting against the markets.

How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from a conversation with Michael Lewis, author, Bloomberg columnist, and contributing editor to Vanity Fair.

Lewis says “The Big Short” is “the end of my story that I wrote 20 years ago” because it documents the damage wreaked by securities first developed at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. He attributes the economic crisis of 2008 to the emergence of a “short-term greedy” culture on Wall Street, the growing complexity of financial instruments and traders’ efforts to profit at the customer’s expense.

If there’s one group to blame, Lewis says it’s the “people who designed synthetic CDOs at Goldman Sachs.”

I interviewed Lewis on March 9 in Berkeley, California. Portions of the interview will air on Bloomberg Television at 9 p.m. New York time today.

Nearly the whole financial system bought into subprime mortgages and the securities that were backed by them — and amounted to bundles of bad debt.

In his new book The Big Short, Michael Lewis writes about people who didn't buy in. In fact, they bet against the colossal tower of debt that Wall Street built. They shorted it — and they profited from its eventual collapse.

The first of what will be many reviews of Michael Lewis’ The Big Short are in. The Washington Post says,

If you read only one book about the causes of the recent financial crisis, let it be Michael Lewis’s, The Big Short.

Which is a fine segue to Lewis’s new opus, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (WW Norton). In what I now take to be a characteristic style, Lewis gazes bemusedly at the most recent example of American financial system dysfunction. He manages to leaven this catastrophe with some humor, chiefly by turning up a small cast of prescient oddballs who actually made big money by understanding and betting on the inevitability of the failure of newly concocted financial instruments. Of course, even the least (financially) sophisticated of our citizens rightfully ask how did the government officials charged with oversight not see what was coming. Lewis’s mordant answer: “It took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them—to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.”

No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis, the author of “Liar’s Poker,” that now classic portrait of 1980s Wall Street. His entertaining new book does not attempt a macro view of the financial crisis, but instead proposes to open a small window on the calamities by recounting the stories of some savvy renegades who cashed in on their conviction that the system was rotten.

If you read only one book about the causes of the recent financial crisis, let it be Michael Lewis's, "The Big Short."

this is an assiduously-reported and beautifully-written book. There aren't many reasons to be happy about the global financial crisis, but here's one: that it brought Michael Lewis back to his roots, to produce what is probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written.

This is a largely psychological story told through the guise of the market crash.

While trying not to spoil too many details—in particular Lewis's well-crafted psychological surprise about Burry toward the end of the piece—here are a few parts of the story that triggered my behavioral radar:

The Good: Lewis' wit, humor, and irreverence. Also, his ability to render the complicated Wall Street instruments in smooth, readable prose. The Bad: His glamorizing the market skeptics he derided before the market collapsed. The Bottom Line: For those who enjoy a knife cutting through the obfuscation and arrogance of Wall Street, Lewis is king.

It arrives with much fanfare; an excerpt in Vanity Fair, appearances on Sixty Minutes (Sunday), the Today Show, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Jon Stewart, among others on Monday, followed by Fresh Air and Charlie Rose on Tuesday.

Lewis’ new volume is an entertaining and very edifying look at several such insightful people — the tiny handful of investors “for whom the trade became an obsession.” These were unusual, “almost by definition odd” folks, soon to make big money on the cataclysm.

The book: Lewis tells the tale of the current global financial collapse through a group of investors who saw the trouble coming, weren’t fooled by the soaring house prices, and bet money on the boom going bust.

Michael Burry always saw the world differently—due, he believed, to the childhood loss of one eye. So when the 32-year-old investor spotted the huge bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market, in 2004, then created a way to bet against it, he wasn’t surprised that no one understood what he was doing. In an excerpt from his new book, The Big Short, the author charts Burry’s oddball maneuvers, his almost comical dealings with Goldman Sachs and other banks as the market collapsed, and the true reason for his visionary obsession.

The marquee panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on Saturday was titled, "What Geeks Don't Get: The Limits of Moneyball," moderated by Michael Lewis.

Mr. Lewis located a small knot of brilliant, quirky independent deal makers such as Steve Eisman, a profane gadfly who alienated Wall Street regulars, Michael Burry, a physician with Asperger's disorder who found dealing with investors via e-mail easier than face-to-face with patients and Charles Ledley who ran a money management firm out of his California garage.

This anecdotal history of the crisis is entertaining, to a point, but Mr. Lewis struggles to integrate the quirky stories with explanations of the complex process that brought the economy to its knees.

In his remarkable new book, The Big Short, Lewis gets to the heart of our current crisis, not by examining the activities of name investors like John Paulson, but by following a handful of small-fry traders such as Mike Burry, a reclusive, gifted stock picker who early on realized just how absurd, exploitive, and dishonest the whole subprime shell game was. After reading Lewis’s book, I fully understand for the first time how reckless and occasionally unethical behavior at every level of the financial food chain—from the mortgage companies to the rating agencies, to big banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—led to the great economic collapse of 2008. It is the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game. And it’s essential reading.