Panic!: The Story of Modern Financial Madness

From Black Monday to the Asian financial crisis, from the dot-com bubble to the subprime mortgage meltdown, our lives are governed by frenzied cycles of euphoria and hysteria that manage to grip the world but are quickly forgotten. In this unique collection of essays, Michael Lewis—a former trader and bestselling chronicler of greed and madness in the markets—takes a skeptical look at the most terrifying panics of recent decades. Using contemporary accounts from commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, and Paul Krugman, as well as many of his own best writings, Lewis conveys the mood before each disaster, what it was like in the heat of the moment, and how we then tried to make sense of the chaos—and then failed to learn from it before the whole process began all over again.