Europe’s Civic Cultures and the Euro Crisis

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:



Europe’s Civic Cultures and the Euro Crisis
Jeremiah Riemer - January 10, 2012


Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
by Michael Lewis
W.W. Norton & Co., 2011, 224 pp.


Michael Douglas is a movie star who won an Oscar for his role as a corporate raider in Wall Street. Michael Lewis was a real-life bond trader who became a celebrity by leveraging three years at Salomon Brothers into a lifelong career as a writer of entertaining books on business, starting with the best-seller Liar’s Poker. The messages they preached, on screen and in print, were coincidentally both so beguiling that they confused their audiences into drawing the opposite lesson from what they meant to convey. Both film and book were intended as admonitions about the dangers of casino capitalism, yet each was widely misread as an invitation to join the go-go lifestyle of the burgeoning 1980s financial sector. Fans told Douglas they were inspired, not appalled, by his character Gordon Gekko’s infamous “greed is good” speech. Lewis hoped his book would encourage “some bright kid at…Ohio State to be…an oceanographer…[and] spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley.” But the author soon found himself swamped with letters from college students who “read my book as a how-to manual” for striking it rich on the Street.

Is there any danger that readers might also get the wrong idea about Boomerang, Michael Lewis’s latest venture in the genre he describes as “financial-disaster tourism”? Wall Street has bounced back to business as usual following its government bailout, and the same credit rating agencies that awarded high scores to shaky financial market products like collateralized debt obligations are now getting tough on governments’ sovereign debts. Might some college grads see the distressed European markets where Lewis goes slumming as places to troll for exciting new business opportunities? Will they apprentice with American firms that teach them how to short the euro or buy up the bargain-basement assets European banks are unloading in order to meet new, stricter capital requirements? Will Kyle Bass, the Dallas hedge fund manager Lewis encountered while researching The Big Short, his book about a few visionary investors who made a killing on the housing crash, and whom he now introduces in Boomerang as a prophet of the coming European debacle, be the Millennial Generation’s Gordon Gekko?

It’s unlikely that Lewis’s travelogue can serve as a guidebook, a kind of Let’s Go Financial Crisis Europe. Today’s Wall Street, though unabashed and profitable, is also a downsized Wall Street, and the “kid from Ohio State” is having trouble finding any kind of job. Still, there are other perils in relying too much on the hit-and-miss insights about markets and politics in Lewis’s jet’s-eye view of the transatlantic economy (in the book he flies from Texas to Iceland, across Greece, Ireland, and Germany, and then home to California).

Lewis does get several things right about the critical state of these regions’ economies today, chiefly because he appreciates that “[a]cross Europe just now men who thought their title was ‘minister of finance’ have woken up to the idea that their job is actually government bond salesman.” And there is something to be said for seeing the Old World through American eyes, whether those of Lewis, the bicoastal Ivy Leaguer undertaking a grand tour of select European crisis spots, or his provincial guru Bass, “a guy sitting in an office in Dallas, Texas, making sweeping claims about the future of countries he’d hardly set foot in.” American judgments about Europe, whether pronounced by investors like Bass or policy-makers like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have recently given Frankfurt and Brussels a wake-up call about their lackluster and makeshift handling of the euro crisis. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=573