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Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay |  | Author: John Lanchester
Publisher: Allen Lane
Category: Book
List Price: £20.00
Buy New: £10.95
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New (22) Used (5) from £9.75
Seller: D BANHAM BOOKS
Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 3178
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 1846142857
EAN: 9781846142857
ASIN: 1846142857
Publication Date: January 28, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
There's probably a word in German for that feeling you get when you can understand something while it's being explained to you, but lose hold of the explanation as soon as it stops. A lot of writing about the credit crunch has that effect. This title makes it possible for all of us to grasp how we found ourselves in this predicament.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
 John Lanchester for Head of the Financial Services Authority February 7, 2010
M. Hillmann (leicester, england)
26 out of 26 found this review helpful
An immensely readable account of the credit crunch by an informed observer rather than a participant with an axe to grind.
Nobody could avoid being totally bemused by the shenanigins of the financial institutions who brought about the credit crunch in 2008 - 2009. I certainly could not nor could I grasp the scale - what does $ trillions mean? How do sane bankers provide mortgages to poor people without any security of assets or income and convert them into triple AAA rated loans? And how can these loans be multiplied up to such an extent that they threaten the global financial markets? What are derivatives and why do they now dominate the financial markets? Should Lehman's bank and the US mortgage companies - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - have been allowed to fail? Were we right to bail out Northern Rock and rescue our banks whose key expertise is meant to be assessing risk? And why were the credit rating agencies not blowing the whistle on the incompetent bankers - surely that is what they are paid to do?
Whoops provides a comprehensible and entertaining account of what went wrong. He places the credit crunch in historical context - the collapse of communism in 1989 and the liberalisation of the financial markets especially the Big Bang in the UK and the repeal of regulation in the US. He explains in layman's terms the explosion of derivatives like credit default swaps (CDS's) and collateralised debt obligations (CDO's) and how they rapidly came to dominate the markets. The lack of understanding of their risk by those who ran many banks is absolutely staggering. There were exceptions, notably JP Morgan, who had pretty much invented the CDS and CDO industry and could see how profitable were these instruments, but to whom the risks were apparent and so they avoided them.
Lanchester writes a very human story. He discusses psychology research which proves that humans, even expert humans, have a particular propensity to errors in relation to risk. In the context of a widespread belief in the power of the free market to correct itself with its arch exponent Alan Greenspan, long time head of the US Federal Reserve, and with the growth of the mathematical modellers basing their work on historical data which did not include major downturns, risk becomes underrated.
The absence of any regulation by the financial services authorities is, in hindsight, fatal. The entire climate of opinion throughout the world was in favour of laissez faire, deregulation and financial innovation. Even where regulation was supposed to exist, the US's SEC and the UK's FSA were negligent. The SEC was warned about Madoff's long running Ponsi scheme and journalists did foresee the risks building up in the global financial system but "expert overconfidence" ignored them.
John Lanchester's conclusions are very depressing. Whilst not relating to $ trillions, I can get my head around the projected US deficit being bigger than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the 1980's Loan crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and the moon landing all added together. In the UK relatively we are just as badly off. It is going to take a very long time to pay off this debt off. And John Lanchester is sceptical of the action that will be taken to regulate to prevent future crises.
A great horror story February 17, 2010
Gamer
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
As I read this book it slowly dawned on me that I was reading a terrific horror story. Frighteningly, it is true. John Lanchester elegantly and with great skill and patience guides you into the murky, scary depths of the financial industry - sorry - business. I knew little about how exactly we arrived at the 'crunch' and now have an insight which has left me reeling. From Quants to regulators, derivatives to sub-prime, the language is dissected and laid out with great and terrifying clarity.
I thoroughly commend this book but prepare to be unnerved and horrified in a way that Stephen King has never done!
A masterpiece January 30, 2010
Richard Smith (Clapham)
56 out of 59 found this review helpful
It's a cliche to say that every body should read a book, but one of the messages from this brilliant book is that most of us blithely went about our business, perhaps enjoying the boom times, wholly unaware of what was happening in financial markets. Yet what was happening was crazy, fascinating, and driven by geniuses scarily out of touch with reality. It is, as John Lanchester argues, one of the greatest stories ever told--and postmodern to boot. We should have been watching and understanding--because now we will feel the pain of our collective failure.
I spent a year at the Stanford Business School, studied finance, and read several issues a year of the Economist, but I had no idea what was happening. Nor despite reading Galbraith's "The Crash" and Vince Cable's book did I understand it until I read John's book. It is a tremendous achievement and illustrates the value of a highly intelligent mind untainted by technical immersion in a subject studying a phenomenon.
John brings all his wit and novelist skills to the book so that it is highly readable, explains the near incomprehensible, and makes you laugh. It's one of life's greatest pleasures to be fascinated, amused, and educated all at the same time.
A Model of Clarity February 20, 2010
Paul Rutherford (Berkshire, UK)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Published under the title "Whoops!" in the UK, this is a 200-page aerial-photo of an economic bombsite, explaning the what, how, why and who of the global financial crisis. Each page brings jaw-dropping revelation, laugh-out-loud asides and a deep under-current of anger. A model of clarity and expositionary journalism. Required reading.
Quite simply, brilliant! March 13, 2010
anna (Somerset, UK)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am deeply grateful to John Lanchester for this lucid, funny and passionate account of the recent Great Crash. Before I read it, I felt impotent and angry; now I feel impotent, angry but informed - and, considering I surrender, numbed and uncomprehending, after two paragraphs of your average money page in the newspaper, I can say that financially informed is an unusual, but satisfying place for me to be. Others have criticised the informal style. It held me spellbound - true, the tone is conversational, the pace as racy as a thriller, but the book is none the worse for that. JL is also articulate, knowledgeable and totally unpatronising. With friendly charm, he kindly assumes that you are both intelligent and curious, and unravels the complexities of the credit crunch with a deftness and lightness of touch that nevertheless confronts head on the profoundly serious situation, moral as well as financial, in which we now find ourselves.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
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