This is the end

Thanks to David Brooks’s Sidney Awards, I’ve just caught up with Michael Lewis’s article ‘The End’, which appeared in Portfolio magazine last month.  It’s one of the most incisive and exhaustive pieces on the credit crunch that I’ve read so far – exactly what you’d expect from the man who wrote the supremely readable account of 1980s Wall Street life, Liar’s Poker – and I’d recommend it to all CoffeeHousers.  As with most of these accounts, it’s stuffed with debt-bubble anecdotes which still have the capacity to astonish.  This one, concerning pre-crunch mortgage-lending, jumped out at me:

“In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.”

So many of these snippets seem like the the first half of a modern parable; with the second half – the bit that tells us what we’ve all learnt from this – still being hammered out by governments and financial institutions across the globe.