I’ve just finished reading John Lanchester’s account of the credit crunch, the excellently titled “Whoops!”. I’m not particularly up to date with finance, banking or economics but I now understand a lot more about what has happened, why it happened, and why it’ll probably happen again. (In the epilogue, Lanchester sticks his neck out and makes a prediction: within the next 5-10 years, due to either a collapse of the eurozone, automated trading failure, or a bubble bursting in China.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n
I really enjoyed reading Whoops!<\/i> and now understand a bit more about sub-prime, credit default swaps, and international banking reguations. The real genius of the book, for me, is not just the in-depth understanding he manages to convey but also the wonderfully erudite style. There aren’t that many writers who can compare global financial instruments to post-modernism and get way with it. The way he manages to get across the kinds of risk – and the kinds of models of risk – that the banking industry deal with is also remarkably clear. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in places, particularly if you like that dry, sarcastic humour he does so well. A top book; if you’d like to get a handle on what’s happened, I can’t recommend it enough.<\/p>\r\n\r\nHere’s an amazon link<\/a>, it’s got 4.5 stars there too, so I’m not the only one who likes it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve just finished reading John Lanchester’s account of the credit crunch, the excellently titled “Whoops!”. I’m not particularly up to date with finance, banking or economics but I now understand a lot more about what has happened, why it happened, and why it’ll probably happen again. (In the epilogue, Lanchester sticks his neck out and makes a prediction: within the next 5-10 years, due to either a collapse of the eurozone, automated trading failure, or a bubble bursting in China.) I really enjoyed reading Whoops! and now understand a bit more about sub-prime, credit default swaps, and international banking reguations. The real genius of theRead More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-admin","post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":889,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions\/889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}