Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. This item is unavailable.Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

W. W. Norton, November 2008. Hardcover. First Edition / full number line. Fine book in a Very Good jacket. Unmarked. Spine straight and tight. Jacket lightly soiled. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. viii + 391 pages. A masterful account of today's money culture, showing how the underpricing of risk leads to catastrophe. When it comes to markets, the first deadly sin is greed. Michael Lewis is our jungle guide through five of the most violent and costly upheavals in recent financial history: the crash of '87, the Russian default (and the subsequent collapse of Long-Term Capital Management), the Asian currency crisis of 1999, the Internet bubble, and the current sub-prime mortgage disaster. With his trademark humor and brilliant anecdotes, Lewis paints the mood and market factors leading up to each event, weaves contemporary accounts to show what people thought was happening at the time, and then, with the luxury of hindsight, analyzes what actually happened and what we should have learned from experience.…