Adventures of a Financial Disaster Tourist

Iceland, Greece and Ireland we know about. On Spain, Portugal and Italy we've heard the warnings. Britain is a fear rumbling in the distant background of precarious triple-A ratings. But surely Germany is safe. Isn't it?

Michael Lewis's brilliant tragi-comic romp across Europe shows how the financial crisis is about to hit everyone in the face.

The cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piñata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack. The Irish wanted to stop being Irish. The Germans wanted to be even more German.

Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles across Europe (which, as he discovers, is rapidly becoming the new Third World) is brilliantly, sadly hilarious. But America can't be too complacent either. When he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the final reckoning awaits the greediest of all the debtor nations too.

It's time to brace ourselves for impact. And, with Michael Lewis, to laugh while we're doing it.