I.O.U., John Lanchester
I.O.U., John Lanchester
1 Rating(s)
List: $16.99 | Sale: $11.89
Club: $8.49

I.O.U.
Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

Author: John Lanchester

Narrator: James Langton

Unabridged: 7 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/18/2010


Synopsis

The wildest story in the world these days is not fiction; it's what's really happening all around us as the world's global economy has gone into freefall. How did we get here? What does it all mean? How could so many smart people be so dumb and believe their own hype?

Accessibly, cleverly, and with mordant humor, journalist John Lanchester trots the globe in search of the answers to these questions—to Iceland, the scene of catastrophic bank collapse; to Hong Kong, the city of his birth built at the altar of free-market capitalism; to the high-stakes leveraging of Wall Street; and to the tragedy of lost homes in small-town America. And in his capable hands, we see and understand what went wrong and why.

Lanchester believes that the current crisis gives us an opportunity to bring about much-needed change and that a stronger and more compassionate system can emerge from the wreckage.

About John Lanchester

John Lanchester is the bestselling author of The Debt to Pleasure, Capital, and other works of fiction and nonfiction. His books, which have been translated into twenty-five languages, have won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He lives in London.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Manny on May 15, 2015

This brilliant, scary little book is the first account I've seen of the credit crunch which truly made sense. I read it in a day, and, if you're at all interested in politics, economics or current affairs, I can't recommend it too highly. Lanchester is an acclaimed novelist, which shows in the witty......more

Goodreads review by Buck on July 12, 2012

One of the few times George W. Bush ever rose to quotability came during the 2008 credit crunch, when he was heard to mutter darkly: "This sucker could go down." He wasn’t talking about the US banking system; he was talking about civilization as we know it. That’s how close we were to the abyss. Ano......more

Goodreads review by David on January 23, 2010

I'd been putting off thinking about the economic meltdown. It just seemed like a surefire trigger for righteous indignation. Helpless, righteous indignation. And what good is that - it's the stuff that heart attacks are made of (note: not ulcers - they come from bacteria) - feeling angry about stuf......more

Goodreads review by Baba on April 28, 2020

An impressive and also damning look at the so called 'Developed' World's financial institutions; as Lanchester sketches out easy to understand definitions and explanations of sub prime markets, derivatives, bonds, CDPs, un-regulation etc etc. In addition he details the decision of the last century t......more

Goodreads review by Rosie on January 10, 2011

I have read four books recently on the credit crunch with the desire to understand better what went wrong, why and who is to blame, and to marshall my own arguments. These books were Gillian Tett's 'Fools' Gold', Ha Joon Chang's '23 things they don't tell you about Capitalism',Michael Lewis's 'The B......more