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

"Warning to bankers everywhere in the world. You better buy every single copy of I.O.U. because Lanchester's painted the target on you that the rest of us so desperately wanted to see." --James J. Cramer, host of CNBC's Mad Money

"Few if any [finance] books will be as pleasurable--and by that I mean as literate or as wickedly funny--as John Lanchester's...Before you begin to cry, pick up a copy of I.O.U. Good humor and good company will be the things that'll get us through." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"[T]his elegantly crafted little book...manages to be, by turns, acidic, frightening, and sharply funny. What it is not is boring....it all makes perfect sense. A." --Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly

"Witty, lucid, solicitous of the average person's difficulty in grasping the conceptual underpinnings of international finance....Lanchester manages to know enough to explain the terrain clearly and yet he never loses his perspective...Lanchester had me in the palm of his hand..." --Laura Miller, Salon.com

"In I.O.U., the only truly entertaining book I've read on the subject, the British writer John Lanchester theorizes that after the Cold War, capitalism could go wild because Western governments no longer had to worry about competing with communism. This is a fascinating idea..." --Jacob Weisberg, Newsweek

"[R]evelatory and insightful."-Claude R. Marx, Washington Times

"Laypeople seeking to understand the crisis, and what it means for their own bank account, will find Lanchester's volume an oasis of understanding in a sea of partisan spin and convoluted financial language."-PublishersWeekly.com (starred review)

"Lanchester's book is also noteworthy for a splendid choice of language and metaphor not usually found in writing on economics and finance...All economic writing should be so evocative." --Benjamin M. Friedman, The New York Review of Books

"Lanchester's gift is to see the big picture in new ways." --Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post Book World

"Lanchester understands perfectly that the man behind the curtain was no wizard-that markets, far from being God-given instruments of perfection, were human constructs. ...[He] is adept at explicating financial complexities with street level analogies."-Roger Lowenstein, NewRepublic.com

For most people, the reasons for the sudden collapse of our economy still remain obscure. I.O.U. is the story of how we came to experience such a complete financial disaster, starting with the magical proliferation of credit that led to an explosion of lending on the global and local landscapes of banking and finance. Viewing the crisis through the lens of politics, culture, and contemporary history—from the invention and widespread misuse of financial instruments to the culpability of subprime mortgages—Lanchester deftly draws conclusions on the limitations of financial and governmental regulation, capitalism’s deepest flaw, and most important, on the plain and simple facts of human nature where cash is concerned.

With newly updated, superbly written reportage, Lanchester delivers a shrewd perspective and a digestible, comprehensive analysis that connects the dots for expert and casual reader alike. Part economic primer, part fiscal and historical analysis, I.O.U. is an eye-opener of a book.