Americans like nothing better than anointing someone as the undisputed expert in a field, their "Elvis" if you like, so you don't have to waste time listening to anybody else.
Robert Parker is the wine man who turned tasting into a numbers game, thus simplifying it for simpletons. Bill Gates was the software man, while Steve Jobs was the computer and design guru. Alan Greenspan used to be the "go-to" man for finance, until he was discredited. Now it's Warren Buffett. He can talk of derivatives as "weapons of mass destruction" and everyone listens, even while he is buying. And for writing about finance, it's Michael Lewis.
Lewis made his name with Liar's Poker in the early 1990s, an insider's guide to Wall Street based on a few years' experience at Salomon Brothers, a now-defunct investment bank. He followed this up with books on baseball, Silicon Valley and The Big Short, on the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the US. You can see why bankers might talk to him: "He's one of us," they'd think, with his trim figure, expensive haircut and Brooks Brothers shirts, while magazine editors like him because he once worked at a bank, and so must understand finance.
As anyone who has watched the banking debacles of the past few years must have realised by now, bankers are probably the last people who understand banking. Some of them must have realised they were blowing up the financial system. They are the interesting ones. The rest didn't get it, but blew it up almost by mistake.
Did Lewis get it, or did he change his tune like a schoolboy sneak? It is hard to say, because most of his financial writing is retrospective. It's easy now to look back at the events of 2008 and say it was bound to happen. I'd warrant even a central banker might notice. But was it in 2006? I don't remember him warning us then.
Reuters liked The Big Short though, calling it "probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written".
Which leads us to Lewis' latest work, Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, a compilation of a number of pieces written mainly for Vanity Fair magazine, based on trips to Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Germany and finishing in California. It is bound to feel a little out of date as journalism always does a few days after being written, even if I read the Too Fat to Fly chapter on California last month, days before its magazine publication.
Lewis is scooping himself. Pay a fellow US$10 (Dh36) a word and that's the gratitude he shows. Clearly he learnt something on Wall Street.
His meltdown tour begins in Iceland (the US subtitle is Travels in the New Third World, perhaps deemed a bit too punchy for European sensibility). He encounters a man charged by the IMF to fly to Reykjavik to find out where the money went.
"You have to understand," says the man. "Iceland is no longer a country, it's now a hedge fund."
It's a good line, but why doesn't the man have a name? I hope it's not because he never said it. That would be against all the principles of American journalism.
Lewis then checks in to the 101 Hotel, a boutique hotel. I stayed there in 2005 when Reykjavik was booming; Clint Eastwood was staying there, too, but by the time of Lewis' visit the place is deserted apart from a couple in the room next door who make a lot of noise and keep him awake.
He tries to decipher what they are saying, then realises they are speaking Icelandic. Imagine: people in Iceland speaking Icelandic.
Unlike other financial hacks, he's too grand to make appointments. Fortunately, after a couple of days the phone rings. One is a TV producer inviting him to appear on television, the other the Icelandic prime minister's office.
It turns out the prime minister is not as stupid as Lewis thought. There is much talk about fishing. People bump into our intrepid reporter, literally, which he does not like. He leaves thinking the country will be much better run by women.
In Greece, there's another problem. They've spent all the money, but his opening sentence is so badly written that you rather wish they hadn't so he didn't need to go there. The buses are "driven madly", the cliffs "sheer", the Greeks talking on "cell phones". As opposed to what exactly? Baked bean cans linked by bits of string?
Then there's the problem of his mauve Brooks Brothers shirt. He mentions it three times in as many pages. Is this the first example of product placement in Vanity Fair? Is this why Reuters likes him so much?
The rest of the trip includes equally bad prose and what he would doubtless call "sweeping generalisations". Lewis would like to compare himself with another Princeton old boy, F Scott Fitzgerald. Fortunately, Fitzgerald never wrote this badly.
Perhaps we should conclude Lewis is the Goldman Sachs of financial journalism: not perfect or without flaws or even that good. It's just that he's better than the rest and he's got the brand name.
He hasn't yet become a "vampire squid"; but if he goes on writing books like this he'll kill us all with boredom.
At the very least he should be downgraded - or put on credit watch.
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