Check This Out: Michael Lewis discusses his new book, “Boomerang”

What: Terry Gross, host of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” interviews author Michael Lewis on his latest book, “Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World.”

Episode: “How The Financial Crisis Created A ‘New Third World’ “; originally aired on Oct. 4

Recommended by: Kurt Batdorf, Snohomish County Business Journal editor

The pitch: Michael Lewis, author of “The Big Short,” “The Blind Side,” “Liar’s Poker” and “Moneyball,” talks to Terry Gross about his new book, “Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World.” Lewis’ research into the financial meltdown of 2008 leads him to conclude that Europe’s sovereign debt crisis is a reflection on Wall Street investment bankers’ effort to make money regardless of risk.

In this episode of Fresh Air, Lewis looks at some of the institutions and individuals involved in the financial crisis in places like Greece, Ireland and Iceland — to determine what went wrong and who was involved in the current debt crisis.

In Greece, he says, the government initially disguised the true state of its finances with the help of U.S. bankers. Goldman Sachs, for example, did off-market currency trades with the government of Greece.

“(Those trades) enabled the Greek government to book upfront a big profit, but down the road (the Greek government) would have to repay Goldman Sachs quite a bit,” Lewis says. “So (Goldman Sachs) lent the government money without saying that’s what they were doing. If you did this in the corporate world, a bunch of people would be put in jail. They helped the Greek government rig its books so that they looked acceptable to the European Union so they’d be admitted to the euro(zone).”

And Greece wasn’t the only country that hid its true financial state, Lewis says.

“This was not a one-off situation,” he says. “You look at the financial crisis in Europe, and the fingerprints of American investment bankers are everywhere. The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior. At the same time they were making bad loans in the United States, they were encouraging the same sort of behavior at the government level in Europe. The basic problem was, historically the role of the financier was to vet risk and make sure risk was evaluated. That got perverted in recent times, and instead the financier helped disguise risk.”