Editor’s Note: This irreverent “journey through the new Third World” by Lewis is at once vastly entertaining and concerning. Within the past year or so, he visits Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Germany and California to measure the fallout of the financial crisis. Interviews with many key players in these focal point geographies suggest to the reader that the crisis a. looks obvious in retrospect and b. is not nearly over yet. And while I’d already had this fact drilled into my head in MBA school in 2005-2007, he reminds me that the clearest sign of trouble ahead is our government (all levels) un-fundable benefit commitments to public workers and pensioners.

Excerpt: “It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans.”