No laughing matter

If you want to get to grips with the culture that spawned the Goldman affair, the "very best book" is Michael Lewis's The Big Short, a new, blistering indictment of the way Wall Street does business, says John Lanchester in The Guardian. The investment banks emerge as particular villains, while the heroes are a bunch of mavericks who diagnosed the credit bubble early, and bet hugely against it. But Lewis clearly shows how, at the peak of the derivatives fiesta, "lines between right and wrong were repeatedly crossed". The SEC lawsuit against Goldman will turn on the much narrower issue of whether "lines between legal and illegal" were also crossed.

Lewis deftly reveals "the full, amoral horror of an out-of-control financial system in the hands of greed-driven sociopaths", agrees Martin Vander Weyer in Spectator Business. And this is a much livelier read than Gregory Zuckerman's The Greatest Trade Ever. But the key question for Lewis devotees is whether The Big Short can match Liar's Poker - his hugely entertaining 1989 account of his career as a Salomon bond salesman. The new book demonstrates his "finely tuned ear for the trading floor", but its cast pales in comparison with the grossly unattractive, but richly comic "Big Swinging Dicks" at Salomon. Lewis tells a colossal story, but he can't quite re-capture the magic. " The Big Short just isn't funny."