Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair article “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds” is an excellent, if somewhat depressing read. Lewis himself describes it as an example of new genre — “financial-disaster tourism”. Doubtless Lewis, also author of the excellent The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine and Liar’s Poker, will be paying visits to Iceland, Ireland and perhaps even the UK next!
I was struck by the following paragraph. This follows a passage in which Lewis meets an Athenian tax inspector (“Tax Collector No. 2″) who is bearing a thick binder full of cases of Greek corporates that have been caught evading tax. The inspector — who tells Lewis he has been taken off tax inspections because he was too “good at it” — fully intends to talk Lewis through the lot.
But Lewis writes: “That’s when I stopped him. I realised that if I let him go on we’d be there all night. The extent of the cheating — the amount of energy that went into it — was breathtaking.
“In Athens, I several times had a feeling new to me as a journalist: a complete lack of interest in what was obviously shocking material.
“I’d sit down with someone who knew the inner workings of the Greek government: a big-time banker, a tax collector, a deputy finance minister, a former M.P. I’d take out my notepad and start writing down the stories that spilled out of them. Scandal after scandal poured forth. Twenty minutes into it I’d lose interest. There were simply too many: they could fill libraries, never mind a magazine article.
This kind of encapsulates how I feel about those who have been defrauded or maltreated by their bank (or their accountant or insolvency practitioner) right now.
Rougly every two or three days I am approached an individual, business, or corporate with a legitimate claim along these lines — including some astonishing tales of bent judges and a legal and justice system that will move heaven and earth to ensure that crooked bankers and professionals are let off the hook.
I regret to say that — partly owing to the difficulties in getting these shocking stories published anywhere other than on this (unpaid) blog — I’m beginning to lose interest, a bit like Lewis did in Greece.
This blog post was published on 6 November 2010