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  • Whoops!

  • Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
  • By: John Lanchester
  • Narrated by: Jonathan Iris
  • Length: 7 hrs
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (222 ratings)
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Whoops! cover art

Whoops!

By: John Lanchester
Narrated by: Jonathan Iris
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Summary

In 2000, the total GDP of Earth was $36 trillion. At the start of 2007, it was $70 trillion. Today that growth has gone suddenly and sharply into decline.

John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless bankers, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders, to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do.

©2010 John Lanchester (P)2010 WF Howes Ltd

Critic reviews

"A valiant and genuinely amusing attempt to describe how finance came off the rails...written with a good heart and a lively intellectual curiosity. ( Independent)

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What listeners say about Whoops!

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Elegance and charm, jazzing on a well-known theme

I've read several books (Gillian Tett's Fools Gold, Michael Lewis's The Big Short, Gordon Brown's apology..) about the financial crisis, so I can't really say I learnt anything new from John Lanchester. However, I was richly amused and entertained by his whimsical and informal style. His wry wit and colloquial turn of phrase often had me laughing out loud. And it is a story so amazing, so profound and so ongoing (unfortunately) that it bears retelling a few times, in different registers, by different people. Mr Lanchester is a definite outsider. Son of an old fashioned (good/safe) banker, he read English and became a writer. He can take the 'man in the street' perspective, and uses analogies that make the whole episode both accessible and maximally absurd.

Normally I don't like narrators trying to mimic real characters (e.g. the voices of Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan), but in this context - a rather theatrical book - it does more or less work. The narrator also manages to personify Mr Lanchester's animated and humorous style.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Clear exposition of the financial crisis

I enjoyed and learnt from this book. It sets out an admirably clear and concise history of the origins of the financial crisis; the author has a knack for explaining things simply, and for the telling analogy in describing such things a financial derivatives - you dont need to be an economist or a mathematician to understand them - and he balances the detail and the big picture very well; some nice touches of humour too. Towards the end of the book he does rather get on his soap box, and his ideas for avoiding similar crises in the future are a bit confusing and contradictory; for example he seems to think that Government could run banks better than bankers, which is more than a tad naive, I think. So four stars rather than five for me.

Narration is excellent; very well paced, which is very important with this sort of book, and nicely varied in tone so you dont get distracted or lose interest.

I listened to this book not long after listening to Michael Lewis' 'The Big Short', also available on Audible. Both books together paint a well rounded and intersting picture of what happened and who should shoulder the blame - worth getting if you're interested in the subject.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

essential but witty

This book has tackled a diificult subject and made it interesting and accessible. The author is very knowledgeable but he puts over his knowledge in a very clear and witty way.
I have been telling all my friends about it and I hope it has a well deserved sucess

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Fascinating! Banking with Interest...

If, like me, you thought of bankers as dull Capt. Mainwarings or dumb but overpaid "hooray Henry's", this book will come as a revelation. Whoops! actually explains Banking as an advanced form of higher mathematics, akin to M Theory or Particle Physics.

What went wrong in 2008, is therefore all the more unbelievable, as the whizz kid mathematicians had devised what seemed like a fool-proof system of managing risk, where everyone benefitted. Whoops! leads the listener through the intricacies of "stocks", "derivatives", "options", "hedging" etc. through the wonders of MPT and the Black-Scholes equation, and the higher maths of managing high-risk, high return investments with minimal actual risk, by calculating the Value at Risk (VaR) of debt recapitalisation, based on historical data. It seemed too good to be true... and of course it was.

The book then brilliantly dissects what went wrong, how complacency and mismanagement by bankers, ratings agencies and fraudsters such as Madoff in a culture of increasing competitive risk-taking, almost inevitably led to situations that according to the model, had probabilities of only occurring once in several lifetimes of the Universe.

Finally, the book looks at the aftermath, and asks what has changed, and what needs to change.

It's a very entertaining read - especially if, like me, it's a world you are not already familiar with. The narration is excellent, and it has pace and verve that I never suspected banking could ever achieve.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Financial crisis

Would you listen to Whoops! again? Why?

I worked in banking for over 30 years and found this audio book clear and easy to follow. I have listened to it a couple of times to remind myself why the global markets are in a mess.

What did you like best about this story?

I found the information up to date and esay to follow

What about Jonathan Iris’s performance did you like?

The narrator's performance is spot on, neither boring or too excitable. Just what a book of this content needs.

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I found myself shouting outloud in agreement with the book

Any additional comments?

I would recommend this book to anyone you don't need to be an economist to understand it !

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Compulsory reading

Given the level to which financial decisions affect us all this book should be compulsory reading.
I can’t believe how ignorant I was of so much.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Whoopy? Do.

Recent exhortations in The Guardian that the time is now to stop reading fiction and start dipping into popular economics swayed me to give this one a try. I’m not going to stop reading fiction, and neither do I think (or, let’s be honest did I anticipate) that Lanchester has the authority of a Chomsky. But an honest endeavour in switching from fiction to faction is well rewarded - this is an informed and informing volume which has the added benefit of impeccable timing. It is important to understand the current economic environment and the insights provided here are wonderful, fresh and endlessly entertaining - but whether the prognosis goes far enough is a matter for further debate and consideration.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Really good

This is a really fascinating audiobook. Lanchester has done a excellent job of making the financial concepts accessible and explaining them in everyday terms. (I'm an engineer and have next to no knowledge of economics and finance). Occasionally he gets a little carried away with analogies in art & music, but it's rare and it doesn't get in the way of the story.

The narration is some of the best I've heard. If I were reading this on paper, I think I might have struggled to motivate myself to finish it because it's such an unfamiliar area to me. Having it read via audiobook made it so easy to just keep listening though and I'm glad I did. It's a fascinating story, superbly told and engagingly read.

Well worth a listen.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Just great.

Loved this so much. Makes complicated machinations easy to understand, and draws brilliant insights.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Good book spoilt by accented quotes in narration

This is a good book on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis by the author of Capital (a state of the nation novel set in London in the midst of the crisis). He is a compelling writer and I enjoyed the book. Its like a British version of Michael Lewis' Big Short.

However whenever the narration reaches a point where it is a direct quote from one of the actors in the crisis or well known politicians, businessmen or financiers with opinions on it, it goes into an approximation of their accent. Every time it is a British person there is someone reading out the quote in a plummy RP accent, and every time it is an American it is a bad impersonation of an American accent. This would be tolerable, even amusing, if every quote was by someone you had never heard of, but many of the people quoted are quite famous, and the voices bear no relation to their own. So Warren Buffet, a measured and avuncular Midwesterner, is quoted in the voice of a cowboy with sunstroke. Alan Greenspan, a patrician New York academic is quoted in the voice of Colonel Sanders.

It ruins a good audio book. I wish they'd used the same narrator as Capital did, and dispensed with the half baked impressions.

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