In the New York Review of Books, John Lanchester takes on Michael Lewis’ new volume about the global economic meltdown, Boomerang. A passage about the apocalyptic view of fund manager Kyle Bass:

“His first interlocutor, Kyle Bass, is a classic example. Bass is a fund manager who made a fortune ‘shorting’ toxic mortgage assets, and then became preoccupied by the subject of global debt levels. Bass is, to put it very mildly, a pessimist on the subject of sovereign debt:

Spain and France had accumulated debts of more than ten times their annual revenues. Historically, such levels of government indebtedness had led to government default. ‘Here’s the only way I think things can work out for these countries,’ Bass said. ‘If they start running real budget surpluses. Yeah, and that will happen right after monkeys fly out of your ass.’

The prognostications that ensue from Bass’s analysis are gloomy, and form the basis of Boomerang‘s big-picture overview. ‘The financial crisis of 2008 was suspended only because investors believed that governments could borrow whatever they needed to rescue their banks. What happened when the governments themselves ceased to be credible?’

Bass thinks that the only reliable investments are guns and gold, and has just bought twenty million nickels, because the metal in a five-cent nickel is worth 6.8 cents, and they are going to be a stable source of value when things go wrong.”