“The striking thing about the seemingly endless collapse of the subprime-mortgage market is how egalitarian it has been. It’s nearly impossible to draw a demographic line between the victims and the perps.” With these words, Michael Lewis introduces us to the world of financial panics. He starts in 1987 with the Wall Street crash, moves to the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, the Internet bubble, and finally, today’s subprime meltdown. In this anthology of articles about these panics, Lewis draws on many excellent writers. I prefer recent Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman’s lucid commentaries. There’s Dave Barry’s hilarious take on real estate. If you want to understand how these financial panics happen, and what to do to fix them, PANIC is the place to start.