From Black Monday to the Asian financial crisis, from the internet bubble to mortgage meltdown, our lives are ruled by crazy cycles of euphoria and hysteria that manage to grip the world but are all-too-soon forgotten.

In this unique collection of articles Michael Lewis – ex-trader and bestselling chronicler of greed and frenzy in the markets – casts a sceptical eye back over the most panicked-about panics of recent decades. He tells a story of boom and bust, deranged greed, outsized egos and over-inflated salaries, where the only thing that can ever be predicted is our constant inability to predict anything.

Using contemporary accounts from commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman, plus many of his own best writings, Lewis conveys the mood before each catastrophe, what it was like in the heat of the moment, how, afterwards, we tried to explain away the chaos – and then failed to learn from it before the whole process started all over again.