The fifth risk - Michael Lewis

'Will set your hair on end' Telegraph, Top 50 Books of the Year
'Life is what happens between Michael Lewis books. I forgot to breathe while reading The Fifth Risk' Michael Hofmann, TLS, Books of the Year

The phenomenal new book from the international bestselling author of The Big Short

'The election happened ... And then there was radio silence.'

The
morning after Trump was elected president, the people who ran the US
Department of Energy - an agency that deals with some of the most
powerful risks facing humanity - waited to welcome the incoming
administration's transition team. Nobody appeared. Across the US
government, the same thing happened: nothing.

People don't notice
when stuff goes right. That is the stuff government does. It manages
everything that underpins our lives from funding free school meals, to
policing rogue nuclear activity, to predicting extreme weather events.
It steps in where private investment fears to tread, innovates and
creates knowledge, assesses extreme long-term risk.

And now, government is under attack. By its own leaders.

In The Fifth Risk,
Michael Lewis reveals the combustible cocktail of wilful ignorance and
venality that is fuelling the destruction of a country's fabric. All of
this, Lewis shows, exposes America and the world to the biggest risk of
all. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.