Lee Cullum discusses the financial crisis on Wall Street with author Michael Lewis during Tuesday evening’s Tate Lecture in McFarlin Auditorium. (Spencer J Eggers/The Daily Campus)

Best-selling author Michael Lewis brought his wit and humor to McCord Auditorium on Tuesday as a part of the Tate Lecture series sponsored by the Omni Hotels.

He explained complex economic topics like the European debt crisis and the subprime mortgage crisis in everyday language.

The New York Times once said of Michael Lewis, “He can make anything interesting.”

His interviewer, Lee Cullum, a senior fellow of the John G. Tower Center for Political Studies at SMU, asked a series of challenging questions.

The discussion started off with Lewis’ first book, “Liar’s Poker.” The book discusses Wall Street culture in the 1980s.

“I thought it was the last time I was going to write about Wall Street. I didn’t think that Wall Street could get any crazier,” Lewis said.

At the time, Wall Street was expanding at a rapid pace and often relying on risky deals to turn profits.

“But, then it all changed. Wall Street could set all the rules for itself and yet it failed to generate money,” Lewis said. “How can a casino cheat itself?”

After asking himself this question, Lewis decided to use an investigative strategy that he has used ever since: gather primary sources.

“I started knocking on the doors of the people who had lost large amounts of money. And surprisingly, they talked to me,” Lewis said.

For Lewis’s later books like “The Big Shot,” he was able to use his reputation as an insider to tell unique stories.

“Wall Street was out of control in the last decade. An art history major from Princeton found himself at one of the big firms and took home wild amounts of money,” Lewis said.

In recent years, Lewis has become a self-proclaimed financial disaster journalist who tours European countries struggling with large amounts of public debt.

“If you were to ask me who is really in trouble, I would say it’s Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain. But, everything is interconnected because of the European Union,” Lewis said.

The European Union (EU) is an economic and political union of 27 member states. The union has a standardized currency and wealth management system.

“Countries like Greece took advantage of easy credit and borrowing that Germany is having to make up for now,” Lewis said.

Greece skewed its economic indicators like gross domestic product and national debt per capita in order to join the European Union.

In reality, the nation was running huge deficits that it could not support in the long-run.

“If a company did what the Greek government did, everyone would be in jail,” Lewis said.

European countries ballooned to large welfare states.

At one point, Lewis said, the Greek railroad cost twice as much to operate as a private railroad.

Even countries outside the EU like Iceland were hit hard by risky investments and a culture of greed.

Iceland, a nation known for its fishing and geothermal energy, decided to become a heavy investor in foreign markets in the early 2000s.

“You had fisherman becoming currency traders overnight,” Lewis said. “They bought everything from airstrips to sports teams to media companies.”

A nation with little management and investing experience soon paid for its decisions as Iceland’s banks defaulted on their loans in 2008.

Since that time period, Iceland has slowly improved its economic status and undergone a social revolution.

Formerly led by men, most of Iceland’s important financial and political institutions are now led by women.

Financial crisis has the potential to cause dramatic change elsewhere in Europe.

“This is different than subprime mortgages. These are political issues as well,” Lewis said. “What happens when Germany wants to stop bailing out weaker EU states?”

International markets can have a huge impact in the United States as well.

“American finance culture has lost a lot of respect because of what bankers did in the the 2000s,” Lewis said. “Germans to this day think that they were robbed by the Americans.”

Germany and the United States have historically had a stable financial relationship, extending back to the post-World War II era.

For people appalled at the greed inherent in the economic climate today, Lewis had parting words.

“Historical patterns repeat.”