The credit crunch that has held the world's financial markets by the throat the past two years has spawned a mini-industry of books and magazine articles analyzing it.

The latest in the genre, "I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay," by British writer John Lanchester, takes us through the paces: the securitization of mortgages that encouraged the handing out of subprime mortgages like so much candy; the failure to measure the risks in increasingly arcane derivative financial products; the rolling back of regulatory laws such as the Glass-Steagall Act that walled off the U.S. securities and banking businesses.

Lanchester is not the first to connect these dots. Earlier books, notably Charles Morris' "Trillion Dollar Meltdown," cover some of the same ground, and Lanchester repeatedly cites the work of Richard A. Posner, a federal judge and author of "A Failure of Capitalism."

What makes "I.O.U." noteworthy is Lanchester's explanatory storytelling ability, including pithy metaphors and personal stories such as Lanchester's own misadventures in the British housing market. He also drops in names and cultural references: "Annie Hall," "The Simpsons," "This Is Spinal Tap," "I Am Legend" and Charlie Parker's "A Night in Tunisia."

Which is not to say that this is "Meltdown for Dummies." In degree of difficulty, "I.O.U." reads much as an extended New Yorker essay -- a magazine that has published Lanchester's work in the past. At its worst, for about 20 pages in a discussion of the mathematics of risk, I suffered post-traumatic flashbacks to my college statistics class. But most of the book is fairly digestible, as long as you don't have an aversion to acronyms such as CDS, SIV, SPV and CDO.

In sum, Lanchester sees the Great Crunch of 2008 as nothing less than the failure of unfettered free-market capitalism -- and reactions to this conclusion will inevitably depend on the reader's politics. Lanchester isn't likely to be invited to write for the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page; he's a fan of Paul Krugman, says John Maynard Keynes is "the greatest economist who ever lived" and skewers the staunchly free-market magazine The Economist as "an algebraic formula in which the answer is always x."

Even the Journal recently published an opinion piece headlined "Bring Back Glass-Steagall." But Lanchester argues that such re-regulation is only a part of the cure for what ails us. We also need a cultural paradigm shift, he says: a realization that greed is not good, that we can be content with what we have instead of grabbing for more, that it's time to start paying off the bill we've run up.

Holding your breath? Me, neither.

Casey Common is a deputy business editor for the Star Tribune.