Our money laureate.

When I was hired to work for The Big Money, the first question a colleague asked was whether I had read Liar's Poker. Coming from political journalism, I had an average American's amount of business knowledge. That is to say, I didn't have any. So I bought Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker, a book written in the late ’80's about the late ’80's, and it was there that I first learned about derivatives. Twenty years after the book’s events, some of the very same derivatives that Lewis described would end up disemboweling the financial system from within. On Sept. 15, 2008, I was thankful I’d read the book.

The book’s prescience—and Wall Street's stubborn refusal to change—has left Lewis uniquely situated to comment on our current disaster. Don't think that Lewis and business editors are unaware. In his October 2008 (post-Lehman, AIG, and Merrill) Portfolio essay, he writes that "there was an umbilical cord running from the belly of the exploded beast back to the financial 1980s." In his and David Einhorn's mammoth op-ed from January 2009, his regulation suggestions are grounded in the kind of alarms he sounded in the late '80s. And in a stroke of professional luck that often seems to follow Lewis, his newly edited anthology Panic arrived on bookshelves this year, promising a retrospective look at—surprise—20 years of financial catastrophe, including the subprime meltdown. Thanks to the meltdown, he's now working on a new book, tentatively called The Big Short, that seems certain to land on best-seller lists in November.

Put simply, this financial crisis has solidified Michael Lewis' position as America’s money laureate. And it's not just because he happened—as some critics would construe it—to be in the right place at the right time. Nor is it because he's sold a ton of books—1.2 million copies since 2001, to be precise. It's because Michael Lewis is by far the best business journalist in the country. His assessment of the country's economic situation—and thus the country's economic mood—has provided some of the finest, most accessible prose available. Lewis serves as translator for the confused, financially illiterate masses. Which makes his secret to success all the more intriguing: His writing isn't actually about money.

Above all, Michael Lewis is a man obsessed with characters. Business journalists are often left with a false choice between writing about inanimate objects—collateralized debt obligations are always a hit—or about stuffy corporations and CEOs—scions, Pfizer, and Bear Stearns, oh my! Lewis has managed to chart a third course. Instead of detailing financial instruments, he finds characters within the underbelly of the market and lets them do the hard work for him. At least hundreds, often thousands, of words in his magazine pieces are spent describing Lewis' characters to set some type of financial and psychological scene. For Lewis, stakes are established by outlining a character's motivations and then detailing the reactions when the principles and artifacts of Wall Street interact with those desires. This process allows his subjects to become emblems of broader economic themes. In other fields, this technique is the norm; it's called storytelling. In business, however, Lewis' type of narrative yarn is rarely pulled off deftly.

Take that New York Times op-ed I mentioned earlier. Almost immediately Lewis (and Einhorn) launch into an anecdote about then-little-known, now-infamous Madoff whistle-blower Harry Markopolos. Markopolos' futile plight becomes a microcosm of all that's wrong with the regulatory system in the country and serves as a narrative catalyst to discuss all of Lewis' proposed fixes. Then there's the piece on Lewis' old colleague John Meriwether and the decline of his hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management. By profiling Meriwether and LTCM's strategists, Lewis manages to summarize a fraught and decaying economic era—without really leaving the walls of LTCM. Oh, and don't forget about his New York Times Magazine missive on Google, which is really about the effect of shareholders on the eternal tension between profits and social good. There's an entire NYT Magazine essay about Lewis' disbelief that so few people in Washington actually get access to their subjects. The point: Lewis would rarely write a piece like this one—in which its principal subject is purposefully never contacted nor heard from.

At times, Lewis' lust for character backfires. In his tech book, The New New Thing, Lewis gets swept up in Netscape founder Jim Clark's utopian visions of the future. By allowing Clark to muscle the narrative, the book and its author get swept away into the very tech bubble that Lewis would later cover after the dot-com crash. It's a fact that Lewis admits in Panic, where he includes a New New Thing passage as an artifact of journalism that was too idealistic, too fast. Consider it an occupational hazard for the character-dependent writer.