The credit crunch may have caused a bust in the economy but it has created a boom in financial publishing. It seems as if every journalist or academic who ever entered a bank has rushed to bring his or her opinions into print. They have taken on a Herculean task.

The best financial books - "Barbarians at the Gate" or "The Smartest Guys in the Room" - have been built around specific deals or companies (the takeover of RJR Nabisco, the collapse of Enron). The credit crunch has been much more diffuse, involving macroeconomic imbalances, greedy and incompetent bankers and fraudulent American homebuyers. Try covering the lot and the book can seem rambling and shapeless; narrow your focus and you miss the broader picture.

The ideal book on the crisis would not only tell readers what happened during the crunch and why. It would also look ahead at how the system will change. And it would be accessible, even to readers who have not spent years studying the minutiae of the financial markets.

Philip Augar's "Chasing Alpha" scores well on both historical explanation and readability. In a sense this book is a follow-up to "The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism" (2000), in which he dissected the takeover of the British financial sector by Americans and Europeans. "Chasing Alpha", again with a largely British bent, explains how the interplay between banks and investors ended up in an orgy of risk-taking. The analysis is excellent. It is a shame, however, that Mr Augar is let down by sloppy fact-checking. For example, Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech was given in 1996, not 2000. This is not the only error.

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