In the next few days I'll be writing about the 2011 annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Denver, from which I've just returned. But such was the dreadfulness of my journey home that I'm going to start with a review of the book that kept me completely absorbed through the unpleasantness of a 9 hour flight and 5 hours of delay. That's Matt Taibi's Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.

The title sort of sums up his views, but the detail is compelling. Taibbi looks at sub-prime mortgages, Alan Greenspan's fuelling of the bubble years by always bailing out the financial markets from their latest crisis, the more recent commodity bubbles in oil and foodstuffs, takes a detour into health insurance in the US, and always comes back to the leading role played by the vampire squid, his famous term for Goldman Sachs.

In some ways the book is similar to John Lanchester's Whoops! It has the clarity of a book about finance written by a non-expert who has gone to the length of understanding the market jargon and the complexities of financial products. However, Griftopia is also a book about politics and the corruption of US democracy by big business donors in general and the banks in particular. So in that way it sits alongside 13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. The financial crisis is a political story as much as a business and economic one. Taibbi, who works for Rolling Stone magazine, is on the political left but he concludes concludes that partisan voters of both the left and the right are correct, and has great sympathy with the source of anger amongst Tea Party supporters, though not with its exploitation by the movement's leadership: both big business and the government are screwing the people. They're doing it hand in hand.

This is of course a book about the United States but that shouldn't be much comfort to those of us living elsewhere. The big banks have excessive market and political power elsewhere – the City has certainly had a privileged place in British politics and we can only hope the coalition government sticks to its tough line on tackling the banks' power. Griftopia explores in detail the relaxation of regulation in the US in recent decades, but although the details differed the trends were the same elsewhere.

Moreover, the financial markets are global. The latest get-rich-quick asset bubble on Wall Street, pouring the ample liquidity that's around courtesy of the Fed into commodities indices, has been driving up oil prices and – even more damagingly – food prices. People are going hungry thanks to big finance. I'm not sure what can be done about it. If the Americans can't fix their political system, it's hard to see what anyone else can do. But Griftopia's themes of the harm caused by short-termism, and the way that market and government failure often go hand in hand, are important – they feature in fact in my forthcoming The Economics of Enough: How To Run The Economy As If The Future Matters.

Griftopia is also a greatly entertaining read. Taibbi is an angry man, and a fine writer made more eloquent by his anger. He's also very rude about many people, and it's often hilarious. So, don't wait for a long journey – this is a book about the financial crisis very well worth reading.