The economic crisis can’t possibly be as entertaining as Michael Lewis, author of Liars Poker, makes it out to be in his Portfolio article. But so long as you don’t have a mortgage, credit card debt, a job in finance, a retirement plan, or want to buy holiday gifts for your loved ones this year, he makes the confusing morass of our financial woes a hoot to read.

For starters, experience and interest in finance weren’t prerequisites for a job in the heady days of Liars Poker:

The willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall . . . Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

While you didn’t need a clue, if you could read, you might become an analyst who could bankrupt companies:

[Steve Eisman] was hired as a junior equity analyst . . . That changed in December 1991, less than a year into his new job . . . One of Oppenheimer’s investment bankers stomped around the research department looking for anyone who knew anything about the mortgage business. Recalls Eisman: “I’m a junior analyst and just trying to figure out which end is up, but I told him that as a lawyer I’d worked on a deal for the Money Store.” He was promptly appointed the lead analyst . . . “What I didn’t tell him was that my job had been to proofread the documents and that I hadn’t understood a word of the [expletive] things.”

Jim Cramer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who come to the Y on Dec 10 and Dec 18, respectively, might have more erudite explanations that involve things like illiquid mortgage-backed securities, Troubled Asset Relief Programs, equity stakes, and special-purpose lending entities when getting to the bottom of this all, as well as bringing us out of it. Paulson, who is currently wrestling with how best to spend the $700 billion you loaned him, should have some answers by the time of his speaking engagement, but if not, maybe Cramer’s sound-effects board will bleep beep crash zip splat us out of this mess.

[Business & Finance Talks at the Y]