Theories abound about what caused the credit crunch. Learned committees have been formed. Nobel laureates have been scribbling away at their universities. One group of people claims to have the answer. London's publishers – who could teach most trading floors a few lessons in greed and short-term thinking – reckon it is all the fault of lap dancers and cocaine. The shelves of Britain's bookshops are groaning with tales of hedonistic excess in the financial markets.

Titles such as Cityboy and Binge Trading are filled with stories of nights at strip clubs and drug-fuelled trading sessions. Plenty of similar books are in the pipeline, as publishers rush to find their berth on the bandwagon.

In one sense, this is harmless fun. And yet it is also damaging. The crisis of the last year had deep roots that had nothing to do with lap dancers and cocaine.

No one could have missed the avalanche of titles. The trend was started by Geraint Anderson, a former Dresdner Kleinwort analyst, who turned his Cityboy column into a hugely successful book. With its subtitle "Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile", Anderson lifts the lid on the steamier side of the markets.

"Sitting here listening to the gentle sound of waves lapping on the shore, with a glass of chai in one hand and a joint in another, I am comforted by the realization that this is payback time," he says on his website.

Others are following a similar vein. In How I Caused the Credit Crunch, Tetsuya Ishikawa, a former Goldman Sachs staffer, offers a thinly fictionalised account of life in the markets. Seth Freedman's Binge Trading doesn't pretend it is fiction. Its subtitle – "The Real Inside Story of Cash, Cocaine and Corruption in the City" – gives the flavour. "It seemed only right to toast my newfound earning power in time-honoured City fashion; namely, to go out, score a quarter-ounce of coke and let the good times roll," Freedman writes about one of his first deals. Things go downhill from there.

The girls are now getting in on the act. Virgin Books has bought the rights to Citygirl, based on a newspaper column, for publication later this year. Next year, Venetia Thompson will publish Gross Misconduct: The Last Year of Excess in the City. Don't expect too much in the way of sober analysis of monetary policy.

"She partied with as much gusto as her colleagues, taking all the life offered: the £900 bottles of wine, the six-hour lunches, the days out at Cartier Polo, the champagne-fuelled nights at lap-dancing clubs, the Chanel handbags and the meaningless sex," the publisher's blurb reads.

All these titles are implicitly pushing a view that the credit crunch was caused by a bunch of overpaid young traders swilling champagne and snorting cocaine in nightclub toilets.

And yet, that was just one of many symptoms of the madness unleashed during the great bull market of 2003-'07. It wasn't the cause of the credit crunch, any more than flashes of lightning are what causes thunderstorms. Yet it isn't the whole story. The crisis that has rolled through the global economy in the last two years had plenty of causes, many of them hard to understand. The bonus system in banks played a part. So did the way central banks ran monetary policy. The trade imbalances between China and the rest of the world, and the vast quantities of capital that had to be recycled as a result, may have been the root of the problem.

Lap dancers and cocaine dealers didn't really have much to do with it, even if they are more fun to read about. It is important to get the facts right about the credit crunch because if we don't, we will end up making the same mistakes all over again.

Matthew Lynn is a columnist with Bloomberg News