The Big Short, a book review

THE BIG SHORT Inside The Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis.  You could alternately call it The 2008 Recession Explained.  Remember how everything kind of fell apart in 2008?  Lewis tells us how the subprime morgatge crisis was created, the players in that giant house of cards, and the handful of people who saw it coming.  A brave (and brilliant) few saw the mess for what it is and shorted the entire market to the tune of billions.  



Michiko Kakutani when reviewing Lewis' books says,  
"No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis.  His entertaining new book does not attempt a macro view of the financial crisis, but instead proposes to open a small window on the calamities by recounting the stories of some savvy renegades who cashed in on their conviction that the system was rotten."

I had fun reading this book.  A few times I even yelled out at a particularly incredulous portion of the story.  I really wish Obama and his entire cabinet would read this and then take the criminals who cheated us all to task!  Like how about putting a few of them behind bars and changing the way we regulate these crooks so it won't happen again.  We got burned folks... 

Michiko Kakutani review for the New York Times here

Steven Pearlstein review for the Washington Post here


The author Michael Lewis

More about Michael Lewis at Wikipeida

Edit:  This is the first book I have read on my new Kindle.  Loving it!

2 comments:

rik said...

new post please....

Danmark said...

Michael Lewis tackles a weighty subject in The Big Short and he does it extremely well. This is an absolute must read for anyone even remotely interested in learning about the subprime mortgage crisis. Lewis takes very complicated concepts and makes them accessible to his reader. I have read criticisms that his "heroes" in the story were actually responsible for drawing out the madness leading up to the crash, but I don't think he ever suggests that they did not play that role even going so far as quoting his characters as admitting they "fed the monster." But his characters did what good investors do, they did not create the mess, and it was not their job to try to prevent it. In the end I think that Lewis does an amazing job of giving a balanced account of who did what and it's impact in the collapse. Fantastic book.