This was an entertaining and informative telling of the stories behind the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Also, Wall Street is fucked up.
Big fan of Michael Lewis. Can't wait to read more of his books.
I have read Lewis' second book - the beginning is mysterious, spicy and compelling.
But that experience flattens as you go which makes the experience unbearable just in the middle of it.
Imagine you had a story for something like 100 pages but your editor tells you there is no way to sell a 100-page book thus you are trying to expand, to squeeze those 250 pages out of your story without being a jerk (by this I mean writing 'books' for adult children as Joko Wilink does. His LARGE elephant quotes and fonts with sexy pictures can turn an article into a book).
At times you succeed by grinding, by finding new comments and facts to include.
But more often you make people choke on an overabundance of facts they don't know how to prioritize and process.
Terrifying? Sort of, yes, although in that forensic way that looking back on a human tragedy is frightening but also morbidly fascinating. In fact, I think Lewis could have done more throughout to emphasize the human disaster that was the early 2000s housing bubble and collapse. Instead, for much of the book you join Lewis in simply shaking your head at the combination of stupidity and greed that brought down a vast swathe of the global economy at the turn of the 21st century. It's easy to forget in retrospect the consequences of that greed and stupidity: so many lives ruined, while the architects of the disaster gave themselves healthy bonuses with taxpayer bailouts. A Captivating book? For me, yes, definitely: I quite literally couldn't put it down (insofar as that expression works for ebooks ... couldn't turn it off?). Lewis does an excellent job of explaining and personalizing the …
Terrifying? Sort of, yes, although in that forensic way that looking back on a human tragedy is frightening but also morbidly fascinating. In fact, I think Lewis could have done more throughout to emphasize the human disaster that was the early 2000s housing bubble and collapse. Instead, for much of the book you join Lewis in simply shaking your head at the combination of stupidity and greed that brought down a vast swathe of the global economy at the turn of the 21st century. It's easy to forget in retrospect the consequences of that greed and stupidity: so many lives ruined, while the architects of the disaster gave themselves healthy bonuses with taxpayer bailouts. A Captivating book? For me, yes, definitely: I quite literally couldn't put it down (insofar as that expression works for ebooks ... couldn't turn it off?). Lewis does an excellent job of explaining and personalizing the story of the 2008 crash. As both a political philosopher and a quantitative social scientist, I appreciated that Lewis took the high road, for the most part avoiding the (not unreasonable) temptation to bash economists and other social scientists ("no one saw it coming!!! you call that a science??" ... which makes about as much sense as berating police investigators and the justice system for not predicting the exact time and place of some ingenious heist: it's hard to do good predictive modelling and causal analysis when the key players are outright lying to you ... but I digress ...). In short, a really good read for anyone with even a passing interest in recent economic history.
For those who have seen the movie based on this book, I still think it is in your best interests to read the book. It's fascinating, to put it mildly. This isn't exactly a story where I can ruin the ending: the big investment banks created derivative products called CDOs based on subprime (meaning unlikely to be paid back) mortgages. The CDOs were insured (mostly by AIG) by Credit Default Swaps, and AIG and others happily allowed people without any investment in CDOs to buy Credit Default Swaps on their own (basically allowing the creation of a derivative of a derivative, the synthetic CDO). The financial rating institutions, like Moody's and Standard and Poor's, rated these CDOs as AAA, which meant that insurance companies and retirement funds could invest in them. (As a note: AAA means as safe as a government bond, and therefore, riskless). This was a catastrophe waiting …
For those who have seen the movie based on this book, I still think it is in your best interests to read the book. It's fascinating, to put it mildly. This isn't exactly a story where I can ruin the ending: the big investment banks created derivative products called CDOs based on subprime (meaning unlikely to be paid back) mortgages. The CDOs were insured (mostly by AIG) by Credit Default Swaps, and AIG and others happily allowed people without any investment in CDOs to buy Credit Default Swaps on their own (basically allowing the creation of a derivative of a derivative, the synthetic CDO). The financial rating institutions, like Moody's and Standard and Poor's, rated these CDOs as AAA, which meant that insurance companies and retirement funds could invest in them. (As a note: AAA means as safe as a government bond, and therefore, riskless). This was a catastrophe waiting to happen and it appears that the banks really had no idea what they were doing, despite being warned by at least a few people. While this all sounds very technical, Lewis manages to make it entirely understandable.
This is essentially a story about what happens when we let our financial institutions run amok through deregulation. Deregulation began with Reagan, and then continued onwards through the Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama administrations (I can only imagine it will continue through the Trump administration as well). This book is a perfect story of a perfect storm, and if it is missing anything, it is a call to action. But I think the call to action is implied by the very nature of the events Lewis describes.
Loved it. Interesting character description, nice explanations about the different financial instruments and all in all a great description of what went down from different points of view. Read it after the movie, which enriched it I guess.
