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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis In "The Big Short", Michael Lewis takes another waltz through the disaster that is Wall Street.

I personally saw so much of the topic of this book happening over the course of my career in the financial world. In the early 1990's as a broker with Merrill Lynch, Lewis had written our Bible, "Liar's Poker". I was at Oppenheimer in the mid 1990's when Steve Eisman was making his first short recommendations on consumer credit stocks. I spent a short stint working at a mortgage company in the early 2000's and saw "stated loans", adjustable rate loans with deceptively low teaser rates and home buyers that had no business being lent money walking into shiny, new homes. In the mid 2000's I worked on CDOs, CBOs and CLOs (though admittedly not on anything mortgage backed) and I wondered why a company that wasn't going to make payroll unless I funded a loan by noon was being allowed to borrow at LIBOR+1.

Lewis is good at the forensics. He is good at talking to the people that were at ground zero when disaster struck and he does it in a manner that gives you a couple of audible chuckles and entertains as much as it informs.


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