"The Big Short" - Full of Win

As I mentioned the other day, I just finished reading Michael Lewis's "The Big Short," his story of the financial meltdown, and it is really exceptionally good.  I first encountered Lewis with his wonderful first book, "Liar's Poker, a depiction of his time at Salomon Brothers during the roaring 1980s.  There were two things I took away from that book -- Wall Street is hugely full of bullshit and Michale Lewis is a great story teller.

Well, nearly two decades later, I can confirm that Wall Street is even more full of bullshit than I ever could have imagined and Lewis is an insanely good story teller.

Lewis took an interesting approach to the financial debacle -- essentially finding and focusing on the few people he could find that actually saw the impending debacle early on and positioned themselves to benefit from it.  They are a small and motley crew of intelligent oddballs -- each is a bit off and/or familiar with tragedy at some level.  The guy whose father was murdered when he was a child, the man whose infant son died when his fever-ridden wife smothered him in bed, the childhood cancer survivor with one eye and Asberger's syndrome -- this is the cast who saw things that the masters of the universe totally missed.

You (and I mean all of you) have to read this book.  First of all because it's a pleasure -- I knocked it out in two days and was really sorry for it to be done.  But second, and more importantly, Lewis lays out this incredibly important story of Wall Street's incompetence and perfidy in a way that makes the abstruse financial language -- credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc. -- perfectly accessible.  Indeed, what Lewis presents is the degree to which the names of these instruments and the financial arcana are means of deliberately obscuring that which is occurring.

There are three chilling aspects to the book -- 1) that the biggest financial institutions in the country were staffed by knaves and fools (with the fool part being most disturbing); 2) that many of those fools still remain at the wheel of the ship of finance; and 3) that the ratings agencies -- Moody's and S&P -- are clueless and utterly lacking in integrity and competence and that the regulators weren't much better.  

As someone who writes investment guidelines for union pension plans as a routine part of my job -- and who drafts those standards incorporating the ratings standards used by the two big ratings agencies -- it left me with a feeling of some helplessness and despair.  

Anyway, do read -- you'll be glad you did, even if it doesn't leave you feeling really good about our financial overlords.   

Comments

[Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle]

Does Lewis talk about Mr. Andrea Mitchell in this book? It sounds like a very interesting read.

[low-tech cyclist]

I have the sort of reverence for our financial overlords that I reserve for only a few other great institutions, such as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the inner circles of the Bush Administration.

So I think I'll enjoy this one when I can check it out of the library. (I was going to get it piped directly to my Kindle, but - like almost everything else I try to Kindle - it's not available on Kindle yet. I'm starting to wonder why I bothered buying one, but that's another story.)

[low-tech cyclist]

Totally off topic, but here's Dana Milbank's entry in the Stupidest Living Pundit competition:

"[Eric] Cantor is one of the few figures who, during this Passover season, could lead us all out of this wilderness."

It would hardly matter which wilderness Milbank was referring to, would it?

The wilderness in question is that of implicit Republican threats of violence against Democratic legislators, but that's almost beside the point. Anyone who's been reading Steve Benen for the past year or so knows exactly how ridiculous it would be to expect any good of Eric Cantor.

[Corvus9]

Cantor is probably the particular figure who has most egregiously led us into the wilderness. His magic bullet story was specifically calibrated to turn politicized violence into a partisan issue, making it so that the press would feel obligated to apply their bullshit-evenhandedness approach to the story, which means it has become impossible now to tap down on the violence by exposing it. Eric Cantor all but has blood on his hands, as far as I am concerned. May he burn in hell.

Happy Easter, all!

[oddjob]

There are three chilling aspects to the book

Somehow, as usual, I'm not the slightest bit surprised to learn that this ancient Roman question still applies. Somehow it always seems to do so:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[oddjob]

Corvus, may the press burn in hell over its cowardice and laziness to reporting the truth.

Anyone who has half a brain and has followed that story with even remote interest should immediately realize that the only appropriate response to Cantor's ridiculousness is ridicule. That the MSM reports his idiocy with no accompanying ridicule is a profound indictment upon the MSM.