The big short

inside the doomsday machine

461 pages

English language

Published Nov. 7, 2010 by Thorndike Press.

ISBN:
978-1-4104-3026-7
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
629700817

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4 stars (4 reviews)

The #1 New York Times bestseller: a brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff.

When the crash of the U. S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine, and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.

The crucial question is this: Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of …

3 editions

Review of 'The big short' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Michael Lewis launches his book with a simple concept: with all the losses at the major Wall Street investment banks, who could have foreseen the impending collapse and shorted the investment firms themselves to make an unprecedented return? Among others, he finds a one-eyed financial trader with Aspergers who had the singular focus to see what all of Wall Street refused to see: the explosion of subprime mortgages, the collusion of the rating agencies in promoting CDO's, and the mind-boggling risks and returns on credit default swaps left the entire financial system at a precipice. Lewis tells the stories of a few men who bet on the collapse of the system, and through their experiences unravels the complex web created by the financial firms to pad their profits and to conceal their risks.The greatest outrage of the collapse is not that it could have been foretold: it was.

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