Sunday, October 28, 2012

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday MachineThe Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis somehow tells the huge story of a collapsing mortgage market--and all the related disasters we know too well--from the perspective of the dweebs, cranks and geniuses who saw it coming, and who profited from it. You can't call it a cautionary tale, because the author, like the reader, finds it too interesting, too outlandish, to moralize over. And it will no doubt happen again, the great boom, the confident knowledge of infinite increase, and the inevitable crash, in some other guise. It's gratifying that the good guys in this story, at least in Lewis's telling, are the ones who refused to join the rush and chose to believe their own eyes. In this age of stampede and chicanery, that's something worth moralizing about.




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