If you want to really understand what was so badly wrong about the US financial system during the naughties and why its stupidies brought about the Global Financial Crisis you couldn’t do better than read this book, which is as gripping as a novel. Lewis, who was once a stock market trader himself, is well placed to describe and explain the madness of the trading in financial derivatives based on hundreds of thousands of mortgages granted to poor people who couldn’t afford them. ( )

A frightening book. Pissed me off all the way through. A lot of people should have gone to jail over the sub prime lending fiasco.

I read this trying to get a better grasp of what happened to our economy. I am not a big finance guy and hoped it would be written in a way I could understand. It was great.

People saw the collapse coming but were ignored in favor of greed. A must read. ( )

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. ( )

Very interesting book about some of the people who saw the opportunity to make money by buying credit default swaps (insurance) against sub-prime mortgage bonds. The scariest part of this book for me was how ineffective an stupid the ratings agencies were/are and how the big Wall Street firms didn't even understand what they were building and selling. Putting your money under your mattress may not be a bad idea after all. ( )

As someone who had just entered University when the financial crisis went down, I only had the basic understandings of what happened and that a lot of shadiness went on behind the curtains. The Big Short was an excellent insight into the small group of people who were actually able to foresee the crisis happening. Michael Lewis does a great job of explaining a lot of complicated financial jargon in a way that is more palatable for the nonmembers (so most of us) of the financial sector.

In short, great book that is very insightful and even contains a few laughs throughout. ( )