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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine |  | Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: Allen Lane
List Price: £25.00
Buy New: £11.50
as of 5/9/2010 04:47 CDT details
You Save: £13.50 (54%)
New (29) Used (6) from £8.49
Seller: AAE
Rating:  39 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 1846142571
EAN: 9781846142574
Publication Date: March 15, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Tells a story of spectacular, epic folly. This book takes us around the globe and back decades to trace the origins of the crisis. It introduces the people who saw it coming, the people who were asleep at the wheel and the people who were actively driving us all of cliff.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 39
 What a pleasure March 28, 2010
Abhinav Chandra (London, UK)
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
After reading tons of material on financial crisis, I thought that this one will be just another book of financial breakdown. I was completely wrong, and this book has been truly a pleasure to read. In fact it has been the best of the dozens of books published spitting on credit armageddon. The typical Michael lewis style to put a very complex financial structure in simple english embedded in the very enchanting story will definitely leave a reader spellbound. Its worth reading again and again. I will go with 5/5 for this fantastic story of the greatest economic event of our times by the best in the field.
Generation Kill goes to Wall Street May 12, 2010
O. Buxton (Highgate, UK)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
Michael Lewis is one of the most gifted and entertaining writers today - anyone who has read his reputation-forming Liar's Poker will know this (if you haven't, and you aspire to a career in finance, you should), but his subsequent offerings, particularly the singularly brilliant Moneyball have also been outstanding. He distinguishes himself from his peers firstly by his thorough insider's understanding of how, when and why finance works (and by extension how, when and why it doesn't) but also a deft turn of phrase and devastating wit. When the subject is the logic-defying but leaden topic of tranched portfolio credit derivative armageddon, both attributes are in good demand. And both, in the shape of Lewis' airy but insightful writing, are in abundant supply.
The rosette for "best book about the financial meltdown" is hotly contested - luminaries such as George Soros, Mohamed El-Erian and Hank Paulson have entered more or less weighty tomes (some excellent, some portentous, some a bit wacky); as have well-respected and deeply learned journalists like the NY Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin and the FT's Gillian Tett.
I thought I had awarded my own best-in-show to Sorkin for his massive and all-encompassing political tome, which manages to encompass the total business perspective across an extraordinarily wide theatre of conflict, somehow holding the whole thing in focus the whole time. A criticism I had seen levelled at that book was that, while it admirably covered the outright red alert state of affairs that prevailed at boardroom level for a couple of years after the credit crunch, it failed - didn't really even try - to explain what, economically, caused all this mess in the first place.
Here, therefore, is the ideal companion volume. Instead of viewing the battle from Operations HQ by reference to the crisis meetings of Wall Street's and Washington's Masters of the Universe (the image that comes to mind is beetroot-faced generals strutting about impotently while the Andrews Sisters push military units around a big map with snooker cues), Lewis takes us right into the heat of the combat, like a journalist embedded with a crack squad of advanced position infantry men as they dodged sniper fire and the general fog of war armed only with a Rusty Humvee and some tarpaulin (think Generation Kill as opposed to Downfall).
This strategy enables Lewis to tell some interesting human stories - the rag-tag collection of fellow travellers he introduces us to are, as befits players in a tragic farce - idiosyncratic outsiders and loners - but through their experiences Lewis offers uncommon colour as to what it is like at ground level engaging with Wall Street.
Along the way you will learn, with great clarity and simplicity of image - exactly what mezzanine mortgages-backed CDOs were, why the went wrong, and how the self-fulfilling cycle of CDO creation ratcheted a well-intentioned risk-spreading device into something which was nothing more, really than a glorified ponzi-scheme. And, unlike Bernie Madoff's scheme, which took some time and expertise (if not much) to reverse engineer and figure out, this one - an order of magnitude larger - went on in full, transparent view of everyone.
That said, I do think Lewis over-simplifies, though not in ways that fatally undermine his case - but in ways that are calculated to make the whole market sound as preposterous as absolutely possible; an exertion which really was not needed. The role of AIG and the Monolines, for example, in converting the "towers of dross" into triple A securities, was under-explained. Lewis characterised the insurers as investors: in a sense they were, but actually they were insurers of the performance of these bonds for other investors - yes; exposed to the risk of their default so investors in that sense, but in return lending their own triple-A credit rating to the senior slices of what Lewis compellingly describes as a cow pat pie.
Lewis is especially, and incompatibly, unkind to some investment bankers in particular (a point well made by David Bahnsen in his excellent Amazon review), and having read this, it comes as no surprise that The Big Short should have fuelled the ire of the Senate financial services committee - whose chairman repeatedly referred to it - in its recent hearing on the Goldman Sachs Abacus situation, Goldman being repeatedly implicated within Lewis' pages.
With that in mind it will be interesting to see how The Big Short fares in this year's Goldman Sachs/Financial Times business book of the year (among the judges: L Blankfein)
But if Goldman is bagged, poor Howie Hubler from Morgan Stanley - who had the prescience to short the mezzanine tranches, but catered for the negative carry of his CDS premia by going long the (equally suspect) triple A tranches (ouch) but in ten times the size (ouch to the power of ten) thus losing nearly ten billion on a single trade is utterly excoriated.
Not poor Howie at all, actually, as he (like all Bank employees) got to keep previous (multi-million dollar) bonuses and was simply deprived of his own "forward carry" - a small and asymmetrical price to pay for putting 15bn of his employer's shareholders' money at risk.
Lewis handles the build-up to the final collapse masterfully - especially the lack of faith shown in his motley band of brothers by their own investors even as CDO indices plummeted yet, by some remarkable anomaly, the mark-to-market valuations of their short positions continued to decline - and the denouement when it finally arrives is as striking as you'd expect (Lewis, with a thriller-writer's flair, pegs it to a (positive) CDO forum being held at Bear Stearns, during which Bear's stock price, hour by hour, tanked.
As the dust clears Lewis returns to Liar's Poker, which he regrets has been read more as a how-to guide rather than the cautionary tale he intended. As an odd coda, in the epilogue, Lewis meets his old boss and nemesis (though from the exchange it transpires to be the other way round!) John Guttfreund. Clearly Guttfreund hasn't got over the damage Lewis did to his reputation (to be fair, Lewis was simply the first among many - and Guttfreund did preside over the most catastrophic hedge fund failure of all time well after Liar's Poker was published, so it's a bit glib of Guttfreund to sheet all his troubles back to Michael Lewis), and even now Lewis has not entirely forgiven the old Titan, for ushering in the era of the publicly owned investment bank, which Lewis contends was the sine qua non which made all of this disaster possible.
An interesting thought, whether that impulse, so many years ago, might have led to all this now.
Olly Buxton
Writing with style on the dark side of finance April 21, 2010
Serghiou Const (Nicosia, Cyprus)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The book's salient points appear on the bottom half of p.243 "...how Wall Street investment banks somehow conned the rating agencies into blessing piles of crappy loans;how this had enabled the lending of trillions of dollars to ordinary Americans;how ordinary Americans had happily complied and told the lies they needed to tell to obtain the loans;how the machinery that turned the loans into supposedly riskless securities was so complicated that investors had ceased to evaluate the risks;how the problem had grown so big that the end was bound to be cataclysmic and have big social and political consequences..."
The elements that comprise the book excellence are:the first class intellect of the author matching the quality of the Institutions he was educated namely Princeton University and the London School of Economics;his charisma in writing concisely, lucidly and impressively wittily, and the fact that he is imbued with morality;the story is not presented in the abstract but through brilliant albeit eccentric protagonists - all betting and winning against the market - such as Steve Eisman graduating from the University of Pennsylvania magna cum laude,and then with honours from Harvard Law School and Dr Michael Burry who abandoned neurology studies at Stanford to immerse himself in the world of finance. Burry's transition was apparently due to his unknowingly been afflicted with Asperger's disease which made him focus with immense intensity with whatever his interests might be, he might well be collecting stamps;the clarity and wit of the author's explanations of relevant financial instruments such as subprime mortgage bonds, credit default swaps and CDOs;the elucidation of the alchemy of transforming bundles of triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds into CDOs,eighty percent of them miraculously tranformed into double or triple rated-As. The facility of securing loans for houses is illustrated through a strawberry picker owning a $750,000 house and a Las Vegas stripteaser owning five.
The book concludes with a bitter taste in that there is no catharsis because instead of redemption the corrupt financial institutions are rescued by the State and thus ultimately the innocent ordinary American pays through taxes for their sins.
The book is not simply recommended reading, it is required reading.
The Big Short April 16, 2010
Scott A. Yeates (Onchan, Isle of Man)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Loved the book - from someone not in the industry, Lewis made it simple to understand so simple you wonder why the whole world couldn't see what was coming.
Scott
Mind blowing May 10, 2010
Picky reader (England)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Although I thought I had a reasonable understanding of the melt-down and what had caused it, having read Gillian Tett's scholarly but dry book (Fool's Gold) when it came out, and having seen and heard a lot of radio and TV discussions, I still found this account from Michael Lewis mind-blowing.
What is most fascinating is to learn that some market players (including in at least one major bank, Deutsche) were well aware of the problems blowing up, they could prove it, and they were going round other institutions (for their own not entirely altruistic reasons) trying to get others to listen to them. It all comes across here as much closer to the casino (the description already adopted by many commentators) than I had thought possible, especially as the banks' lauded mathematical models have proved to be little more robust than the "systems" used by gamblers at the roulette table. Michael Lewis's knack is to tell the stories of those rough/tough personalities who were predicting (and betting on) the bust, and what they went through before the big bust eventually arrived (all the worse for being delayed). In fact, "irrational exuberance" (copyright. A. Greenspan) just proved to have become much more exuberant and far more irrational than ever he realised it might.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 39
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