The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

by Michael Lewis

Overview

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 those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 best-selling Liar’s Poker. Who got it right? he asks. Who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? And what qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? Out of this handful of unlikely—really unlikely—heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393353150
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/16/2015
Series:	Movie Tie-in Editions Series
Edition description:	movie tie-in
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	35,537
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, and The Undoing Project. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.

Date of Birth:

October 15, 1960

Place of Birth:

New Orleans, LA

Education:

Princeton University, B.A. in Art History, 1982; London School of Economics, 1985

Table of Contents

Prologue Poltergeist xiii

Chapter 1 A Secret Origin Story 1

Chapter 2 In the Land of the Blind 26

Chapter 3 "How Can a Guy Who Can't Speak English Lie?" 61

Chapter 4 How to Harvest a Migrant Worker 85

Chapter 5 Accidental Capitalists 104

Chapter 6 Spider-Man at The Venetian 136

Chapter 7 The Great Treasure Hunt 160

Chapter 8 The Long Quiet 179

Chapter 9 A Death of Interest 200

Chapter 10 Two Men in a Boat 226

Epilogue Everything Is Correlated 253

Afterword 265

Acknowledgments 269

Index 271

What People are Saying About This

Dick Durbin

I’ve joined a lot of other people in just finishing Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short, and it’s really an eye-opener of what was going on at the time that this real estate bubble was created.

Carl Levin

I read it, marked it up for my staff, underlined it, made copies and asked them to read it.

Jackie Speier

[A]n incredible piece of commentary on Wall Street.

Harry Reid

I recommend everyone within the sound of my voice to read [this] book.

Byron Dorgan

If you’re wondering if there’s importance or an urgency to this issue, read the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis, and then, when you’re finished reading, come back to the floor and say that you support this amendment [on financial reform].

Editorial Reviews

No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis. . . . [he] does a nimble job of using his subjects’ stories to explicate the greed, idiocies and hypocrisies of a system notably lacking in grown-up supervision.

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

On January 30, 2007, Jamie Mai wrote an email to his partners Charlie Ledley and Ben Hockett. "If a broad range of CDO spreads starts to widen," he said, "it means that a material global financial clusterfuck is likely occurring."

 

On January 31, 2007, a broad range of CDO spreads started to widen, dramatically. The long-feared meltdown was upon us all -- not that most of us knew it, at the time -- and a very small number of investors was about to get paid out on the trade of their lifetimes. Mai, Ledley, and Hockett were part of that select group, whose tale is grippingly told by Michael Lewis in The Big Short.

 

The Big Short is not the story of the crisis, as the crisis is commonly understood. The failure of Lehman brothers and of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the stock-market crash; the bail-out of Detroit; the fevered all-nighters pulled at Treasury and the New York Fed; the fears that the entire global financial system was on the brink of collapse -- little if any of that is in this book.

 

Instead, Lewis has found a different story -- one which he started mining for a spectacular cover story in the December 2007 issue of Portfolio magazine, and which has culminated in this book, over two years later. It's the story of what used to be called the "subprime crisis" before it metastasized into something much larger and more dangerous than that. And it's also, like all Michael Lewis tales, a human story, which takes us deep inside unique characters like Steve Eisman and Mike Burry.

 

On the face of it, there's almost nothing sympathetic about these men. Their social skills are all but nonexistent; they live in a world of arcane financial analysis which might as well be a different planet for all that it has any bearing on the way that most of us live our lives; and they made their outsize profits by wagering hundreds of millions of dollars on the proposition that Americans across the country would end up being thrown out of their homes after they found themselves unable to make their mortgage payments. 

 

What these men did was not "socially useless," to quote the chairman of the UK's Financial Services Authority, Lord Turner. It was worse than that: it was actively harmful, since they provided the fuel which kept the subprime mortgage furnace burning even when the country was running out of new junk mortgages to write. In most financial markets, bearish bets act as a dampener; in this one, they were a necessary part of the subprime-mortgage machine, and a Deutsche Bank mortgage trader named Greg Lippmann ended up making billions of dollars for his employer -- not to mention a $50 million bonus for himself -- by aggressively going out and finding fund managers to put on the short bets needed to keep the market ticking. (This is the same Lippmann who, when accused of being a "Chicken Little" responded by saying "Fuck you, I'm short your house.")

But Lewis has a soft spot for these misfits -- fund managers who stumbled into the bond market from careers making bets on stocks, who suffered ridicule and ostracism even from their own investors before their bets paid off, and who he has now chosen to immortalize in print as the few clear-eyed men in a world of deluded bankers and investors.

 

At the same time, Lewis aims both barrels at the ratings agencies, happily quoting someone describing the staff there as "basically like brain-dead." He also sets up a hapless fund manager named Wing Chau as a major villain for taking the long side of the bet and making millions of dollars by doing so, despite being spectacularly wrong.

The result is a rollicking narrative: a tale of beleaguered little guys betting against monster banks and fund managers, and, in the end, winning. (Lewis barely mentions the biggest and most famous of the shorts, John Paulson and Andrew Lahde, perhaps because they were too rich and successful to begin with.)

 

Amazingly, despite the fact that the book is so one-sided, it also functions as a peerless guide to exactly what went so very wrong in the credit markets generally, and the mortgage markets in particular, over the course of the last decade. It's not easy to explain synthetic subprime-backed collateralized debt obligations, but Lewis does an excellent job on both the micro level -- what these thing are, and how they worked -- and the macro level -- how the market in such exotica helped to destabilize the entire financial system.

 

Most impressively, Lewis has backed up his story with an enormous amount of old-fashioned reporting, spending a lot of time with the characters in his book and their families, as well as getting the important complex financial details correct. (Not everybody will understand the grittiest of the details, of course: that's inevitable. But everybody will be gripped by the book's narrative, all the same.) The Portfolio story on which this book is based was a great tale which was sometimes a bit fuzzy on the finance; the book is an even greater tale with the facts nailed down.

 

The result is that rarest of beasts in a world drowning in financial-crisis books: a new book which actually breaks news. For instance, Lewis uncovers what could possibly be the single greatest trade that any Wall Street banker ever made: in December 2006 and January 2007, Deutsche's Greg Lippmann paid an insurance premium of 0.28 percentage points to take out insurance on $4 billion of triple-A-rated bonds from Morgan Stanley's Howie Hubler. Less than a year later, that $11 million bet paid off to the tune of a whopping $3.7 billion. I'll save you the math: that's an annual return of more than 33,000%.

 

There's lots more where that came from: this is an assiduously-reported and beautifully-written book. There aren't many reasons to be happy about the global financial crisis, but here's one: that it brought Michael Lewis back to his roots, to produce what is probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written.

-Felix Salmon

No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, that now classic portrait of 1980s Wall Street. His entertaining new book does not attempt a macro view of the financial crisis, but instead proposes to open a small window on the calamities by recounting the stories of some savvy renegades who cashed in on their conviction that the system was rotten…Mr. Lewis does a nimble job of using his subjects' stories to explicate the greed, idiocies and hypocrisies of a system notably lacking in grown-up supervision, a system filled with firms that "disdained the need for government regulation in good times" but "insisted on being rescued by government in bad times."
—The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

If you read only one book about the causes of the recent financial crisis, let it be Michael Lewis's, The Big Short…What's so delightful about Lewis's writing is how deftly he explains and demystifies how things really work on Wall Street, even while creating a compelling narrative and introducing us to a cast of fascinating, all-too-human characters…The Big Short manages to give us the truest picture yet of what went wrong on Wall Street—and why. At times, it reads like a morality play, at other times like a modern-day farce. But as with any good play, its value lies in the way it reveals character and motive and explores the cultural context in which the plot unfolds.
—The Washington Post

Steven Pearlstein

Since his first book, the autobiographical Liar’s Poker, Lewis has tackled big, engaging stories…by finding and developing characters whose personal narratives reveal a larger truth. He's done it again. The story of the crash is, overwhelmingly, a tale of failure. But Lewis managed to find quirky investors who minted fortunes by making unpopular, calculated bets on a financial meltdown. Ditching the aloof irony of his earliest works, he constructs a story that is funny, incisive, profanity-laced and illuminating—full of difficult-to-like underdogs whose vindication and enrichment we end up cheering.
—The New York Times Book Review

Daniel Gross

Although Lewis is perhaps best known for his sports-related nonfiction (including The Blind Side), his first book was the autobiographical Liar's Poker, in which he chronicled his disillusionment as a young gun on Wall Street in the “greed is good” 1980s. He returns to his financial roots to excavate the crisis of 2007-2008, employing his trademark technique of casting a microcosmic lens on the personal histories of several Wall Street outsiders who were betting against the grain—to shed light on the macrocosmic tale of greed and fear. Although Lewis reads the book's introduction, narration duties are assumed by Jesse Boggs, a veteran narrator of business titles (including Lewis's own 2008 book Panic!). Boggs's rich baritone is well suited to the task and trips lightly through a maze of financial jargon (CDOs, derivatives, mid-prime lending) and a dizzying cast of characters. Lewis returns on the final disc for a 10-minute interview about the crisis's aftermath, including a savvy assessment of the wisdom of the financial bailout and where-are-they-now updates on the book's various heroes and villains. A Norton hardcover. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Superb: Michael Lewis doing what he does best, illuminating the idiocy, madness and greed of modern finance. . . . Lewis achieves what I previously imagined impossible: He makes subprime sexy all over again.

Andrew Leonard - Salon.com

No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis....[he] does a nimble job of using his subjects’ stories to explicate the greed, idiocies and hypocrisies of a system notably lacking in grown-up supervision....Writing in faintly Tom Wolfe-ian prose, Mr. Lewis does a colorful job of introducing the lay reader to the Darwinian world of the bond market.

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

It is the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game. And it's essential reading.

Graydon Carter - Vanity Fair

[A] strikingly original take that offers an enhanced understanding of the debacle....Since his first book, Liar's Poker, Lewis has tackled big, engaging stories...by finding and developing characters whose personal narratives reveal a larger truth. He's done it again.”

Daniel Gross - The New York Times Book Review

I recommend everyone within the sound of my voice to read [this] book.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

I’ve joined a lot of other people in just finishing Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short, and it’s really an eye-opener of what was going on at the time that this real estate bubble was created.”

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)

I read it, marked it up for my staff, underlined it, made copies and asked them to read it.

Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.)

[A]n incredible piece of commentary on Wall Street.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.)

If you’re wondering if there’s importance or an urgency to this issue, read the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis, and then, when you’re finished reading, come back to the floor and say that you support this amendment [on financial reform].”

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota)

I read Lewis for the same reasons I watch Tiger Woods. I’ll never play like that. But it’s good to be reminded every now and again what genius looks like.

Malcolm Gladwell - New York Times Book Review

Superb: Michael Lewis doing what he does best, illuminating the idiocy, madness and greed of modern finance. . . . Lewis achieves what I previously imagined impossible: He makes subprime sexy all over again.— Andrew Leonard

Salon.com

No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis....[he] does a nimble job of using his subjects’ stories to explicate the greed, idiocies and hypocrisies of a system notably lacking in grown-up supervision....Writing in faintly Tom Wolfe-ian prose, Mr. Lewis does a colorful job of introducing the lay reader to the Darwinian world of the bond market.— Michiko Kakutani

The New York Times

It is the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game. And it's essential reading.— Graydon Carter

Vanity Fair

[A] strikingly original take that offers an enhanced understanding of the debacle....Since his first book, Liar's Poker, Lewis has tackled big, engaging stories...by finding and developing characters whose personal narratives reveal a larger truth. He's done it again.— Daniel Gross

The New York Times Book Review

Versatile best-selling author Lewis (Panic) gives a different take on the 2007-08 credit crisis as he chronicles how a handful of investment managers detected early on the growing bubble in the mortgage bond market and made fortunes betting against it. Lewis is a storyteller, and he weaves the personal stories of these renegades against the inner workings of Wall Street's mortgage-backed securities money machine. He explains in plain language how the industry obscured credit risk by packaging and repackaging low-quality subprime mortgages into complicated securities that could receive high credit ratings in a process he calls the financial alchemy equivalent of turning lead into gold. He says investors then looked at little more than the ratings as they bought billions of dollars' worth of these supposedly safe bonds. Lewis turns the crisis into a true financial thriller that screams of Wall Street's greed, recklessness, deceit, incompetence, and hubris. VERDICT Readers from generalists through specialists will find this fast-paced, engaging account both illuminating and disturbing. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/09.]—Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

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