The Big Short by Michael Lewis is an excellent book, and I heartily recommend it - if you can stomach it. It doesn't go down easy - and I'm not the only one who gave up on the book. Wall Street Journal blogger Peter Lattman took on admittedly more work by reading the thesis by a recent Harvard grad, cited in Lewis' acknowledgement, instead of reading the book itself.
Before I quit reading, I was surprised to learn that Lewis, who also wrote Moneyball (film adaptation starring Brad Pitt now in theaters) and The Blind Side, spent a few years in his early career working on Wall Street. In this book, he exposes the smoke and mirrors and BS that passes for "complicated math" and reveals what most of us know, in our guts: most investment schemes are, first and foremost, schemes. Flat-out thievery in many cases.
Look, Lewis is an outstanding storyteller with superb research skills (translation: hard-working journalist) and I'll try to read just about anything he writes. Unfortunately, I just couldn't handle this particular tale. Probably because it's a true story, about a bunch of crooks who got rich and got away with it. And we're still paying the bills.
Sigh.
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Attention book clubbers bound and determined to figure out the financial mess: this is your book.
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