noorbasheer

Michael Lewis does an admirable job attempting to weave an entertaining story that explains the causes and consequences of the financial meltdown of 2008 -- in fewer than 300 pages. His approach focuses on the personal stories of several prescient investors who foresaw the ultimately disastrous consequences of an out-of-control financial system, and found ways to place bets against it. The characters on whom the author chooses to focus are indeed interesting, but their personal stories take us only so far: the author must still explain what caused the crisis, and it's an extremely complicated story. He tells it as clearly and engagingly as one could hope, but I found myself rereading many sections over and over in order to try to get the facts straight, and still I ended up confused. Lewis also seemed to repeat himself in places, and I felt myself getting bogged down in the middle third of the book. The paperback edition also includes a fluffy and self-congratulatory afterword that adds nothing to the story. This being said, I'm not sure the story of the financial crisis could be told any better than it is here. It's an extremely complicated story: the financial instruments at the heart of it were designed to be opaque. This book very effectively gets to the heart of what happened. And the last chapter, the epilogue, is excellent: the author pulls no punches in calling out the greed and stupidity of the leaders of the Wall Street institutions that encouraged the extension of credit to uncreditworthy borrowers and then compounded the damage by repackaging and reselling the risk to such an irresponsible extent that they came close to crippling the world economy.

2022-12-07 15:26