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    The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
    Unavailable
    The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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    The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

    Published by Penguin UK Audio

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    'We fed the monster until it blew up ...'

    While Wall Street was busy creating the biggest credit bubble of all time, a few renegade investors saw it was about to burst, bet against the banking system - and made a fortune.

    From the jungles of the trading floor to the casinos of Las Vegas, this is the outrageous story of the misfits, mavericks and geniuses who, against all odds, made the greatest financial killing in history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin UK Audio
    Release dateMar 15, 2010
    ISBN9780141964003
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Big Short

    4.5/5

    129 ratings75 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Thats interesting...
    • 5/5
      The book made the perverse transactions and business practices which led to the GFC easier to comprehend for the rest of us. The book should be used as a textbook in every economics course around the globe, but at least remind the US taxpayer, that their Government gave trillions to undeserving fraudsters because they lacked the resolution to deal with the root causes.
    • 1/5
      The file has a problem at the end of cap 4 and beg cap 5.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book - very informative, clever yet fun. This is my first audiobook, I was only dissatisfied with the audio quality.
    • 5/5
      Entertaining style of explaining what led up to the 2008 financial collapse. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to know what happened and how. Superb narration by Jesse Boggs. Also great was the 10-minute interview with author Michael Lewis, which included ia savvy assessment of the wisdom of the financial bailout and where-are-they-now updates on the book's various heroes and villains. If you've never been interested in the financial markets, this book will change your mind.
    • 3/5
      A lot of technical and financial language that further in the book starts to get confusing
    • 5/5
      The best book about the subprime crisis 2007-2008.
      Must read for anyone in the financial sector.
    • 5/5
      Will keep you hooked to every word if you understand the nuances of the the Financial world.
    • 3/5
      Good technical description of the events preceding the mortgage crisis. The narrator's voice is a bit dull, and the story can drag on at some points, but overall this is a good read for anyone interested in the subject.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book is presented to us in a reader friendly manner that makes this complicated story of true events easy to follow and the dots easy to connect. The recession of 2008 impacted nearly everyone in the United States and made its presence known all over the globe from the trickle down after effects that were spread out to other nations as well. There were many factors that contributed to the events of 2008 but there were key mistakes that were made and key shifts in the world of investing that played a major role and contributed greatly to these events. Even if you are not familiar with investing or not of a financial background, this book will be easy for you to follow and a worthwhile read. I'd recommend this book to just about anyone and I feel it is an important read and book to have in your library.
    • 4/5
      Great book focusing on the people involved in the financial meltdown. But . . . it needs a cheatsheet or appendix explaining the terms and/or concepts (credit default swap, etc.), and an index.
    • 5/5
      A little bit nauseating, but undeniably brilliant. Lewis explores some of the same territory covered by This American Life and Planet Money in their great deconstructions of the 2009 financial meltdown, but manages to make it feel fresh and interesting.

      Admittedly, the book does tend to get a bit too technical at times, but it's almost as if that's part of the point. What happened in the subprime mortgage market does its level best to defy explanation, as people we expect to be very smart managed to do very dumb things. In a lot of ways, The Big Short reminded me very much of the other Michael Lewis book I've read, Moneyball, which has a very similar story of the small group of people who are able to recognize flaws and oncoming changes in a system and use that to achieve an advantage on the entrenched group of people who refuse to acknowledge that the present or future will be any different than the past.
    • 4/5
      Arriving very late to the party, I finally read Lewis' The Big Short. I enjoyed both his Liar's Poker and Moneyball. His talent of drawing quirky portraits is again on display. The Big Short might also be called "The Revenge of the Nerds". In Lewis' tale, it is only the outcasts, the socially misfits and cranks. who discover that the US real estate market has run amok, fueled by easy money provided both by the FED and Wall Street whose greedy investment bankers eagerly sold their clients toxic sludge with Triple A ratings, signed by Moody's and Standard & Poor's. Lewis' tale is a good yarn of David vs. Goliath (where Goliath is rescued by government life support). The banks, the rating agencies and the regulators thus are allowed off the hook far too easily.The crisis of 2008 happened because criminal activities were not checked by the watchdogs whose sole job would have been to keep those criminals in check. As Lewis shows, the bosses in the rating agencies were not unaware that BBB tranches could not magically all be turned into AAA tranches. They signaled and made clear to their employees that they wanted this fraud to proceed (and were compensated for their sale of their reputation accordingly by the investment banks). The retail banks knew that "liar loans" were not worth the contract paper they were signed on. They willingly handed on unsound risks to dumb investors (often European) who believed in the "made in the USA" quality label, despite much prior experience with the shoddy quality of US cars which should have cured anyone from such an idea. Lawyers and regulators also, for a fee, looked away, actively directing the Titanic onto the iceberg. Instead of paying the price for their folly, the criminals not only were allowed to keep their loot, government handed them huge amounts of money. In directing his focus on the few who stood on the right side of history, Lewis allows the culprits to get away. Just like Liar's Poker became a manual for junior Gordon Geckos. The Big Short might train the next generation of real estate crooks.
    • 4/5
      Great story from the view of those who saw the sub prime mortgage coming and made money from it. It explained part of the financial meltdown in an easy to understand way. He also tries to explain credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
    • 4/5
      If you’re looking for an understanding of exactly what happened in the financial markets to cause the stock market to crash in 2007, The Big Short is as close as you’ll come to a coherent explanation. While you’re unlikely to understand exactly what the CDOs which caused the crash were, their nature isn't particularly important- they’re only the MacGuffin of the story. Lewis explains them as best as possible in English, but as the nature of the story here tells you that Wall Street’s obfuscatory jargon succeeded in concealing their true nature you may end up none the wiser.The Big Short is essentially a modern version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, with the part of the boy who dared to point out the nudity taken by the unlikely figure of Michael Burry, a medical student with one eye and Asperger’s Syndrome who had gained a very minor financial celebrity with some smart blogging. Initially no-one listens, but in a testament to Richard Dawkins’ theory of the meme it gradually spreads through Greg Lippmann, the founders of Cornwall Capital and finally Steve Eisman. The bulk of the book is about the inexorable spread of the realisation that Wall Street had come up with a means to package junk bonds (those unlikely to retain a high level of payment) as triple A rated bonds, and that when those junk bonds inevitably went belly up there was a fortune to be made. Lewis, as proven with the likes of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball and The Blind Side, is expert at finding the story and building tension as investors who see their money being bet against conventional market wisdom start getting itchy trigger fingers and start wanting their money back as Wall Street appears to be colluding to hide the scale of the CDO problem. As we now know, eventually the market collapses, taking down Lehmann Brothers and Bear Stearns and essentially resulting in many of the other firms being bailed out. But the lucky few who’ve seen the Wall Street emperor’s covering his dignity as well as Ron Jeremy does make it out not only alive but rich. Essentially, they’re rewarded for their foresight in stepping away from the herd.As with Liar’s Poker it’s Lewis’ ability to capture the nature of the characters involved and his eye for telling detail that makes a book about financial trading amidst mainly conventionally unlikeable characters compelling. Eisman, Lippmann and Burry wouldn’t exactly be the first candidates for representing their country at the United Nations. But even they appear best buddy material compared to the likes of Howie Hubman and Wing Chu, brash upstarts who smugly collect their money whilst the going’s good with sub-prime mortgage bonds... and end up walking away millions of pounds personally richer despite having orchestrated some of the worst losses in Wall Street history.That ends up being the real sting in the tale. Despite nearly bringing the whole economy crashing down, after Lehman and Bear Stearns fail the US Government jumps in to prop up other banks, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson (a former CEO of Goldman Sachs under whose reign a huge number of the eventually toxic CDOs were created) ending up essentially giving the banks cash... which they end up using to go back to business as usual. It’s as pointless as having tipped that cash into the Atlantic Ocean – it’s simply ended up propping up what’s been comprehensively demonstrated to be a corrupt, flawed system which ends up rewarding failure and complacency as much as success and foresight. It’s a disquieting note on which to end the story, the thought that the system which failed so badly is still there having learned none of the lessons it should have.Thematically, this feels like the sequel to Liar’s Poker, as well timed as Gordon Gecko’s equivalent filmic return. And like that pair of films, this seems like another warning about the state of Wall Street. On this evidence any putative third instalment of either might simply be a survey of the devastation of a financial atomic bomb.
    • 3/5
      Lewis is best when describing the few financiers who accurately predicted the failure of the sub-prime mortgage market and the subsequent collapse of the financial system. His characters are richly drawn. Some are everything you expect Wall Street types to be: cocky, vain, and whip smart. Others, surprisingly, are socially inept and/or solitary. Three guys make millions going short because they are temperamentally uncertain and cynical.Where Lewis falls short, is in failing to simplify the underlying complicated financial dealings, although he tries. Lewis would have been better off not even attempting to clarify derivatives, Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and other sophisticated financial instruments or deals.
    • 4/5
      I would have given this 3.5 stars if that were possible as this is a good but incomplete story about the financial debacle of 2008 and three men who made a fortune off of it by seeing it coming. It's absolutely worth reading, if only for the moment when one of the main characters realizes that the Chairman of Bank of America is "an idiot." In addition to that one moment, it contains many moments of dark humor and information one would never find in newspapers.
    • 5/5
      Has there aver been a more readable book about complex financial instruments and the people behind them?
    • 3/5
      This book got me about as close as I'm going to get to understanding credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. Normally, my eyes glaze over and my mind wanders at the very mention of finance, so this book gets kudos for just keeping me interested. Lewis achieves this by personalizing the story, following several individuals who are pessimistic about the mortgage bond market and its spinoffs and who bet against banks and brokerages who are putting together increasing incomprehensible financial instruments. They ultimately make lots of money as the economy goes up in flames.
    • 5/5
      One of the easier to read books on the financial collapse that originated in the subprime mortgage market. That said, this book is still a challenge for those who don't have a background in economics. I left the book with a somewhat hazy general picture of what happened, though some of the details left me scratching my head.Lewis takes a unique approach- by telling the story of investors who predicted the collapse and actually put their money where their mouths were, Lewis simultaneously develops credibility and a readable narrative.In a nutshell, the subprime mortgage fiasco was the result of a new lending paradigm. Unlike the traditional model involving a bank that gives loans to vetted customers, this new paradigm saw mortgage companies sell their loans to banks who then resold those same loans to fund managers. The connection between lender and lendee was lost- no one knew the status of the people in the homes, and no one cared because faith in the U.S. housing market was unshakable. There is more here. Credit default swaps and other funky things. Just know that you don't need to understand everything to walk away feeling like you understood something. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      This is not an easy book to get on with. Don't expect the easy style of Moneyball or Liar's Poker, let alone The Blind Side. For one thing, this is a lot more serious than baseball. Not that Michael Lewis doesn't do a great job of explaining what went on in the back rooms and trading desks of Wall Street - but this is all somewhat more complex than simply balancing your checkbook, a fact duly acknowledged by Lewis in many places.As always, Lewis is a great explainer - in my eyes he is one of the best non-fiction writers going. Not only does he have a gift for bringing the tiny significant details into the limelight and explaining them to the layman – he also has a gift for getting inside people's heads and explaining what makes people tick. Lewis is one writer I would like to meet and learn from.What the book brings home is the absolute failure of an unregulated financial sector. It's not a failure of capitalism per se, but it shows that all systems need governance, and that the so-called "free market" of the 90s and 00s is as much of a disaster as Soviet-style state control. And if anyone wants to attack this viewpoint, may I humbly suggest that (a) you verify your credentials as a derivatives trader or (b) show that you have read this book before doing so. If you don't understand at a basic level the way in which the elements of the whole crazy alphabet soup of the financial world etc. all worked together, then you have no right to bleat about how "the government" caused the collapse of Wall Street. True, there was pressure placed upon lenders to lend. But there was no pressure for those who weren't even lenders to make up and trade synthetic derivative products for billions of dollars, knowing at heart they were junk. Read this in conjunction with other books, such as Gillian Tett's "Fool's Gold" and so on in order to get an understanding of the mess that we are in now.
    • 5/5
      An absolutely riveting "financial thriller" that describes how three groups of investors, working independently, managed to win big betting against an overinflated housing market. Lewis, who's intimately familiar with the subject of monetary misadventure, uses these intertwined narratives as a tool to make an extremely complex subject accessible to the lay reader. "The Big Short" is, among other things, the clearest explanation of the Crash of '08 that I've read to date. CDOs, mortgage bonds, floating ARM loans: they're all explained here in gruesome detail. The book also provides fascinating portraits of its oddball investor heroes. It seems that making money off real estate derivatives was such an intoxicating experience for Wall Street that it took a slightly cracked outsider to see how doomed the market really was. In more personal terms, it's gratifying to see these talented eccentrics – most of them late bloomers without any formal training in finance – beat the Wall Street pros and make a bundle doing it. Lastly, "The Big Short" is a stunning indictment of Wall Street fecklessness and irresponsibility. Say what you will about those Occupy Wall Street folks beating on drums in downtown Manhattan: "The Big Short" will make you want to heave a brick through the window of an investment bank and hide your own money in a mattress. After finishing Lewis's book, you'll never look at modern capitalism the same way again.
    • 5/5
      Author Michael Lewis tells the stories of a handful of men, investors who foresaw the real-estate bubble bursting and positioned themselves to take advantage of it financially. They were all amazed that others couldn’t see what they saw: that the entire underpinning of the mortgage-bond market was quicksand. In fact, they felt they weren’t truly gambling at all – that the bubble would burst big time, no doubt about it.In the process of reading The Big Short, I learned to understand credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations -- arcane financial instruments that undermined our economic stability in 2008 and will continue to do so well into the future. The spotlight in The Big Short is on the ignorance and hubris of highly compensated bankers – those whose companies our tax dollars saved and those that were allowed to fail. The characters Mr. Lewis focuses on are truly incredible. With one exception, they are not smooth-talking financial gurus. They are plodders with personality disorders, but they saw what was happening and took advantage. I’m glad I read Busted and The Age of Greed before I read The Big Short. The three books put our financial situation in perspective. I don’t know if I feel better about our future after reading these three books, but I certainly feel more enlightened.
    • 4/5
      As good as it gets. This is not a book you pick up because Lewis usually has an entertaining spin and attitude on any subject. You have to be truly interested in the mechanics behind the 2008 economic crash. I'd read God-knows-how many news stories and didn't realize that credit default swaps were *insurance* on the bond bundles of crapulous mortgages. And AIG was the initial insurer. How could so many layers of people--AIG!--be so stupid? Well, with one or two exceptions, you won't learn who was stupid and who was plain evil.Lewis focuses on the stories and chaacters of some of the few people who had the foresight to see disaster early on and bet against it. (This took an incredible amount of work!) There are two investment fund managers--one in New York and a California medical doctor with Asperger's--and a pair of young amateur semi-doofuses investing for themselves and a few friends. The pros are not quite the assholes I would have guessed. The first actually tried to warn about the dangers of subprime mortgages when they surfaced small-scale in the 1990s and he kept saying so publicly in the 00's even as he was buying up the swaps. The Asperger's guy would rather go long on equities. Lewis clearly hates the Lehman Bros types and the top executives of investment banks for packaging the crappy bonds in the first place much more. Not to mention the ratings agencies.You will be disappointed, though, if you are looking for answers about the laws and regulations, or lack of, that made the whole mess likely. Where was the regulatory oversight? I was especially disappointed by the quickie wrap-up re Washington's rescue response. OK, you couldn't let all these banks and houses fail. Lehman's collapse sent the world economy into a tailspin. But the government should have retained more control in the ones it helped out. Why not at least fire the top executives? There must have been a lot of pro and con arguments goings on, within the White Houses, and among economists. You get no sense of the rationale for what was done.Lewis is really sloppy with his terms at this point too, talking of the govt giving handouts and bailing out banks, leaving the impression these were straight giveaways for God knows what. But they were loans that have been paid back, right? I supposed the book would have been much longer with that kind of information. Politics and policy have never been Lewis's strong point--which is pretty weird for someone that lived in D.C. But I'd like to read a book that explains that! Maybe Too Big Too Fail?
    • 4/5
      On page 243 of this book, Charlie Ledley explains to an old professor of his what happened clearer than anybody has in the thousands of pages of reports, articles and lawsuit complaints I have read: "“I remember he started by asking me ‘do you know what a mezzanine CDO is?’ And he started to explain to me how it all worked”: how Wall Street investment banks somehow had conned the rating agencies into blessing piles of crappy loans; how this had enabled the lending of trillions of dollars to ordinary Americans; how the 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 risk-less securities was so complicated that investors had ceased to evaluate risks; how the problem had grown so big that end was bound to be cataclysmic and have big social and political consequences." That's it in a nutshell. So if you are going to read Lewis's book to try to understand what happened, I've relieved you of that obligation. But if you were going to do that, you were going to read it for the wrong reasons anyway. It's a fascinating, infuriating, expertly told tale, but ultimately it's the story of how a bunch of guys got rich for being smart and a bunch of other guys got rich for being dumb or crooks, when the deep, convoluted mess that was our economy burst like a suppurating wound in September 2008, and the great mass of society got stuck with the tab. That same Charlie Ledley, one of the less-reprehensible-than-the-dumb-guys-and crooks smart guys, when he pauses from making money off the disgrace, sees the implications of the scandal - "Either the game was totally rigged, or we had gone totally fucking crazy. The fraud was so obvious that it seemed to us it had implications for democracy. We actually got scared." Everyone is still scared, but nothing seems to have changed. As another prophet, Howard Beale, once said: "I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
    • 4/5
      The book tells the tale of a few visionairies who used their common sense to spot that something was going terribly wrong with the subprime mortgage loans. They succeeded to persist and stick to their ideas while the rest of the financial world was clearly blind for the insanity of the ABS and CDO instruments. Independently from each other, a couple of people analysed the situation and came to the conclusion that lending to people who cannot afford it and using those loans to create a segment of the financial industry based on the premise that all would continue to go well and up, would in the end result in disaster sooner or later. While doing their research, they spoke to many in the industry: from CEO's of banks to rating agencies to hedge fund managers and investment bankers, asking what could be possible wrong with their analysis. Although no-one could answer, no-one would listen to them and continue to build the mirage (and make money in the process). The author succeeds in explaining clearly the frustration that must have caused to the protagonists.The book also gives a good overview of sheer magnitude of the subprime industry and thus explains its importance for investments banks financial results.
    • 4/5
      I have a confession to make: I really do not understand money. Oh, I can handle my own household finances just fine. I know how to balance a checkbook, and all my bills get paid on time. But once you get into the abstract realms of money as a business and start talking about stocks and bonds and other, more esoteric financial doings, my mind tends to seize up and my eyes to glaze over. It's not that I'm stupid -- I did manage to earn a degree in astrophysics -- but somehow whatever part of the brain is necessary to understanding Wall Street, mine appears to be missing. (Or, as I like to put it: "I know this isn't rocket science. I understand rocket science!")Nevertheless, being someone who lives on the planet Earth, and thus being affected by the latest economic debacle, I do want to at least try to understand what happened. I eventually managed to glean at least a sketchy and basic idea about the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis, largely thanks to a couple of well-produced segments on NPR's This American Life, and I was hoping that reading this book might illuminate things a little further for me. Well, the answer to that is yes and no. Lewis' description of the events leading up to the crisis and the people who saw it coming doesn't assume any expertise or Wall Street insider knowledge on the part of the reader, but it's not exactly the "...for Dummies" version, either. A lot of the details went over my head, and I'm still not sure I could adequately define some of the basic concepts. But if it hasn't exactly given me a clear understanding of what happened, it's at least made my murky understanding a lot broader and deeper, which is something. And Lewis' writing is good. The portraits he paints of some of the personalities involved are interesting, and the sheer insanity of the whole thing does come through loud and clear.I'm rating this one 3.5/5, but I feel I should note that that's an extremely personal assessment, based on how much I got out of it. I'm pretty sure that anyone with even slightly more of a head for this stuff will find it more rewarding than I did.
    • 4/5
      A masterful book on the subprime mortgage disaster. Some critics have pointed out that the timing was a little off - published too late to be the definitive book of the crash (surely Too Big To Fail), but too early to include the aftermath of the Treasury Select Committee - yet this doesn't diminish the excellence of all those stories about the Cassandras who saw it all coming.
    • 4/5
      Recommended by Ira Glass, of This American Life, this is an interesting look at the people who saw the 2008 financial meltdown coming, and helped it along, while placing bets against the system. And eventually winning. So to speak.
    • 5/5
      Terrific look at the people who saw the Great Recession coming. Very interesting portrayal of outsiders of mainstream thought on Wall Street. Fascinating to see what individualism truly looks like.Doesn't make me believe our government can effectively monitor abuses in the US financial markets. Also makes me think that allowing our schools to be run by hedge-fund managers is not a good idea.