The Big Short

Michael Lewis launches his book with a simple concept: with all the losses at the major Wall Street investment banks, who could have foreseen the impending collapse and shorted the investment firms themselves to make an unprecedented return? Among others, he finds a one-eyed financial trader with Aspergers who had the singular focus to see what all of Wall Street refused to see: the explosion of subprime mortgages, the collusion of the rating agencies in promoting CDO's, and the mind-boggling risks and returns on credit default swaps left the entire financial system at a precipice. Lewis tells the stories of a few men who bet on the collapse of the system, and through their experiences unravels the complex web created by the financial firms to pad their profits and to conceal their risks.The greatest outrage of the collapse is not that it could have been foretold: it was.