{"id":1737,"date":"2016-07-25T10:09:02","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T17:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=1737"},"modified":"2017-12-18T08:30:59","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T16:30:59","slug":"review-the-big-short-inside-the-doomsday-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/25\/review-the-big-short-inside-the-doomsday-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\n The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine<\/a> by Michael Lewis<\/a>
\n My rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

This is my third Michael Lewis book, and I\u2019m starting to detect a pattern. There\u2019s always a guy, near the beginning, who figures “it” all out and writes as much in a newsletter, or blog. In Moneyball<\/em>, \u201cit\u201d was that OBP was more important than batting average; in The Blind Side<\/em>, \u201cit\u201d was that the left tackle was probably the most important player on the field after the quarterback; in The Big Short<\/em>, \u201cit\u201d was that our nation\u2019s economic backbone was run by incredibly stupid people.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m paraphrasing, of course, but \u201cstupidity\u201d was the overlying theme of The Big Short<\/em>. Who knows, maybe Michael Lewis decided that \u201cout-and-out\u201d fraud was too libelous, and even guys who crashed the stock market still had enough money left over to sue him a few dozen times over. Indeed, one wants to believe the folks who run billion and trillion dollar companies are villains, not idiots. It fits a better narrative and, in the long run, is way less scary. <\/p>\n

But what you get out of The Big Short<\/em> is that the people at the top of the money-food-chain are too arrogant and complacent to see the through the many layers of obfuscation they\u2019ve built to disguise their utter greed. And the result of this was little guys, at the bottom of the chain, finding a loophole and exploiting it. <\/p>\n

Michael Lewis does a pretty good job explaining something that literally only a handful of people in the world really understand. More or less he beats you over the head with it, but stacking the story into a character-driven narrative and repeating the malfeasance of the corporate elite over and over again. Trust me, you won\u2019t get it the first time he explains credit-default swaps. By the tenth time, you might.<\/p>\n

You know what the truly horrible part of the this book was, for me? Even though all those \u201ctoo-big to fail\u201d companies failed, the stock market went kerflooey, and the US Government gave away hundreds of billions of dollars to slap a band-aid on what should have been a better regulated system\u2026 my life wasn\u2019t really all that effected. In 2008 and subsequent years, my middle-class lifestyle was as it ever was and has been since. And this is horrible, because I\u2019m not the only one, am I. All that money, all the stupidity, and for most of us, the only take-away was: oh goody, another Ryan Gosling movie.<\/p>\n

\n View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is my third Michael Lewis book, and I\u2019m starting to detect a pattern. There\u2019s always a guy, near the beginning, who figures “it” all out and writes as much in a newsletter, or blog. In Moneyball, \u201cit\u201d was … <\/p>\n

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