An absolutely amazing book! For anyone who is a Michael Lewis fan, interested in economics, or has the faintest curiosity regarding what happened during the financial crisis, there is no better resource than this.
I was fortunate enough and had the pleasure to read this book almost immediately after I read Liar’s poker. For books that were written almost two decades apart, I felt like there was almost no interruption, but just a short break, between two episodes of a single story that smoothly transitioned to a fast forwarded time frame. I felt as if I was immediately immersed back into the world of Wall Street with the help of Michael Lewis’ prologue, in a tone I’ve grown to admire, respect and trust.
This time around, Michael Lewis did not have the benefit of having a first-hand experience of being inside the Doomsday Machine as events unfolded. Fortunately, individuals like Steve Eisman and Michael Burry, along with other members of Scion Capital, Frontpoint Partners, and Cornwall Capital Management opened a door to their lives from the early 2000s until the collapse of the market around mid 2008. I really did feel like I was inside the Doomsday Machine, seeing the gears grind and hearing the clock tick as events unfolded.
This book reads very easily and feels like an entertaining fiction most of the time. It flows very well flow one concept to another, one character’s plot to another, and draws implicit connections between unrelated events. This is no sheer coincidence, it’s Michael Lewis brilliant writing at work. While it does read like fiction, the best part is that it’s not! Real, historic, accountable events are turned into fascinating stories. The book taught me so much about the lending & borrowing market, bonds, mortgages, CDOs, CDSs, ratings, and much more. After reading this book, I can name all the major Wall Street banks of the top of my head. I almost feel as if I am a knowledgeable insider, yet I was simply reading a book on the bus.
The biggest life lesson to take away from this book is that the world we live in is unsupervised. While the government did come in and bail out a lot of the banks, the book still showed that no one knew what they were doing for a very long time. Even Mike Burry didn’t realize he was feeding the beast itself. Those inside Wall Street, and those on the sidelines, are just as likely to make the right calls. The lesson is to always be logical, smart, realistic, and dig deep until there is no more digging to do. Most importantly though: don’t fuck up the economic system. It was, is, and probably will be for the near future, in a very fragile state.
Thank you so much, Michael, and all the individuals you mentioned in your Acknowledgments section, for putting this together. I’m finding it very difficult to express how much I enjoyed reading this book.