...The Big Short is not the story of the crisis, as the crisis is commonly understood. The failure of Lehman brothers and of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the stock-market crash; the bail-out of Detroit; the fevered all-nighters pulled at Treasury and the New York Fed; the fears that the entire global financial system was on the brink of collapse -- little if any of that is in this book.
Instead, Lewis has found a different story -- one which he started mining for a spectacular cover story in the December 2007 issue of Portfolio magazine, and which has culminated in this book, over two years later. It's the story of what used to be called the "subprime crisis" before it metastasized into something much larger and more dangerous than that. And it's also, like all Michael Lewis tales, a human story, which takes us deep inside unique characters like Steve Eisman and Mike Burry....
...Amazingly, despite the fact that the book is so one-sided, it also functions as a peerless guide to exactly what went so very wrong in the credit markets generally, and the mortgage markets in particular, over the course of the last decade. It's not easy to explain synthetic subprime-backed collateralized debt obligations, but Lewis does an excellent job on both the micro level -- what these thing are, and how they worked -- and the macro level -- how the market in such exotica helped to destabilize the entire financial system.
Most impressively, Lewis has backed up his story with an enormous amount of old-fashioned reporting, spending a lot of time with the characters in his book and their families, as well as getting the important complex financial details correct....
...The result is that rarest of beasts in a world drowning in financial-crisis books: a new book which actually breaks news....