brucestanley

Growing up as a father-less club-footed boy on the public school playgrounds of urban NJ in the 1950s, I learned to discern s*** from Shinola at a tender age. I have always had an instinct about investment advisors who wanted to "make my dreams come true". The character in this book with whom I most closely identified was Dr. Mike Burry, the one-eyed neurologist with Asperger's syndrome. This book is very well written, putting human faces and real personalities on the Market Meltdown of 2008. By that time Lewis was no longer an "insider", but knew enough about how the machine works (or, more precisely, doesn't work) to explain to the rest of us why 40% of our 401k, not to mention all of the equity in our homes, evaporated almost overnight. Lewis takes the esoteric and arcane acronyms of the asset-backed mortgage bond market and educates us as to how no one on Wall Street or banks and governments around the globe understood them either. And how those few who did were able to profit handsomely. The take-away message of this book is that be they smart or be they stupid, the Wall Street big shots came out of this smelling like a rose, courtesy of the US taxpayer, and that nothing has changed. You can be smart and make a lot of money, but you can also be really stupid and make a lot of money, and so where's the incentive for investment bankers to ever make sound decisions? The answer -- there is none.

2023-06-02 08:51