Michael Lewis is one of the most stylish journalists around. My copy of the Big Short, procured from the local town library is one of the least stylish covers I’ve ever seen.
On the morning that Bear Stearns collapsed, Steve Eisman was delivering a speech at an event due to be attended by no less than Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Fed. Eisman was an investment banker who had for a number of years cultivated a portfolio based on the premise that the mortgage boom was built on fraud and would collapse. As his prophecies were literally coming true, this is what he wanted to say, but ultimately didn’t have the guts to say:
The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, ‘This is wrong.’ And no one ever gave a shit about what I had to say.
It is a compelling rant that summarises the shocking fraud, injustice and incompetence that has led us (with many other factors at play) to a situation where almost half a million Irish people are unemployed, Greece is on the edge of anarchy and America is slipping back into recession.
This is a magnificent read and perhaps that is a clue to its major weakness. I kept wondering, “How can a story so compelling be accounting for all the nuances that do justice to reality?” Yet it isn’t an academic treatise on the history of the financial collapse and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is the story of how Eisman and his buddies, three lads in Cupertino and a neurologist with aspergers made a fortune by being some of the only people who were willing to actually call the mortgage boom junk.
I would love two more books by Lewis; a prequel and sequel. The mortgage boom was ultimately a political movement started by Clinton. How can such a noble idea, “Let us make it possible for more people to own their homes” have gone so wrong? And subsequently, why was only Lehmann allowed to collapse? The story of government intervention into a system that had despised social responsibility during the “good times” needs to be unfurled in a similar, accessible fashion.
A superb book.
Your Correspondent, Remarried to Lady Liquor