Great explanation of the underlying causes of the recent financial crisis. The story highlights that even when people knew what was coming, Wall Street willfully ignored the crisis until after it happened.

A very good read that wasn't too heavy on the financial jargon that managed to convey the message that Wall Street is out of their minds!! Worse than that though, is the sobering reality that their financial machinations are only made possible by a public willing to believe that they can afford mansions on minimum wage and that they too can one day join the party as anything more than a server. The 2008 crisis was bad but look around and ask yourself if anything has changed. The next crisis is coming and will be catastrophic for all of us.

After having read this book I wasn't any the wiser as to what a credit default swap or a CDO was. What i did learn was how Wall Street is just a big casino masquerading as a Financial Industry. An enjoyable read.

Michael Lewis is always good on this subject. I think this was his first economic study. He has a wonderufl sense of humour and tells the layman what it's all about succintly and entertainingly.

Michael Lewis is a consistently good author. Any of his books are a good read. An excellent description of how the 2008 meltdown occurred. Makes you wonder at the influence Wall St has over politicians that they continue to remain basically unregulated.

Good read if you really want to know what caused the financial meltdown. Basically, everyone is greedy and horribly selfish. I found it to be somewhat repetitive and borin gin some parts, but overall was a good read.

So that is what all the subprime mortgage problems were about. A readable, understandable guide to complicated finance made easier and extremely interesting. Michael Lewis' careful detailing of events in the early part of the century, on Wall Street and in the USA generally, is fascinating. Super read.

As author of books like *The Blind Side* and *Moneyball*, Michael Lewis is no stranger to success as a nonfiction writer. He has a talent for covering stories in ways that play up their humanity, giving niche topics like economics and sports a universal appeal. But despite his knack for reading and reflecting public sentiment, even he couldn't have foreseen the push his latest effort, *The Big Short*, would receive from the zeitgeist. *The Big Short* takes readers on a thrilling, fast-paced and sometimes baffling ride through the swell and burst of the subprime mortgage bubble. He's already written one book exposing the inner workings of Wall Street – *Liar's Poker* covered the greed, incompetence and corruption that ran rampant in the big firms of the 1980s - so when he tackled his second Wall Street opus, he was uniquely positioned to understand the complicated market machinery and labyrinthine logic driving the subprime mortgage crisis and triggering The Great Recession.<br /> Sure, it's a bit of dense information and economic terminology, but he delivers it quickly; and given that some of the brightest minds on Wall Street couldn't make sense of the complicated mess surrounding subprime mortgages, readers should forgive themselves if they get a little lost in the details. At any rate, he works these technicalities into the story well enough that they don't break the narrative’s momentum.<br /> Lewis also introduces readers to the real people making the trades, swaps and bets that left nations teetering. He takes us into the lives of those who inflated the value of investment portfolios containing subprime mortgages and disguised their risk, as well as those who discovered the risk and bet against them. Spoiler alert: the ratings agencies (like Moody's and S&P) *do not* come off at all well. Moving chronologically from the early 2000s, his prose builds a mix of disbelief, dread and outrage as events race toward the conclusions with which we're all now too familiar. Characters in the real-life drama range from iconoclastic to downright devious and smarmy, and the tale of how they manufactured investments that looked to be made of gold from groups of losing loans is riveting and angering to say the least. Even more interesting are the stories of those who identified the problem, bet against the subprime mortgages, and tried to warn others. For readers itching to know more about the events feeding the rage driving the Occupy protests, there is probably no more absorbing, enraging crash course available than Lewis' *The Big Short*.

This is one of the best books out there on the sub-prime residential mortgage crisis that brought down the economy in 2008. It also covers the investors who saw the collapse coming and bet against the market using derivatives. Lewis gives a detailed account that is IMO entertaining and informative.

It was interesting at first, but became REALLY repetitive (i can't count how many times the author pointed out that people were blind not to see this coming...). It also wasn't in as plain language as I expected and I found it rather boring in parts (mostly because of the repetitiveness).