Profiting Off the Financial Crisis

When the financial crisis hit, most people claimed they never saw it coming; those who did, however, made a fortune. Michael Lewis tells the story of investors who predicted the crisis and therefore were able to bet against it in his new book, The Big Short. Michiko Kakutani writes Lewis does “a nimble job of using his subjects’ stories to explicate the greed, idiocies and hypocrisies of a system notably lacking in grown-up supervision.” The subjects, Lewis writes, “told you something about the state of the financial system, in the same way that people who survive a plane crash told you something about the accident, and also about the nature of people who survive accidents.” Kakutani likes the book but her main complaint is that “the reader is put in the position of rooting for people who, while smarter or more farsighted than those who helped bring about catastrophe in the first place, were nonetheless trying to make money (who saw a rare opportunity, as one put it) by betting against the health of our financial system.”