The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

The Big Short is less a history of the 2008 financial crisis than a series of character studies of individuals who profited by making bets on various mortgage-related instruments — wagers that turned out to be highly valuable when mortgage defaults increased. The book doesn’t claim to be comprehensive; nonetheless, the story is so simplistic and misleading in its good-guys-versus-bad-systems orientation that it presents at best a wholly incomplete picture. But as with all of Michael Lewis’s books, it is an exceptionally entertaining read, and includes informative background on the structure of mortgage-related instruments.