Michael Lewis’ book, The Big Short was released over the weekend. I got a copy and sped through it – cover to cover. It is one of the best novels I’ve ever read – except that it’s nonfiction. OMG WTF were the ‘gurus’ of the financial world thinking?
My novel, Sunrise on the Pier, touches briefly on the debacle as incentive for the characters’ actions. Michael Lewis exposes the meltdown in detail, with protagonists and antagonists as colorful as in any novel. As bad as it was, the world is fortunate that the problem wasn’t much, much worse. Even now, some of the major players are screaming like ill-mannered children at having their hands slapped even though they walked away from it with billions of dollars. Many of the rest of us are barely coping with the aftermath.
Next on my reading list, the acclaimed Harvard undergraduate thesis on the subject by Anna-Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis”.
