What Michael Lewis keeps telling us



I finally got around to reading The Big Short by one of the finest financial writers of our time, Michael Lewis. While he's more famous for writing Moneyball and the Blind Side, both of which were made into popular movies, the Big Short is a great book in its own right. Especially if you like following a small group of disrespected financial outsiders as they crawl through the fiery money pits of Wall Street and emerge triumphant on the other side.

By now, most of us know all about the financial insanity that preceded the crash of 2008. (I actually ghosted a report called Economic Insanity back then for a financial client.) Truth be told, the insanity and the excesses haven’t gone away, they've just grown more outrageous. We need to keep reminding ourselves of this fact so we don't become pawns in the game, and Lewis' excellent book does that. Click the image if you want to enlarge it.
Michael Lewis
What I think makes Lewis such an exceptional writer is that while he's generally detached from the industries he writes about, he's very sympathetic to a certain portion of the people who populate that industry. These people are almost always the outsiders. Though they represent but a tiny portion of the industry Lewis happens to be focused on -- whether it's Wall Street or baseball or football or Silicon Valley -- the underdogs drive the narrative. They are his heroes.