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Comments (56)

The Big Short

Inside the Doomsday Machine
Community comments are the opinions of contributing users. These comments do not represent the opinions of Tulsa City-County Library.
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1 to 25 of 56 items
Oct 26, 2023KlayDyer rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Lewis is the master of what he does: write long-form, intensely researched, and sometimes overwhelming non-fiction studies of seismic disruptions. As the US sub-prime market spiraled into a black hole of greed, hubris, and astounding…
Dec 16, 2022
wall street
Oct 22, 2022Ferengi rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
There were individuals who saw this coming, were ridiculed, laughed at to their faces and then cancelled and black balled after they were proven correct. A California real estate investor who bailed two years prior to the start of the…
Apr 05, 2022DPL_Emily rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
The story of the 2008 financial crisis is difficult to grasp, but once understood, reveals the good, bad, and ugly of human nature. I just read The Big Short for the second time. I wanted to rediscover and relive the emotional and…
Dec 07, 2021terenceherlihy rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Nell Zinc mentioned that companies invested in things that don't exist. I recently read (in Keynes Solution, I think) that corporations have bought $75 trillion worth of worthless credit default swaps. The government workers who used to…
Jul 28, 2021Twiggzette rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I won't comment directly upon the book other than to say that it was superbly written about an incredibly complex situation, mostly the sub-prime CDO and CDS insanity leading up to the crash of 2007 and the recession of 2008. The book…
Feb 27, 2021rebho1wt rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Having been in High School during the financial crisis I didn't have a lot of perspective on the scope and impact of the crisis. My only real memory is while taking economics we paper traded some amount of money on the stock market. At the…
Feb 08, 2020dixithanoop rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
I had seen the movie. Then I read this book, and then rewatched the movie again, and understood and appreciated the movie a thousand times better. That's how you know the book was so incredible. Michael Lewis's The Big Short is the most…
Jan 02, 2019
An interesting inside perspective on the happenings and errors of the financial world, all leading up to the Great Recession. This book is written quite well, with quite a few more introspective insights and details to what is actually…
Nov 26, 2018ryankegley rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Between daily coverage on NPR and Marketplace and longer investigative pieces by Planet Money and This American Life, I understood, perhaps more than most, exactly what happened in 2008. (Just writing “2008” seems absurd; we’re talking…
Apr 25, 2018737capt rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Reading this book will make you mad that the heads of Banks and rating agencies didn't go to jail!
Mar 08, 2018
Michael Lewis does a terrific job at explaining the details and flaws of the banking system in the United States that helped contribute to the 2008 housing market collapse in this book. Michael Lewis’s depiction of banks lending…
Apr 03, 2017kaylalgreen rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I expected this to be better than the film and I was right. What I really enjoyed about the book was the focus on the ratings agencies and how if their ratings had been accurate and not based on what Wall Street was telling them to rate…
Feb 28, 2017thornhill_star rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
I can very deeply resonate with this book because I lived through the phenomena during 2004 to 2009, with investments both in properties and money market. When I read the book and decipher the layers, I can see what hit me during that…
Feb 19, 2017michaelbritt rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
This book is a roller coaster and a train wreck in the same ride. You'll be amused, sad, angry, discombobulated, scared and many times all at once. Lewis does a great job of moving the story along as well as explaining CDSs, CDOs, the…
Feb 14, 2017dylankemp rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Fairly entertaining. But more importantly, pretty good at simplifying and explaining how messed up the global financial markets are, and how much of the American financial system in particular is based on fraud. And nothing has changed.
Jul 26, 2016steve5977 rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
OMG!
Jul 17, 2016cat_22 rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
Could not get through this book. Writing is boring and very repetitive. Think I'll watch the movie instead....I heard it's actually good.
Jul 13, 2016
Consider this: “In Bakersfield, California, a... strawberry picker with an income of $14,000... was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.” (The Big Short, page 97) At the other side of that loan was a lender, who was…
May 29, 2016
Did the author just want to introduce the credit swap?
Apr 22, 20161tarheel rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Ugh. My head hurts. But it's so good! Top marks for even attempting to explain credit default swaps. By the end of the book, I nearly understood the middle. Plus, I hate what this (true) story tells us about our society, BUT Lewis…
Mar 30, 2016999NORMA rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
I have not seen the movie with the same title. Lots of technical stuff that sometimes overshadowed the book's intention. It could have been given more attention to making the connectivity that the author has discovered between the main…
Jan 19, 2016StarGladiator rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Technically, overall, this is a good book, but my problem - - a constant problem I have with Lewis - - is his reframing, focusing on a quasi-good guy [or gal], when all the players are really quite bad. In this book, which the movie stays…
j123456789
Jan 16, 2016j123456789 rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
some people saw what was happening. WHY didn't the responsible agencies? banks etc too big to fail & the bottom 90% keep getting screwed. goper family values at work for their corp masters! the people that vote gop are proof that "The…
Dec 26, 2015jimg2000 rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Read this quite sometime ago but my comments and quotes disappeared. Anyway, recall it was an easy and informative read on the subprime CDO/CDS derivative mess of 2007. Below is a downloadable excerpt on Michael Burry (one of the colorful…