This is not about a sartorial experiment but rather my book review after reading a work of non-fiction titled the 'The Big Short' by Michael Lewis.
It is a story of the big financial crisis of 2008 spawned in the USA that endangered the fate of the US banking apparatus and by consequence of the world economy. It delves into the opacity surrounding the financial instruments cooked up by collusion of power hungry and greedy marketers that operated and still operate on Wall Street and the immoral shenanigans that led to destroying the system built on the power of TRUST.
While the Big Short could in the eyes of Mr. Lewis be merely a tale of a few autistic savants and shrewd investigators that accidentally foresaw the big tsunami of sub-prime mortgage loan defaults before the large Wall Street firms did there is also an underlying crusade to expose the wrong doings of chosen few.
This is where the story falls Short or has Gaps.
While explaining the entire buy and sell side math the author tends to veer away from exactly describing how these so called investors taking the minority view of the market going to default were expecting to get paid if indeed the market did spectacularly fail?
If no one has the cash then it does not matter which side you bet on - you still win ZERO. So it was not clear to my simple brain if the outcome for any particular protagonist was net positive to be meaningful or was it merely a story about righting the wrong?
Another slight nuance while trying to be a private citizen and ex-finance person from the street, the author tries to expose the wrongs of his trade by self admitting that he did not know a F***G thing about what he was peddling in his days at a 'reputed Wall Street firm'.
Then later he does narrate the outcomes of large institutions like Bear and Lehman collapsing but does nothing to cast aspersions for the fraud that was conducted under the watch of their CEOs, CFOs, auditors or Chief Risk Officers of said firms.
It is a story of the big financial crisis of 2008 spawned in the USA that endangered the fate of the US banking apparatus and by consequence of the world economy. It delves into the opacity surrounding the financial instruments cooked up by collusion of power hungry and greedy marketers that operated and still operate on Wall Street and the immoral shenanigans that led to destroying the system built on the power of TRUST.
While the Big Short could in the eyes of Mr. Lewis be merely a tale of a few autistic savants and shrewd investigators that accidentally foresaw the big tsunami of sub-prime mortgage loan defaults before the large Wall Street firms did there is also an underlying crusade to expose the wrong doings of chosen few.
This is where the story falls Short or has Gaps.
While explaining the entire buy and sell side math the author tends to veer away from exactly describing how these so called investors taking the minority view of the market going to default were expecting to get paid if indeed the market did spectacularly fail?
If no one has the cash then it does not matter which side you bet on - you still win ZERO. So it was not clear to my simple brain if the outcome for any particular protagonist was net positive to be meaningful or was it merely a story about righting the wrong?
Another slight nuance while trying to be a private citizen and ex-finance person from the street, the author tries to expose the wrongs of his trade by self admitting that he did not know a F***G thing about what he was peddling in his days at a 'reputed Wall Street firm'.
Then later he does narrate the outcomes of large institutions like Bear and Lehman collapsing but does nothing to cast aspersions for the fraud that was conducted under the watch of their CEOs, CFOs, auditors or Chief Risk Officers of said firms.
There is passing mention of the Morgan CEO bumbling on an investor call and not knowing why or how they lost $9B in funds (leading to fall in their share price) at a single desk but it does not shed any more insights on how it is that the large firms all walked away with their executive bank balances richer than when they started this mess.
Another PBS news magazine called 'Frontline' had done seminal work on this subject of the Financial Meltdown that had dissected and distilled down the complicated subject of modern creative derivative market and provided a sober look inside the struggle to rescue the economy. I personally thought that investigation and story telling by Martin Smith was more revealing and hard hitting than this made for Hollywood book that indeed is releasing in theaters starring Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt and Christian Bale directed by Adam McKay.
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