The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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Narrated by:
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Michael Lewis
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Written by:
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Michael Lewis
About this listen
The #1 New York Times bestselling account of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. Hear the original story that was turned into an Oscar-winning film directly from the author, Michael Lewis, for the very first time.
When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash had taken place silently over the previous year, in obscure financial markets where the SEC doesn’t bother to look: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was actually happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.
Newly narrated by the author himself, Michael Lewis creates a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 bestseller Liar's Poker. In The Big Short, he asks: Who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? And what qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? Out of this handful of unlikely―really unlikely―heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.
©2010 Michael Lewis (P)2025 Michael Lewis and Pushkin IndustriesYou may also enjoy...
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What the critics say
“It is the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game. And it's essential reading.”―Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair
“No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis....[he] does a nimble job of using his subjects’ stories to explicate the greed, idiocies, and hypocrisies of a system notably lacking in grown-up supervision.... Writing in faintly Tom Wolfe-ian prose, Mr. Lewis does a colorful job of introducing the lay reader to the Darwinian world of the bond market.”―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“One of the best business books of the past two decades.”―Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times Book Review,
Lewis' steady and confident narration is punctuated with news clips reporting updates on the growth of these mysterious yet seductive billion-dollar deals that led to the devastating collapse, the effects of which still reverberate two decades later. An essential, if complex, listening experience that will enrage listeners once again."" —Kirkus Reviews