The Big Short

The year 2008 shook the financial world to its roots and the whole world was perplexed about the situation. The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis deals with the other side of this gripping situation.

The real economy started to decline in the early 2006, and this decline had its impact on investments in business equipments and consumer spending on durable goods as well. The cause of this drop was initiated in 2005 when it occurred to a money manager to short mortgage bonds, which in effect means to bet against the mortgage paid at the appropriate time. For this, Dr. Michael Burry visited various banks to buy credit default swaps (CDS), which are like a type of insurance against the default of mortgage bonds.

The concept is that if the borrowers in these bonds paid their mortgages at the expected time, then the investor would lose out on a set amount of money. However, if the borrowers defaulted on their loans, then the investors would gain multiples of his basic investment.

Soon, these investments went crazy among the investors, which lead to the opening of a new position named Credit Debt Obligations (CDO) manager. At certain point, it became vivid that neither the banks nor their CDO managers understood the true nature of the market or the product they are dealing with.

But once the mortgage bonds had its blow, its effect was spread throughout the CDS and CDO. In September 2008 most of the wall street went down, which was exactly witnessed by the whole world.

Thus, the book presents a clear picture of behind the screen act of the economic crisis 2008. The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine was published by Penguin UK in 2011 and it comes in paperback.

Key Features:

Contains direct and bold approach of investigating one of the greatest economic meltdowns ever