At the Heart of the Crash

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
by Michael Lewis
Norton, 266 pp., $27.95

Not the least striking revelation of Michael Lewis’s excellent book, The Big Short, is that this author of financial best-sellers has changed his mind. In a column for Bloomberg News in early 2007, he praised the rapidly expanding market for derivatives. Visiting the annual meeting of financiers and policymakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that year, he was exasperated by the fears of some of the participants. “None of them seemed to understand that when you create a derivative you don’t add to the sum total of risk in the financial world,” he wrote, sounding arguments very similar to those made by Alan Greenspan. “You merely create a means for redistributing that risk. They have no evidence that financial risk is being redistributed in ways we should all worry about.”

As we now know, derivatives were the instruments that enabled Wall Street to stretch capital dangerously far—and were at the center of the financial crisis that began that year.