There is nothing so fantastically stupid than a mass of so-called 'smart people'. When the American economy collapsed in 2008, the real crisis had already hit a year earlier, in a hidden and unregulated market of extremely complex securities. Lewis follows as his protagonists a handful of hedge fund managers who spotted the warning signs back in 2005, and who made a lot of money as Wall Street titans like AIG and Bear Sterns imploded.

As expected, he's create at getting across the culture of these guys, the monomaniacal pursuit of detail and profit and unconventional approaches to value. He does a decent job of explaining CDOs, the complex financial instruments that sliced fraudulent bad mortgages from across America into supposedly 'AAA' rated bonds. When highly leveraged individuals (a strawberry picker with a $750,000 mortgage, a stripper with five houses) couldn't pay off their usurious adjustable rate mortgages and walked away, Wall Street absorbed billions of dollars of losses, and was bailed out by a bipartisan consensus. Sadly, I still have no idea how a CDS works, or why anyone would need one.

I'll admit a certain bias as a data scientist who works for a financial institution, though on nothing like this. We make loans to people who we genuinely believe will pay them off. The idea that bankers would make loans to people who they knew never would repay the money, and that other financial wizards would package them and sell the complex products in an unregulated market to such an extent that no one even knew where these things all were... we'll it's not just criminal, it's a moral sin. Everyone involved should have been thrown into the sun, and the fact that almost none of them were is a stunning indictment of our culture.

Hold still, let me get my mob.